Lessons with Mother Nature Ma’am | Eye News,The Indian Express
She has the biggest and best classrooms of all, and all you need to do is pay attention.
Sunday, Sep 04, 2022
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HomeEyeLessons with Mother Nature Ma’am
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Lessons with Mother Nature Ma’am
She has the biggest and best classrooms of all, and all you need to do is pay attention.
Written by Ranjit Lal
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September 1, 2022 11:51:59 am
Rainbow coloured fly! (Source: Ranjit Lal)She has the best and biggest campus that we know of: And, nearly 8 billion pupils. Her subjects are totally mind-boggling: some can only be studied under a microscope, others are truly gargantuan and can only be stared at in awe. Many are beautiful beyond words, others bizarre. Most have exceptional talents in one field or the other. Every “classroom” of hers, be they deserts, mountains, oceans, islands, woodlands, rainforests, parks, gardens and even “wastelands”, is crammed with subjects bewildering in their variety and zany in their lifestyles. From us, her students she demands only one thing: to be the most inquisitive nosey parkers imaginable and to never stop asking questions. And yes, the earlier our education starts, the better – perhaps, at the same age at which we shove our toddlers into nursery and kindergarten, because toddlers like stuffing slugs and snails into their mouths and will happily make friends with large, hairy spiders and lizards, provided their moms and minders are not around to have hysterics. A great place to start!
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Over the eons she’s had a galaxy of star pupils – like the rows of 100 per-centers you see lined up in coaching class ads. Brilliant students such as Charles Darwin, Alfred Russell Wallace, James Watson, Francis Clark, Friedrich Miescher (who you probably haven’t heard of; I hadn’t till just now!) Alexander Von Humboldt, and more recently, Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, Birute Galdikas, our very own Dr Salim Ali and, of course, the evergreen Sir Richard Attenborough, among myriad others.
They’ll all probably tell you one thing about what led to their passion: They were all curious. Something in the “classroom” caught their attention and imagination and with it came the lifelong quest to find out more. This often meant spending decades in very itchy, prickly, wet, cold, or searingly hot and dry and uncomfortable classrooms, studying subjects that were extraordinarily shy or out to kill, and that certainly did not want to reveal the secrets of their lives to every idiot with a pair of binoculars or worse a bisecting kit.
Unlike our educational syllabi which stuff you into a prescribed straight-jacket, you are able to choose whatever subject in whichever classroom that catches your fancy, and not necessarily just one – as many as you like, if you can manage it. There’s nothing to stop you from studying, say, cockroaches as well as birds of paradise and tornadoes at the same time – if you are able to. What usually happens of course is that you get stuck on one subject and with your nose to the ground, like any good bloodhound, follow its trail and life for most of the rest of yours. (Some of the gossip they can generate is truly mind-boggling. Honestly, there are things out there who are both girls and boys at the same time and so have twice the fun; snails for example!) And maybe, just maybe, you will be rewarded if you are persistent enough, with some revelation that you will have stumbled upon (like Jane Goodall discovering tool-use among chimpanzees) – and Mother Nature Ma’am will put a little golden star against your work that will shine forever. (Until, of course, some smart aleck turns up, some time in the future, and says, “Sorry, you were so wrong! Now here’s what’s really going on.”) The thing is, once you stumble upon that revelation: you have to loudly toot about it from the cell-phone towers. And thanks to social media these days, that is not a problem. Of course, you have to get your work and great discovery “peer reviewed” and peers, by definition, are, usually a bunch of pudding-faced spoilsports – rather like book reviewers. Ah, yes, I do review books on nature, too, and boy, are there a load of doomsday prophets out there, writing about Armageddon and spoiling your day!
Rating: 5