Heart to Heart

A smile from South May the 13, shone warm and benign. Earlier, it had been February-like: rambunctious, wet and cold. In the silent hours of that lovely Palampur morning, while savouring the avian symphony and the hard-arrived, shy summer’s virginal bliss, I was giving final touches to my ‘Ms Biology’ blog. But a cloud hung over my head. For, every now and then, the thought of Karnataka’s election results washed over me like a suspenseful wave. “What if?” This question rose and fell making it difficult to get my focus right. The morn melted into forenoon. My eagerness was mounting. What were the initial trends, I was wondering but daring not to access the google news, or approach the darkly staring TV screen a finger-tap away, eager to break into its familiar bluster. Later when my wife broke the first news that the Congress was leading, a wry smile came over my face, only to be displaced by vague fears. “What if?” assuming myriad forms and shapes, resumed its assault. What if the lead

                              An encounter with Ms Biology “Darwin must be turning in his grave while we, the (shocked) living, in delightful awe of his epochal ‘On the origin of species…’  squirm and shed (invisible) tears.  As of now, ‘organic evolution’- one of the profoundest concepts that explains how life on earth evolved - would no longer adorn the school text books. Poor Darwin! He spent years on the remote Galapagos islands keenly observing and documenting organic diversity in all its pristine splendour and finally came out with his monumental work… Never ever thought that with one impudent stroke of bureaucratic pen, his enduring thought and theory would be vanished for the coming generations in a country which boasts of Jagadish Chandras, C V Ramans, Homi Bhabhas…?” I caught these words spoken by a professor- ly gentleman lecturing his young, eager-looking companion, as I passed them by.  Moments later, I noticed a feminine-like figure beside the barren road. In tatte