|
A few random thoughts lazily raise their sleepy heads after a long leisurely weekend. Like, I wonder what the poor Martians maybe undergoing now that water has been discovered on the red planet, despite the best efforts of those creatures to hide it. I can imagine a lot of those green hued, pixie-eared creatures hiding in deep caves on the planet, desperately trying to hoodwink those big Nasa probe gizmos, concealing their large water bodies in underground reservoirs. They must be a general feeling of defilement and infiltration as the probe's long inquisitive arm crawls around determined to smoke them out of their hideouts! I am sure the Plutonians must be heaving a sigh of relief and throwing parties after being officially struck off the planet register!
Whenever I read about stem-cell research and organ transplants, there is a strange feeling. I wonder what thoughts may have crossed the mind of the amputee farmer from Munich when he woke up on the surgeon's table to find a pair of brand new arms. It seems very soon we might be able to sprout our own liver, pancreas, extra pair of knees, eyes and elbows in a petri-dish in our kitchen garden. We'd have rows of beans, tomato shrubs, herbs and along with it a creeper growing our spare eyes and in another, a spare set of tonsils or even appendix in case of a tonsillectomy or appendectomy. The docs think we can live without these organs, but once we have the luxury of owning spare ones, why upset the fine balance in which our bodies were conceived, might as well get the new set fitted in for the sake of aesthetics.
Unable to visualise
It's all very well for scientists to come up with a fantastic formulation of exercise-free workout in a pill. But my only problem is not being able to visualise their test on mice. How on earth do they get the mice to stay steady on treadmills and get them to pump muscles and then how do they measure all this so accurately. Are they making mice out of men or vice versa?
Luck can make all the difference to the humdrum state of our lives. We have people winning millions with just a turn on the wheel of fortune. But to me people are either fortunate or unfortunate and that has got nothing to do with their bank balance.
I have known really fortunate people who have the luxury of enjoying the small pleasures of life - smelling the chlorophyll in the grass around them, hearing the chirp of the sparrow on their window sills and enjoying the pleasures of simple homemade food with their loved ones. And then there are those with all the money in the world who hardly get to see the grass as they are travelling around the world, hear the chirp of birds only on in-flight movies and go home to a DVD player and take-away grub.
Good fortune has got little to do with spare set of organs, fantastic new discoveries or miracle pills. I think we can be considered really lucky if despite the rapid pace of evolution and invention, we still have the capacity to laugh heartily at a good joke, sob hysterically over the loss of love, feel the bumpy goose-pimples on being moved beyond words in life and can celebrate being whole and intact humans, notwithstanding the universal conspiracy to make us less than humans!
|
