Nature's Ways

 Nature has announced the onset of NE Monsoon with a bang. Chennai (particularly Mandaveli and its neighbourhood) experienced blinding lightnings and deafening thunders early this morning . They were so threatening that one could be forgiven for thinking that the end of the world was at hand.

Luckily (am I using the right word?), the apocalypse has not happened and I continue to live. The dry monsoon as the NE Monsoon is called, has arrived imperially. What can we predict about its course this year? Weathermen console us that the delayed onset (the monsoon is a week late this year) does not mean that the rains will be scanty. It is strange that we focus only on the possibility of a weak monsoon at the start of the season. At this time, we do not realise that a very strong monsoon might cause greater havoc than a failed monsoon.

The beginning of monsoon is usually portrayed as a harbinger of good tidings in Bollywood. In real life, it creates apprehensions. This time, the possible cataclysm is twofold. One natural adversity can make us squirm in paranoia. The combination of an unpredictable monsoon and the novel coronavirus is sending shivers down our spine.

We experience monsoons periodically and yet we have been unable to fully fathom their behaviour. It is no wonder that we know little about SARS-CoV-2 which we are facing for the first time and hope does not become a regular visitor like the monsoon. Europe is now battered by a repeat wave of the virus. Belgium and the Czech Republic are the worst affected as of now. 

Some epidemiologists have thrown in the towel reasoning that the virus is behaving 'arbitrarily' and therefore any prognosis is out of place. Why should our inability to understand the virus make its natural behaviour arbitrary? If all that we do not comprehend is to be dismissed as arbitrary, most of the universe is arbitrary. Our ignorance must not be interpreted as nature's arbitrariness.

Mega-savant

Mega-savant (the politically corrected version of 'idiot savant') is a person with prodigious capacity in one aspect of life, but miserably bereft in other aspects. Kim Peek who passed away recently was one such. He could read the left page of a book with the left eye and the right page with his right eye simultaneously. He would read say a 200-page book in double-quick time and remember every word in order. If you had misplaced the telephone directory, you could check his memory.

Scientists say that the left and right hemispheres of his brain were distinct and without any connection between the two. Contents of his brain differed from a common one. When he was an infant, a neurologist was supposed to have given up on him as non-social. The doctor was certain that the infant would pass away as infant. Kim Peek went on to live for 54 years and was an inspiration for the film 'Rain Man'.

Stephen Hawking is another wonder of nature (not a mega-savant though) who was given up by doctors long ago and who continues to amaze us with his brilliance. Such freaks of nature remind us that there are no limts to nature's variety. There ought to be limits to 'scientific hubris'.