Idle Thoughts

Barkha Dutt closed a TV debate on ‘death penalty’ with an unusual take on justice: “Justice,” she said “is somewhere in between turning the other cheek and revenge”. I liked the fact that she differentiated justice from revenge. That is one step more evolved than those TV anchors who made a eleven year old girl bay for Ajmal Kasab’s blood. In the primitive world when every man was unto himself, justice and revenge had the same meaning. When someone hurt you, you got revenge by hurting them back. This was considered just and fair because that was the way you defended yourself in those days. The initial sets of law like the code of Hammurabi brought in an essential difference – the individuals were spared of taking revenge. Instead the state took the responsibility to get things even. But with the famous ‘an eye for an eye’ tone, the code itself came closer to a ‘revenge code’ than a ‘penal code’. During the 3000+ years after Hammurabi, the system of justice evolved a lot. Toda...

The human view of development of agriculture is straightforward – we preferred specific grains and fruits as our food and we started growing more and more of those. But how does this look from the view of the plants? How did they make humans chose them from the plentiful choice? How did they cultivate us as advanced form of bees and birds to spread their genes? I picked up Botany of Desire tempted by its promise to provide interesting insights into evolution from the plant’s point of view. Here is my experience. The book is filled with interesting tidbits and views. Look at this comment on the impact of commercialization of apple cultivation: An apple tree grown from the seed  produces a very different fruit from what the seed came from. Hence the natural forests and the original orchards that grew apple trees from the seeds were home for an incredible variety of the fruit – varying in taste, smell, shape, size and color. Now the commercialization has limited the choice to a han...