The curiosity of Ranga Yogeshwar
Ranga Yogeshwar
He lives secluded in Hennef, a small town near Cologne. A spacious study with huge windows overlooking the greenery, a large tree in front of a window. Monitors are everywhere in the room. Yogeshwar, known on television as a presenter of science programs, points to a screen showing the observatory in his garden - the starry sky is his passion.
A few mouse clicks later you can see another observatory under blue skies, it is in the south of France and also belongs to him. Obviously, the weather is better there than in Germany, he says. Down there he has 300 clear nights a year. Occasionally he goes and looks under southern sky in the stars. If you ask him something, Ranga Yogeshwar usually has an answer. But sometimes he says simply, "I do not know." Unusually for a researcher. When talking, he articulates strikingly, almost like the phonetic textbook, and looks closely at his interlocutor. Who is still doing this today? I put my recorder on the table, Yogeshwar looks at it carefully, then he suddenly picks up the headphones and carefully rips the cable, which is completely tangled.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Thanks for the service, none of my interviewees have done that.
Ranga Yogeshwar: Please, please. As a father of four, I know such cable balls. And I know that headphones, if they are treated with care, live longer.
He takes my pen in the hand, which is made of wood and where you do not recognize at first glance, how to get the mine out. Very concentrated, he examines the pen. After a short time he has seen through the turning mechanism and places the coolie on the table.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Surely you were as curious as a child.
Ranga Yogeshwar: Yes, I wanted to know everything: why do not spiders cling to their net? Why do sleeping birds not fall out of the nest? Such questions have always fascinated me.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: And where does this curiosity come from?
Ranga Yogeshwar: Can not say exactly, she was just always there.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Your father was an engineer and has certainly explained a lot to you.
Ranga Yogeshwar: From him I have the courage to ask questions. He always got to the bottom of things. I remember well how we put together a glider. It was a kit with an installation manual. My dad put aside the instructions and said: we'll do it differently, why did I study aerodynamics? He never accepted things prefabricated.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: And you? Were you a rather bulky student? Or a spotty nerd who perched forever over his books?
Ranga Yogeshwar: Neither. I often dreamed and was in my own worlds.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: An example?
Ranga Yogeshwar: Do you know how a housefly eats sugar?
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: With the trunk?
Ranga Yogeshwar: Exactly. She moistens her trunk and then sucks in the crumb. For such a thing I could develop a tremendous passion and forget everything else. A fly could save me over a whole school lesson.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Maybe your curiosity has something to do with your origins. Her mother was an artist from Luxembourg, her father was Indian. They come from a multi-cultural relationship.
Science to touch: The magnets on the wall in Yogeshwar's house represent the planets of our solar system
He stares at a fly that has been around me for a long time. I do not understand that she does not bother the fly.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: I listen attentively.
Ranga Yogeshwar: But she is annoying! Should I try to kill her?
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: If you want.
Ranga Yogeshwar: This is not so easy: fly eyes consist of 3000 single eyes, so that flies have a 360-degree panorama and can detect dangers very early. Depending on the direction from which the danger comes, they organize their movements for escape.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Is it really exhausting for you to always want to explain everything?
Ranga Yogeshwar: Not at all! Curiosity can be very productive. Take the doctor Luigi Galvani, who investigated in the 18th century why frog legs still twitch when they get in contact with iron and copper, even though the animals were already dead. So Galvani landed in the field of electricity. Through his courage to try new things, he was able to advance the science. Many researchers have this portion of perseverance and craziness.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: You yourself have made various self-experiments.For a series of "The Great Show of Natural Wonders" you are like the mirror-smooth facade of the Dusseldorf city gate crawled up like an insect, your equipment included four high-tech suction cups. Why are you doing this?
Ranga Yogeshwar: This was the very first "natural wonder" show. Locally there was a stuntman who was supposed to climb for me. But I wanted to try for myself, what it feels like to crawl up a vertical wall. Since I was secure, I was not afraid. It looks very spectacular, but it is not. I certainly was not a hero.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Another time you volunteered for a pain experiment ...
Ranga Yogeshwar: I shot in a clinic in Munich where a big pain study was done. I was punctured with an artery, I was in the MRI, and it was recorded exactly what is going on through the pain in my brain. Of course it hurt, but the scientist in me said: You have to do that now. In an experiment, I tried to imagine the pain. The doctor did not believe that I would succeed, but you could confirm it by the measurements. I found it nice to be useful to science.
Curiosity needs space for it to unfold
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Is it always important for you to have an experience first-hand?
Ranga Yogeshwar: I understand better what's going on. A movie can never replace that. The TV camera gets only a fraction with, many details escape her. If you understand something in your heart, it is completely different.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: "Amazement is the beginning of everything," said Aristotle. But not all people are as curious as you are.
Ranga Yogeshwar: Every one of us gets to know the world, experiences things for the first time consciously: the first full moon, the skin on the hot milk. You just have to keep your eyes open. There are so many phenomena that are exciting. I think curiosity can also be an attitude.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: What role does education play?
Ranga Yogeshwar: Certainly a big one. Parents should encourage children to get to know new things. If children are constantly overprotected, that's not good for curiosity. I know children who have never climbed up a tree.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: And of course you have done it quite differently with your own children. If a dead beetle lay on the ground, it was immediately taken apart.
Ranga Yogeshwar: No! This is such an assumption that I hear again and again: The Yogeshwar children are constantly sitting at the microscope. It was not like that. Above all, I tried to encourage them in their interests. My daughter is 14 and loves photography. I support her in that, but sensitive, otherwise she may refuse.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Arouse curiosity - that sounds good and beautiful. But how does one manage today against the many inertial offers that television and computer games deliver?
Ranga Yogeshwar: That's not easy. There used to be a kind of boredom that made you hear the bones growing as a child. Moments in which nothing was happening. Today we live in a media overkill and stuff our antennas to ...
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: ... being part of this overkill as an infotainer on TV.
Ranga Yogeshwar: That's right. And I have a growing feeling that television is denouncing us. But still I have the passion to convey information in this medium. When I started watching television 25 years ago, there were not so many channels, not private TV. For the kids today it is much harder to filter out the good offers.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Is childhood ever more difficult today than it used to be?
Ranga Yogeshwar: Yes. In my childhood, I was able to make much more than the kids do today. I passionately built my first radio and screwed it around. Today, the devices are much more perfect, you can not mess around with them. In my childhood, it often happened that my parents did not know where we were because we did not have cell phones. Today there is a kind of permanent transparency, children are obliged to be reachable. In my childhood in Luxembourg, we built soap boxes and raced down the steep village street. Today, after five minutes, the police would come and say that we are violating the Highway Code.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: You mean that the curiosity of the children is sorted out.
Ranga Yogeshwar: Partly already. We are over-anxious in some situations, almost paranoid.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: Why is that?
Ranga Yogeshwar: We have developed a strong Keeper mentality here in the West and we strive to maintain the level we have achieved at all costs. Prosperity brings with it the fears of loss: we absolutely want to keep what we have. If you have a lot, you have to keep a lot. We have many insurance, nutritional rules, relationship counselors. We believe that we can get a guarantee for paradise, if we stick to it all. And forget that life can surprise us - for better or for worse.
ChroniquesDuVasteMonde WOMAN: What would you recommend for us to come back to ourselves?
Ranga Yogeshwar: Let me give you an example: The other day I had a head full and sat down on our terrace. It was raining, I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds: How do raindrops sound when they fall on the leaves of the trees? How does it sound when they hit the ground? It was nice to open my surroundings to my ear. Usually we tend to shut down to filter out the annoying -radio spots, emails, redundant traffic signs. We should learn to reopen ourselves. Curiosity needs space for it to unfold.
Ranga Yogeshwar
was born in 1959 in Luxembourg. His father was an engineer and comes from India, the mother, artist, from Luxembourg. Yogeshwar lived in India until he was ten, and then the family returned to Luxemburg. After graduation he studied physics and worked in research.
After a break, in which he wandered alone through the Himalayas for a year, Yogeshwar began in 1986 as a science editor at WDR. In television, he developed various popular science programs and acts as a moderator, for example in Quarks & Co or Knowledge before 8. His book "Any questions?" about the riddles of everyday life became a bestseller (KiWi Paperback). Yogeshwar works today as a freelancer, he is married to the soprano Uschi Yogeshwar, together they have four children.
