Experiences

Prettiness’ got nothing to do about it, we discovered. It’s about the desperation you show to get on to the said bus and your willingness to dash to the middle of the road and stand intrepidly on its way. But I am getting ahead of chronology here. It all starts with the way Peoria has been showing off to a pretty girl called Monjima. There’s no other way to describe it. I mean, how often do you walk into the neighborhood mall and into approximately 10 live tigers, from the Siberian feline to the pitch-black puma? How often do you run into an Irish festival, complete with Guinness and folk music, when you are just out on a walk? How often do you saunter at 10 pm at night on the main street of Peoria and encounter five people holding up placards decrying the war and lustily asking to get the troops back home? Seriously—10 pm in the night? Don’t even get me started on the weather—it’s been unrelentingly hovering in the 90s the past three months; now that Monjima is here, it’s at mild seve

I'm in those dreamy moments before wakefulness. It feels like floating on clouds and it feels nice. I don't want to open my eyes. I want to sleep some more. But the clear, sweet voice insists, "Priya, Wake up! You wanna play cards?" There's something about that voice that makes me open my sleep-burdened eyelids. There she is, sitting on the floor, right in front of my face. She looks like a live doll. She is bright and full of energy to take on the world. She's my guru about to impart a big life-affirming lesson to me, but I don't know that yet. She's all of three years old. The next two days are filled with awesome adventures. We spend 10 minutes watching a pair of bumblebees having their breakfast in the flowerbed. We run after a very jumpy squirrel, trying to make friends unsuccessfully. We do make friends with the much-tattooed delivery guy and admire his two-wheel trolley. We start coloring with crayons, but end up with a far more fun game of usin

Maybe I am exceptionally dumb, but I've never understood the theory of Natural Selection - it says that life adapts to the environment, and those who adapt successfully survive, right? My confusion is this - adaptation requires mutation at the genetic level as well, doesn't it? I mean, the Darwin's Finches can learn a certain traits, but the distinctive differences in their physiology meant some tinkering at the DNA level, didn't it? Growing a new type of beak is not like building biceps, is it? So how did it all happen? Did a series of ground-living Finches clamber up a tree, tried a new diet of insects instead of their staple seed, choked on it and died at first, then gradually liked it over a few generations, and then were helped by random mutations to help them be arboreal and insectivorous? So did this process take like a million years of dying losers on the trees before one generation casually mutating? My discomfort is with the apparent randomness of the mutation