The day before he broke the speed of sound, Chuck Yeager broke two ribs when he fell off a horse. As he climbed into the cockpit of the Bell XS-1, he had a broomstick hidden under his flight jacket. A last minute improvisation, to help him close the 5 million dollars toy’s canopy, while his arm was disabled by the injury. Few minutes later, Yeager violated the order not to do so on the first test flight, and took the Bell XS-1 to a speed of Mach 1.05, making the spectators hear a supersonic boom for the first time in history.
Two months earlier and half a world away, a seemingly, completely unrelated event took place: The partition of the Indian subcontinent into two sovereign states, India and Pakistan. On August 15th 1947, M. K. Gandhi was in Calcutta, fasting and praying in protest of the violent partition process, that he was in principle against. Yeager and Gandhi. What could a US Air Force test pilot and the pacifist founder of modern India can have in common?
Gandhi called his autobiographical book, “The story of my experiments with truth”. He was the test pilot of his own ideas and literally risked his life more than once, and eventually was assassinated, because of his commitment to practicing his own preach.
Some people are risk takers by nature, but not all risk takers have the same motivation. There are those who take risks because they see greater opportunities to gain fame and fortune in high stake ventures. Other are just hasty and irresponsible. But there are some, like Chuck Yeager or M. K. Gandhi who are driven by a certain call. History speaks to them and tells them to go and scratch the performance envelope. Research the seemingly impossible and come back with lesson learned, for the benefit of all humanity. Their experiments enable it, to eventually make new possibilities available for everyone, but they also send a moral message to all of us, that we should take the risks required, to break the barrier of fear, because what awaits on the other side is meaning and hope.
