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Journalism of Courage
I recently came across an article in The New York Times regarding the experiments being done to stop dengue (and malaria), spread by the Aedes aegypti species of mosquito. The idea is to introduce a virus into the infected mosquito that attacks the dengue virus. Once infected with this Wolbachia virus, the lady mosquito passes it on to her progeny rendering them incapable of spreading the dengue virus.
If enough mosquitoes are thus infected with Wolbachia, a whole population of mosquitoes can be rendered harmless over a period of time as far as dengue is concerned. But Wolbachia doesn’t occur naturally in these species of mosquitoes, so it has to be introduced into the eggs laid by female mosquitoes, via an injection. Millions of lady mosquitoes are fed a daily ration of blood so that they can lay their eggs which then can be injected.
Imagine, there are technicians out there, who spend their working days serving trays of blood to mosquito ladies, but before them, there were scientists who came up with the idea in the first place. Come to think of it, everything we know about nature (and pretty much everything else) has arisen from curious people who want to get to the bottom of things: once they get a bee (or bees) in their bonnets, or as we would put it, ‘dimag mein keeda’, they don’t let go. Back in the day, some of these nosy parkers endured considerable hardship in pursuit of their goals. Think of Charles Darwin, sailing all the way to the Galapagos to discover his different finches, of Alfred Russel Wallace, burning up with fever in steamy South-East Asian jungles as he contemplated what the deep waters of the Lombok Strait between Bali and Lombok might mean.
Mother Nature has piqued the curiosity of thousands of ordinary people who went on to become biologists, botanists, zoologists and ecologists down the ages, who then devoted their lives to studying, observing and living with what fascinated them. Salim Ali (who would have been 127 this November) shot a sparrow with a yellow splotch on its breast and the rest as they say is history. Rachel Carson was appalled by the death of raptors and eventually tracked down the cause: DDT. Jane Goodall, fascinated by chimpanzees, went off to the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania to study the apes and discovered that they used tools and spent a lifetime studying the animals. Dian Fossey studied (and was killed for) the gorillas in Virunga, the Congo. Iain Douglas-Hamilton studied elephants in Africa, Jacques Cousteau explored the ocean depths, Ullas Karanth studied tigers in India, and Sir Richard Attenborough narrated all these wonderful stories.
What’s so heartening is that nearly everything that breathes or moves or wriggles has its guardian angel or patron saint, studying it, observing ‘every move it makes’, and en garde for its welfare. There are people studying colour vision in butterflies, the communication between treehoppers, the evil way some mushrooms reproduce, the electrical fields of the duck-billed platypus, the composition of spider silk, the echo-location abilities of bats and blue whales. Some study habitats and environments – and vow to protect these come what may.
And this is not a modern phenomenon. The Bishnois of Rajasthan set off the Chipko movement back in 1700s when one stubborn and determined lady, Amrita Devi clamped herself to a tree that the king wanted to be cut down along with a whole lot more for a new palace he wished to build. She along with over 300 other women were beheaded by the king’s soldiers before the king was appalled enough to order the banning of all felling. Ever since, the Bishnois have fiercely protected their desert habitat and all the creatures that live in it.
I meet too many people who are just bland, blasé and ‘whatever!’ about everything. What’s scary is their total lack of curiosity (and no they are not cats, though many think of themselves as fat cats!), so they have nothing to fear. They live what I see as ‘flatlined’ lives. Speak to anyone who has a passion and you know they are truly alive! First, they will go on and on about what consumes them and then of course, try to convert you to their cause! Their intentions are clear and noble. They may talk earnestly to 1,000 people and make 999 yawn and edge away, but the one person they do have an impact on, who listens astonished, (‘but I had no idea!’) whose life they might change is all they are really seeking.
I’m often asked, ‘But, how did you get interested in natural history in the first place?’ By being curious and inquisitive, by asking questions, how, where, why, when… And that happened because I took time out and looked around and observed what was going on.
Sure, if you get obsessed by say bats or bird-hunting spiders and want to devote your life to them, you are not going to have a very comfortable life. Dark, musty caves thick with bat fug and steamy tropical rainforests are not salubrious environments in which to spend the best years of your life. Or you might spend hundreds of hours hunched over a microscope at strange wriggly things. But the backaches (and mosquitoes) will be of no moment because you will be totally absorbed in what you are doing and so much the happier for it. You may never have a ‘eureka’ moment, but then the mosquitoes that bite you might just be one of the Wolbachia ones. The result of a bee in someone’s bonnet.
