The Way Kids See Things

My father had an old transistor radio (In fact he uses his radio even today, though TV, cell phones, computers, etc have already replaced the olden things). When I was a little one, I wondered hearing the melodious voice of Yesudas through the radio that, ‘how does the human voice come from a radio? How such big human beings can enter into such a small thing?’

It was my elder sister who had answer to every question cleared my doubts, “Actually there is a tiny human being inside the radio. It is him who opens his mouth whenever our father switches on the radio,”

I was surprised and asked hesitantly, “Is that so? Are you sure that you are not telling lies? Is there a human being within the radio who is employed to sing such beautiful songs every time our father switches on it?”

My sister said in an assured manner, “Yes there is! Actually not one, but there are two human beings. I saw both of them when father opened the radio last time to repair it. They are sitting on the top portion of it.”

'My sister tells what she saw with her eyes. So I don’t need to disbelieve her', I thought. 

Next time, when my father opened the radio to repair, I scrutinized it with my eyes standing close to him. I ran to my sister and told her as if I had discovered something new, “You were wrong when you said there were two human beings inside our radio. In fact, there are many such tiny human beings. And they all are sitting next to next inside it,” I had actually mistaken the small transistors with different colours for tiny human beings.

A few years later, one moon-lit evening, my younger sister came running and asked me in a single breath, “Do you know where the moon is actually coming from?”

“Which moon? The one we see in the sky?” Taking her question simply, I asked.

“Yes, the same”, my sister said, “Our text books are wrong about the occurrence of the Moon. You know that old well of the next homestead? The Moon is actually hiding itself within that well during day time. And in the evening it comes up slowly to make itself visible to everyone,” she was so sure about it, I guessed it from her tone.

She continued taking another breath, “And now our elder sister showed me the Moon and told this fact. It is so big now and so close to us; so anyone can understand this fact from its size and nearness that it is actually coming up from that well,”

“Elder sister told you this fact, right?” mockingly I asked, and it was a good reason for me to mock my sister for a long time whenever I wanted a reason to do that.

After a few more years, one day my little cousin brother came home. This time the chance was mine to explain things to him in an imaginative way. His doubt was about the Sun. “How the Sun appears there in the morning and here in the evening?,” musingly he asked.

“It is curious,” opening the sack of my imaginations I opened up my theory. “the Sun actually walks from this side to that side through the sky,” I said. Pointing to the setting Sun, I continued, “and it goes beyond that mountain by climbing down the trees. Then it walks along the path underneath where we are sitting. It is actually straight below us in the night, and in the next morning it climbs up holding the tree trunks of the mountain at the eastern side.”

My brother liked the theory. He deeply reflected upon it for a few more minutes. Actually my theory was not very much wrong. What I presented to him was a Sun that rotates around the earth, when in truth, it is the other way round.