The Wandering Cloud I See

I found this letter standing out in waste paper basket, curious me picked it up and read it. Shaken was I, I did not  have any words. I quietly walked back to my lab and sat in silence. The Letter goes like this: Dear Human, Imagine that, little by little, your home was taken away from you. The forests and mountains where you once roamed freely disappeared, replaced by by roads and concrete buildings. What if politicians in suits, someplace far away, decided your fate... decided that you, your family, your friends and your neighbors became a nuisance-- a menace-- to those who had invaded your home. And so now you must die. Imagine these politicians rallying for your slaughter... ignoring what science has told them, encouraging citizens to hunt you down and kill you. Imagine your family under attack. Defenseless, with nowhere left to hide, you must dodge bullets from ground and sky, just to find food for yourself and your young children. Imagine that in one...

Different people live differently, they have different dreams and aspirations and I feel it's really dumb to judge people. I would rather be free and wild like Amur Falcon than spend my life in and around a plot of land (I read it as cage!)   Currently am a Ph.D. student (Biological Science, U of A), many ask me for what job options are there after Ph.D. or where do I see myself after 10 years? Well I have no answer most of the times cuz I dont know. Well one thing that I do know is that I will be doing what I love doing: Wildlife Conservation I believe that Wildlife Conservation cannot take place if we do not include the most basic and intricate human traits, if we do not include the needs, the culture of the locals be it tribals or not. A wildlife biologist can be done with biology of the species but for a true wildlife conservationist (depends also on the species/region) there is a need to take a step further. That being said, there have been a few (ra...

I was recently introduced to this amazing world of Mushrooms. I was out there at Pea Ridge Military National Park, helping a fellow graduate student Don Nelsen in collecting his data samples. The  awesomeness of finding fungi in field a few days after having studied them in the field is mind blowing!!! After we were done collecting data, we searched for edible fungi with hard luck. The diversity though amazing can be a nightmare for taxonomist. I hardly would pay any attention to fungi despite them being everywhere I was more or less oblivious to their presence and thought fungi is not present anywhere close to me. Now I understand much more closely the thought process when someone would say to me in India that snakes are only in forests and not where that person lives. They are as oblivious to snakes as I was to fungi. As a thumb rule I took them all to be bad (except the one in supermarket- Mushrooms)!!! WO!!! WO!!! WO!!! I could not have been more wrong!  Nothing!...