A Kaleidoscope of Ideas

Picture Courtesy: Rumna Mukherjee   My first experience with wildlife was through the pages of a book, ‘The Man Eaters of Kumaon’ written by the eminent hunter, writer and naturalist, Jim Corbett. A second hand, hard-bound with yellowing pages that still remains nestled in my bookshelf, passed down by my father during one such summer vacation as an attempt to make me read anything other than the Harry Potter books. The mesmerizing, tranquil beauty of Uttarakhand’s Pauri Garhwal and the gripping adventures with a tinge of mystique and suspense made an inexplicable narrative for a child who had only witnessed these magnificent feral cats as emancipated and indolent beings in various Zoological Parks over the years.   The vibrant cover image of a feral tiger, our national animal, in its very element, dredging up goosebumps is what I then longed to experience in reality— an opportunity to witness these glorious and feral felines in the pristine wild. In 2015, the opportunity pre...

Photo Courtesy: Rumna Mukherjee A planet shared among millions of diverse species, the Homo sapiens merely occupy a small sliver of the biodiversity spectrum - 0.01% in terms of biomass, and are crowned as the most influential, capable and forward-thinking species as indicated by evolution and ontogeny. Classified under the phylum of Chordata as an order of Primates, Homo sapiens are an integral part of the animal kingdom, yet have always elected to view themselves as different from the other animals and even better than most. However, with great power comes great responsibility - a sense of empathy towards holistic preservation of all the other species we share the planet with, yet here we are waiting out the wreckage of a global pandemic as avaricious perpetrators of climate change, looters of the environment and biodiversity, and mercenaries to the very core. Darwinian evolution seems to have agreed with the Homo sapiens seeing as we are the most thriving species in the planet, surv...