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20 years

In another 20 years, I wonder if the world would have given up on trying to fight the inevitable or if we would, as a species, still be talking about “emissions reductions” and “sustainability” the way we are today. Gen Z children will have their own by then, and we (I’m a 1994 kid) will have ripened into either cynical grumps or tired zombies. The people currently alive on the planet have no idea what the world was like before industrialisation took place. There are probably very few souls alive who don’t know what petrol smells like, or what smog looks like – the remotest and least ‘globalised’ of our brethren. In another 20 years, we will have forgotten what the Earth used to be. 200 years since the dawn of “modern society” and with all the environmental degradation, wars and droughts behind us, the ones remaining will not know what needs to be restored. What will we have lost by then? Can we find our way back? Is it even a fair position to place society in, to expect that what is l
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Dogma

Science and it’s ability to explain the world around us has always fascinated me. As a child I stared with awe at my science textbooks before the start of each year, excited about what I was going to learn that year. But as children, we internalise not just the facts but also the process, the narrative and the ideologies espoused. I have begun to realise the extremely overpowering and hegemonic nature of the paradigm that my “formal education” has not just imparted to me, but in a manner of speaking, propagandised. This morning, as I sat staring at a squirrel nibbling at specks of rice leftover on the wall of my balcony, I wondered what the squirrel must be thinking. Is he (I noticed the testicles on the guy) wondering if this will be enough to satiate his hunger? Is he thinking of where he can go to for his next morsel? It is a uniquely human trait to anthropomorphise (of course) an experience by projecting our thoughts onto another object.  But science has, through codified structure
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Magic

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My love story is a crazy story - one that has so many coincidences, you’d think it was a scripted movie. As a scientist, I have internalised the age old adage that “In nature there are no coincidences” but the human mind assigns this label to what it considers inexplicable (or calls it God’s will, destiny, fate, the universe bringing it together, among a host of different things). I’m only documenting my side of the story here. Ask her for hers 😜 The first coincidence starts with the way we met. Rewind to December 2020 when I’ve just moved to Himachal Pradesh as part of my fellowship and am exploring my local area. I am supposed to be heavily busy with spadework, scouting for villages that can eventually be our project locations. But the Christmas weekend presented itself to me as a golden opportunity to check out the Holy Grail for noob hippies like me - Parvati Valley. And so I set out, with a plan to meet 2 friends from college at Kasol. Getting to Kasol and meeting them was an adv
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Art in Biology

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Found this in my archives. Posting here for posterity. Original date: 15.02.2018 I often have conversations about very random topics that get me deeply involved in what is being discussed. One such conversation I had was with an arts student at ZHdK. He gloriously proclaimed that everything is art and everyone’s profession is art, ergo, everyone was capable of art. Now this is the dilemma I was facing – I didn’t consider myself very “artsy”, so to say. So, to accept his worldview, I would have to see art in what I did as a biologist or convince him that it wasn’t really art. After all, I am quite incapable of gazing at a plain orange piece of canvas or any other expression of “modern art” and finding any meaning in it. But this conversation got me thinking – what if biology really is an art? It is indeed an erudite appreciation of all that is natural. I believe I can speak for most natural scientists when I say that it was fascination coupled with an incurable sense of curiosity that d
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Poverty

Do we even need to solve poverty? Don't we need to address ambition first? Let me explain why I think so. We all know (notice I don't use the words "have read" or "have heard") by now that the planet is on fire and that our species are the sadistic chest thumpers having set it aflame. The sad realisation I have had recently is that only 30% of the species can really be assigned the blame, in the traditional sense of the word, but the brunt of the  planet's punishments are borne by the remainder 70%. That is the poor, the disenfranchised, the ones with smaller voices and smaller votes in this "equal" world. And the reason we see them as powerless against this natural ire is because we know it is possible to not  be powerless against it. It is possible to beat the system. But not everyone can do it. Because the boat only has so many seats. But once you go to a woman who has lost her land because you said she'd get better fruits if you put a b
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The tree

Today my eyes beheld, A tree falling thunderously, A thought crossed my head, One that runs repeatedly, When corals turn white, And forests burn bright, When plastics clog tight, And bombs drop with spite, When countries exploit fright, And fields lie dried, When storms surge all night, And hunger strikes with might, When children have to fight, While silences punctuate the night, With no end in sight, Of civilizations being a blight.
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Himalayan winter

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I remember the first time I woke up in the middle of the night shivering from the cold – it was after a party I was at in Switzerland. The C 2 H 5 OH had reached threshold concentration and my brain had shut down on a sofa next to the fireplace. The confusion of where I was and why it was so cold when I woke up led to a singular objective – find the nearest heated room. Much later I found out that someone had turned off the mains to the cabin and everyone had had the same horrendously cold night. I was thinking of this incident the first time I woke up shivering here in the Himalayas. In all the excitement of spending a year in the mountains, I’d forgotten how brutal the elements actually are. And the first stretch of my year was one of the most brutal environments my body had ever experienced. City-comforted, seaside, cushion baby suddenly at the Third Pole of the world, no fancy ambient heating either. In the time from November, for 4 months, I have woken up shivering way too many ti
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Location: Nirmand, Himachal Pradesh, India
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