A visitor from space with mood swings!

Raju Korti
For months now, this mysterious interstellar object has behaved like that one relative who changes personality depending on who is watching. First it was described as a hostile outsider armed with nuclear ambitions. Some theories even suggested it was spying on planets, making gravity defying turns and pointing its tail in the wrong direction. The object seemed determined to play the villain straight out of a sci fi potboiler.

31/Atlas: Pic representational

Cut to the latest twist. The same object is suddenly being repackaged as friendly. Harvard professor, Loeb, has floated the idea that it may be sprinkling life giving chemicals across planets it has flown close to. In Indian terms, it is as if the guest who arrived with threatening body language is now offering homemade sweets.

So, what is really going on? A couple of scientific clues have come from what the object is believed to be releasing into space. If that’s true, two substances stand out. Methanol and hydrogen cyanide. The names sound intimidating, but their behaviour is surprisingly down to earth.

Methanol is basically a simple alcohol. In space, it is found near new stars. On Earth, tiny organisms like bacteria happily treat it as food. Plants manufacture it as part of their daily life. Methanol in space can transform into sugars and amino acids, which are the basic bricks from which life is built.

Hydrogen cyanide on the other hand is the classic villain of detective novels. Deadly in high doses. Extremely useful in tiny amounts. Plants and bacteria actually produce it to defend themselves or to help seeds germinate. In chemistry, hydrogen cyanide can join other molecules to form the bases of DNA and amino acids. These are the tools that make life tick.

Now here is the curious part. Observations show that this interstellar object is releasing more than a hundred times more methanol than hydrogen cyanide. That is the highest ratio seen since only one other oddball comet in our own solar system. If chemicals had personalities, this one would be leaning heavily towards the life friendly side. The cyanide is present, but in a defensive whisper, not an attacking shout.All this naturally leads to the buzzword ‘panspermia’. The idea is simple. Comets or space rocks can carry these basic life building chemicals to planets. When they crash or even graze a planet’s atmosphere, some of these chemicals settle down and kickstart life. Think of it as cosmic courier service. Long before e commerce deliveries, the universe was perhaps sending parcels of methanol and hydrogen cyanide to young planets.

Does this make a material difference to what we know?. Not yet. Scientists still know very little about this object’s origin and purpose. Its tail pointing in the wrong direction, its colour changing to blue near the sun and its gravity defying lane-swerving behaviour remain unsolved mysteries. Some argue it is a normal comet formed under unusual conditions in a faraway system. Others wonder if it is something artificial. But until there is proof, everything remains speculation.

What does it mean for Earth? Practically nothing at the moment. The object will not come anywhere close to us. It might casually gift wrap some life friendly chemicals for planets like Mars or moons like Europa, but nothing more. If these chemicals do find their way onto such worlds, they may help us understand how life begins elsewhere. For now, Earth is safe, and all theories about danger seem to have taken a coffee break.

So we are left with a cosmic visitor that entered the solar system with a dramatic reputation. It has danced around planets, confused astronomers, and sprinkled chemicals associated with life. It has also given rise to wild theories that range from apocalypse to universal gardening. As of now, the object is not the interstellar villain it was feared to be. If anything, it behaves like a confused tourist on a long space yatra. Friendly, unpredictable and utterly mysterious.

Grounded by greed! Why India’s low-cost dream Is now flying on fumes

Raju Korti
I have watched the arc of Indian aviation from the swagger of early privatisation to today’s turbulence and it is impossible to escape one conclusion: the low-cost dream that took off with fanfare in the late nineties is now sputtering on its last fumes. Kingfisher, Jet Airways, East West, Damania and Go First all went bust and each collapse was wrapped in a different excuse but the underlying reason was the same, irrational economics dressed up as innovation. Air India, retaken from the Tatas, is still reeling and remains trapped between legacy fatigue and the trauma of that recent London-bound crash. IndiGo holds sway not because it is exceptional but because everything around it has collapsed. Once a competitive field, the sector is now a duopoly masquerading as choice and that is the real story.

The recent disruption where IndiGo virtually threw the government, passengers and the entire aviation ecosystem under the bus was not an operational blip but calibrated muscle flexing. When flights were cancelled en masse, when delays piled up and when thousands of travellers were stranded, it looked suspiciously like orchestration to force the government to dilute roster guidelines, and the tactic worked.

(Pic representational)

This government does not normally take blackmail lightly but this time it blinked. The rollback of the new crew duty and rest norms was a concession that signalled something far more troubling than administrative weakness. It told every dominant player in a vital sector that scale can be weaponised against the state. It also amplified the larger anxiety that IndiGo’s control of over sixty percent of the domestic market and dominance across major terminals has given it a chokehold over regulators and passengers alike.

The truth is unpleasant but unavoidable. DGCA has been slow, reactive and too ready to adjust its stance when pushed. The so-called transition period was not an act of prudence. It was capitulation dressed as pragmatism. Pilot bodies had warned that IndiGo had frozen hiring and relied on non-poaching pacts instead of preparing for the rule change. The predictable chaos that followed was then deployed as leverage. In the end the regulator backed off and passengers paid the price.

But the rotten core of the sector is not regulation alone. Everything comes back to ticket pricing and surge pricing practices that have turned flying into an extortion racket. A seat that costs four thousand can jump to forty thousand within minutes. Refunds vanish behind invisible deductions. Cancellations read like they were drafted by Nigerian scam artistes. And while corporate travellers now count pennies, the rural and small-town flier who has entered the market in large numbers is willing to pay for reliability. That reliability simply does not exist and the airlines know they can behave with impunity because demand will keep coming.

IndiGo’s recent internal revolt only sharpens the edges of this story. Pilots writing a blistering open letter accusing the management of greed, claiming the airline believes it is too big to fail, exposing ground staff making eighteen thousand rupees while doing the work of three people and even mocking a seventy-year-old leader who refuses to retire is not mere dissent. It is a rebellion from the cockpit and proof that the operational chaos outside is mirrored by structural decay within. A company cracking from inside is the last entity that should be running most of India’s skies.

The government’s instinct now should not be to merely crack the whip but to redesign the rules of the game. Pricing bands must be clearly defined. Arbitrary spikes must stop. The base price may rise but predictability will return and that is far healthier than randomness masquerading as free market logic. DGCA must grow a spine because soft regulation in a market dominated by one player is not neutral, it is dangerous. And the government must engage Indigo without fear or favour because the airline’s temporary victories will cost it heavily if the state finally decides it has had enough.

What remains constant is this: in every round of confrontation between airlines, regulators and governments, the flyer loses. The low-cost revolution promised democratisation of travel but delivered instability, opacity and the unchecked arrogance of dominant players. Unless the system is rebuilt around transparency and accountability, the dream that once lifted millions into the air will remain permanently grounded.

Oh those moments with Trevor Bailey & Peter Roebuck!

Raju Korti
It was the autumn of 1987. The Reliance World Cup was in full swing, and I was fortunate to meet a man whose voice had echoed through countless living rooms. Trevor Bailey, England’s Test all-rounder, writer, and the sardonic soul of BBC’s Test Match Special. Bailey wasn’t in India in his usual avatar as a commentator but as a cricket writer, detached from the boisterous box that included legends like Brian Johnston, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, Henry Blofeld and Don Moseley. Having grown up addicted to the BBC’s understated, wry, and supremely literate commentary, I approached the hotel reception with a touch of trepidation. To my astonishment, Bailey agreed to meet me, then working with The Hindu and its sister publications, Frontline & Sportstar, almost immediately in the lobby. No fuss, no pretense.

Me, Moiz Haq with Trevor Bailey and Peter Roebuck.   

By a wonderful coincidence, I was also occasioned to meet Harold “Dicky” Bird during the same time. During the 1987 Reliance World Cup match between India and New Zealand, a game forever stamped in memory as the only one where Sunil Gavaskar struck his lone ODI hundred, I also had the unusual privilege of securing a one-on-one with the legendary umpire. Bird was never easy to approach. He was famously blunt and, true to form, initially refused outright, saying he had little interest in journalists. It was only through the good offices of BBC Test Match Special’s Trevor Bailey and the thoughtful columnist Peter Roebuck, both of whom I had long conversations with the day before, that my credentials were vouched for. Thanks to their intervention, Bird relented and agreed to half an hour.

That meeting is etched in my mind, not so much for his views on umpiring or on his own cult status, but for the cadence and charm of his conversation. Listening to him, I felt he could have been a marvellous commentator, lacing authority with wit and a Yorkshireman’s candour. The initially stiff Bird, eased further when I told him that I loved John Arlott’s commentary. When I mentioned this impression to Bailey and Roebuck the next day, they broke into hearty laughter, as if to say they had always known Bird’s hidden flair. I also noticed something more, which reflected the professionalism of that generation. Be it Bird, Bailey, Roebuck, or any of their contemporaries, they insisted on meeting scribes in the hotel lobby, never in private rooms or suites. It was a small but telling gesture, upholding both dignity and distance. In Harold “Dicky” Bird, I remember a man who was hunched in the shoulders yet towering in his integrity. He never sought to be a figure of awe, yet players across the cricketing world revered him instinctively. He belonged to a breed that placed the game above the individual, even when the individual himself became an institution.

Barely a day after umpire Dicky Bird had turned me down politely, but had relented later thanks to a delighted Bailey, who appreciated a half-page article I had written on him. That conversation with Bailey turned into a two-hour masterclass in wit, warmth, and dry English humour. He spoke glowingly of his fellow commentators. “We were different in temperament but gelled beautifully,” he mused. I mentioned my eternal favourite, Brian Johnston “Johnners” to millions, and asked if he would pass along a letter of admiration. Bailey not only agreed but actually did, which I later confirmed through Peter Roebuck, the sharp Australian columnist seated beside me in the Press Box that day as India triumphed over New Zealand and Gavaskar scripted his only ODI hundred. Bailey smiled when I reminded him how Johnston and Moseley would dissolve into helpless giggles during commentary, and how Johnston had dubbed him “The Boil” after an Aussie distortion of his name (Boiley). He recalled the leg-pulling in the commentary box, often at the expense of Henry Blofeld, with the mischief of a schoolboy reliving dormitory pranks.

Bailey, nicknamed "Barnacle" for his gritty, immovable batting, laughed when I teased him about the long pauses in his speech that made it sound like he was trying to dislodge a piece of obstinate chicken bone from his throat. “You’ve noticed that too?” he chortled, clearly unbothered. He was candid about his sporting life: “I was actually a better footballer. I could dribble longer than I could bat,” he quipped in that clipped British accent. Yet, behind the acerbic wit was a man who understood the art of restraint. On the field and in the commentary box. “We never read out scorecards or explained field placings. Still, nothing escaped us. Commentary was fun, not a frenzy. And yes,” he added with a wink, “we did enjoy our wine and cakes, often sent by admirers.

”Toward the end, when I asked him if I could get Johnston’s book autographed someday, Bailey’s tone turned briefly sombre. “Johnners isn’t doing well... but I’ll pass on your sentiments.” That autograph never came. Johnston passed away a few years later. I had hoped to make up for it the next time Bailey visited India. But that reunion never happened either. He and Roebuck, the two men I met within days of each other, passed away within nine months of each other in 2011. The article I wrote on Bailey is now a tattered relic of yellowing paper, but the photograph remains intact. A reminder of a golden afternoon when I spoke with a man who embodied cricket’s wit, grit, and old-world grace.

That same week, I had another enriching encounter. With Peter Roebuck. Sharp, deeply perceptive, and unfailingly courteous, Roebuck had the disarming quality of turning an interview into a conversation among equals. We spoke at length about cricket, commentary, and writing. It struck me then -- and has stayed with me since -- that these men, Bailey and Roebuck, were giants of insight and elegance, yet wore their brilliance with quiet modesty. Both gone in the same year, they left behind not just cricketing wisdom, but a rare kind of human warmth that no obituary can fully capture. Unlike Bailey, I was occasioned to meet Roebuck a couple of times later. What struck me was his affability to meet anyone and everyone without any airs.

In their very different ways, Roebuck and Bailey embodied cricket’s finest virtues. Sharp minds, dry humour, and unshakeable integrity. Fittingly or ironically, both left us in 2011, just months apart.

(NB: The pic is 39-years-old. Between me and my dear colleague Moiz Haq, we handled the special four-pages devoted to World Cup. At the cost of patting our backs, we did an exemplary job.)  

‘No Comebacks” meets cricket’s return artists!

Raju Korti
The flutter around Virat Kohli’s supposed Test comeback was brief but intense. Following India’s second home Test series whitewash in a year, whispers surfaced that the BCCI might request him to rethink his retirement from the longest format. The board swiftly rubbished the speculation, yet the broadcaster probed Kohli about it after the Ranchi ODI against South Africa. Kohli responded with a smile and a clear “Yes, and that’s how it’s always going to be. I am just playing one form of the game,” shutting down the theory with trademark candour. His majestic 135 in MS Dhoni’s hometown had revived the old question that tends to follow iconic players. Can cricket afford to let them go or does the sport instinctively look back at them for stability and sparkle.

Bobby Simpson

The idea of summoning a retired great has a storied past. Australia’s Bobby Simpson remains the most celebrated example. Having retired in 1968, Simpson was coaxed back a decade later at the height of the World Series Cricket split. At 41, he returned as captain and struck three centuries against India in the 1977 to 78 series, proving that touch, temperament and experience can occasionally defy time. His comeback remains one of cricket’s gold standard return stories.

England turned to Colin Cowdrey in even more dramatic circumstances. In the 1974 to 75 Ashes, Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson were terrorising English batting with pace and menace. Cowdrey, 41 and long retired, was summoned to lend spine to a traumatised team. He walked out at Perth to greet Lillee with the unforgettable line, “Good morning. My name is Cowdrey. Pleased to meet you.” The comeback was more symbolic than triumphant, yet it embodied courage and cricketing spirit in a period of raw intimidation.

There have been other noteworthy returns. Imran Khan came out of retirement in 1987 to lead Pakistan to their first ever Test series win in India, later returning again in 1992 to win the World Cup. Closer home, Sourav Ganguly was effectively retired by selectors in 2005 before forcing a comeback a year later and finishing with impressive consistency. On the other side of the ledger are players whose returns did not quite work. Muhammad Yousuf’s international reappearance never recaptured his earlier fluency and Aravinda de Silva’s brief Test return lacked conviction. These stories reinforce that comebacks can elevate legacies or dilute them depending on timing, form and the competitive landscape.

Colin Cowdrey

Viewed through this lens, Kohli’s clarity appears rooted in self awareness. He remains the fittest and most driven Indian batter of his generation, yet he knows precisely what he wants from the final phase of his career. His white ball numbers still surge and his intense competitive streak remains intact, but the grind of Test cricket is something he has chosen to leave behind. A comeback for sentimental or stop gap reasons has never been his style.

The broader question of returning from retirement carries both promise and peril. The advantages are obvious. A seasoned player brings institutional wisdom, dressing room calm and proven technique. He or she can lift younger teammates and offer stability in turbulent phases. Yet the risks are equally real. The intensity of modern cricket demands peak fitness and unwavering mental sharpness. A returning player must recondition mind and body for pressures they had already stepped away from. Fans and selectors often expect vintage performance, which creates a psychological burden. Team dynamics can shift and the comeback might unintentionally stall the growth of emerging talent.

Cricket’s history shows that comebacks can sometimes rejuvenate teams and redefine careers, yet they work only when the motivation is pure and the player is completely aligned with the demands of the return. Virat Kohli seems to recognise this with rare clarity. For now, his story of reinvention lies firmly in the limited overs arena and the romance of a Test comeback is best left as a passing rumour rather than a real possibility.

Time to say adieu to Gambhir’s experiments!

Raju Korti
Gautam Gambhir’s stint as the head coach of the Indian cricket team has turned into a troubling case study of how poor strategy, erratic decision making and muddled communication can derail an inherited cricketing powerhouse. His politics has nothing to do with this evaluation. The failures stand on their own. What makes the situation alarming is the consistency of those failures across Tests, selections, role definitions, dressing room atmosphere and public communication. The pattern is unmistakable and the conclusion is unavoidable. Gambhir has not succeeded as India’s coach and the time has come to consider a change.

His record as coach is the most straightforward indictment. India under Gambhir won only three Tests, lost eight and drew one. That is roughly a one in three success rate. For a team that has built a reputation as a dominant Test side for over a decade, this slide is startling. The 3–0 whitewash at home against New Zealand in 2024 was unprecedented. India had not lost a home Test series for twelve years and they did not merely lose this one but were comprehensively outplayed. The pattern continued with a 3–1 defeat in Australia, prompting Sunil Gavaskar to publicly question the purpose of having a coaching staff when the basics of preparation and reading conditions seem consistently wrong. The decline has now deepened with the series loss to South Africa after the defeat in the second Test, a result that further underlines how far the team has fallen under his stewardship. These losses were not unfortunate. They were built on flawed planning, indecisive selections and players entering matches without clarity or confidence.

One of the most destabilising aspects of Gambhir’s tenure has been his restless experimentation. His frequent tinkering with the batting order has unsettled players instead of empowering them. Sanju Samson, for instance, has been made to oscillate between opening and batting as low as number eight, a shift that would unsettle even the most seasoned cricketer. Shreyas Iyer, despite a strong record, has been ignored, while Harshit Rana, associated with Gambhir from their KKR days, has repeatedly been preferred ahead of more deserving and experienced bowlers. Shubman Gill’s elevation across formats, including Tests and T20s, has also raised doubts about whether personal preferences are outweighing merit. And I am not even speaking about Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli. This sense of unpredictability has created an atmosphere where players are unsure of their role, position or security, a stark contrast to the stable environments created by earlier coaches.

The recent Test against South Africa at Eden Gardens provided a telling example of how Gambhir’s decision making repeatedly backfires. The pitch became the subject of national ridicule after Sourav Ganguly revealed it had not been watered for four days. It was totally unfit for a proper Test match. India fell while chasing a target of only 124. Instead of acknowledging the poor call, Gambhir insisted there were no demons in the pitch and that the team could have easily chased down 124. That defence was not just specious. It was unconvincing and tone deaf. The team had gone in with four spinners, including Washington Sundar, who barely received any overs. The planning was confused. The execution was worse. The outcome was a collapse of their own making.

Adding to the technical failures is Gambhir’s temperament and communication, which have not helped create a cohesive dressing room. He appears withdrawn and humourless and rarely projects the warmth or assurance that helps players handle pressure. Many find him unapproachable and stiff. Younger aspirants like Sarfaraz Ahmed must wonder what more they need to do to break into the eleven. Even in public communication, he often appears defensive or combative rather than introspective. His tendency to dismiss criticism outright, whether regarding the New Zealand whitewash or the Harshit Rana selection debate, further isolates him from stakeholders. It is telling that former influential players including Gavaskar, Srikkanth and even R Ashwin have voiced concerns over his methods. Such criticism from seasoned names rarely emerges unless the rot is deep.

Gambhir also compares poorly with his predecessors. Rahul Dravid offered calm, clarity and a clear developmental arc for players. Ravi Shastri provided authority, tactical firmness and man management. Gary Kirsten brought emotional intelligence, structure and the ability to build a united team environment. Gambhir, by contrast, has neither the stability nor the vision that these roles demand. To be fair, he remains a man of great passion and strong will and his support for young players and India’s 2025 Champions Trophy triumph stand out as positive notes in an otherwise uneven tenure. Yet these are exceptions, not the blueprint.

Indian cricket thrives on structure, confidence and long-term planning. Gambhir has introduced uncertainty, inconsistency and fragmentation. The team often looks unsure of itself, its selections, its hierarchy and its tactical direction. That is the direct result of a coach who has failed to provide clarity, cohesion or conviction. The evidence has piled up long enough. It is clear that India needs new leadership, someone who can restore stability, inspire trust and bring sharp cricketing judgment to the job. Gambhir’s continued presence in the role risks further decline at a time when Indian cricket stands at a critical juncture. The team deserves better. The time for change is now.

Decoding the whimsical nature of India’s cyclones!

Raju Korti
As someone who evinces keen interest in Climate Physics, cyclones hold an abiding interest for me as a way to understand how oceans quietly script the fate of nations and the more I observe the recent churn in the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea, the more I realise that India is living through a climatic inflection point that is both scientifically fascinating and deeply unsettling because cyclones are no longer following the seasonal discipline we once took for granted. Since the early onset of the monsoon in the second half of May 2025, the number of cyclonic disturbances has risen sharply and almost rhythmically, beginning with Depression ARB 01 and Deep Depression BOB 01 in May, continuing through Deep Depression BOB 07 and Depression ARB 03 in October, and culminating in intense and damaging systems like Cyclone Shakti, Cyclone Montha and now the expected Cyclone Senyar around November 26. What is striking is not merely their frequency but the time window in which they are forming because cyclones typically prefer predictable seasons whereas this new behaviour is a climate signal that cannot be ignored.

(Pic representational)

The Bay of Bengal has always been India’s cyclone factory owing to its warm surface waters, abundant moisture, and favourable atmospheric structure. Between 1990 and 2020 it recorded 190 cyclones compared to the Arabian Sea’s 73, but what has changed is the velocity and intensity of this engine. Warmer waters are the raw fuel for cyclogenesis and the Bay of Bengal is now consistently warm enough to trigger and sustain more frequent storms, which explains why Cyclone Montha could intensify rapidly before hitting Kakinada and why a low-pressure system over the Strait of Malacca is already primed to turn into another depression by November 24. What is even more telling is the Arabian Sea’s newfound restlessness because historically it remained cooler during most of the year, limiting cyclone formation, yet in the last two decades its cyclone frequency and intensity have gone up appreciably owing to human-induced climate change that is warming its upper ocean layers faster than expected.

This year’s early monsoon itself was a clue that the ocean-atmosphere machinery was behaving in overdrive because an active Madden Julian Oscillation, a positive Indian Ocean Dipole, and unusually strong cross-equatorial winds through the Somali Jet created a conveyor belt of moisture that pushed the monsoon ahead of schedule and simultaneously set the stage for more cyclonic spin-ups. When such background conditions persist, cyclones are no longer anomalies but expressions of a new normal that is deeply tied to global warming. In climate physics terms, every extra tenth of a degree in sea surface temperature increases the probability of a cyclonic system drawing enough latent heat to intensify quickly and unpredictably and this is exactly what India is experiencing. The grim reality is that once sea temperatures rise beyond a threshold, there is no known human intervention that can cool ocean surfaces on a regional scale because heat absorbed by the ocean is a global, not local, phenomenon and therefore part of the broader crisis of global warming that needs coordinated international mitigation.

Untimely cyclones wreak havoc on economies because they disrupt ports, power grids, transport networks and coastal industries and they strike hardest at the agricultural heartland which depends on predictable rain cycles. When storms like Shakti or Montha arrive in the wrong month, they flatten standing crops, ruin soil fertility through salinity intrusion and throw rural livelihoods into chaos. Each cyclone comes with an invisible economic signature in the form of damaged fisheries, lost workdays, reconstruction expenses, and insurance burdens. In the long run, a climate of frequent cyclones becomes a drag on GDP as governments are forced into perpetual relief and rehabilitation cycles while farmers grapple with the psychological toll of unpredictability.

Whether governments are alert to these disturbing shifts is a question that demands uncomfortable honesty. India’s meteorological systems are improving in tracking and forecasting but mitigation remains fragmented because true cyclone management means tackling the root cause, which is global warming. No coastal embankment can compensate for warmer oceans and no disaster management manual can keep up with a climate that is mutating faster than policy. What is required is not just national preparedness but a sustained global campaign to cut emissions, invest in renewable energy, restore coastal ecosystems and negotiate climate justice with more urgency because warming oceans do not recognise national borders and neither do cyclones.

The sudden proliferation of cyclones in 2025 is therefore not a coincidence but a climatic message written in the language of physics. It tells us the oceans are warmer, atmospheric rhythms are shifting and the boundaries of our old assumptions have dissolved. Cyclones were once seasonal events and are now year-round reminders that climate change is not a theory but a lived reality.

(NB: The picture is representational, since cyclones generally look and behave alike, differing only in their severity and the impact they leave behind. So there!)

In a world of strange viruses, survival Is the real marvel

Raju Korti
I have been thinking a great deal about the Washington case where an elderly resident became the first human to die of an H5N5 bird flu strain that had never before crossed into people. It is a chilling reminder of how easily the microscopic world can ambush us. The patient lived far from the bustle of Seattle, kept a backyard flock of domestic birds, and by all accounts had no reason to imagine that a virus unknown to medicine would slip silently from his poultry into his bloodstream. He arrived at the hospital with a blazing fever, confusion and laboured breathing. Tests revealed the strain had jumped from birds into him, but thankfully it has shown no inclination to spread among humans. His isolated tragedy is a stark illustration of how little we truly control in the biological universe that swirls around us.

When I first read a deeply researched Time Magazine piece on viruses sometime in the late seventies, immunology and virology were still finding their feet. Even then, scientists warned us that humanity lives on a razor’s edge, surrounded by a cosmos of invisible particles. Today we know the scale far better. Earth is home to an estimated ten nonillion virus particles. That is a number so absurdly large that it makes the stars in the universe look sparse. Fewer than seven thousand viruses have been studied in any meaningful detail and millions more continue to exist in forms we have not catalogued. The astonishing part is that most of these do not harm humans and never will. They float in the air we breathe, drift through oceans and soil, ride on insects and animals and even infect bacteria, yet our bodies repel their advances without us even knowing.

(Pic representational)

That, to me, is the real marvel. The human immune system is a fiercely intelligent protector that learns, adapts and remembers. It keeps guard from the moment we are born until the moment we die. Every second of our lives it is intercepting invaders, neutralising threats and outsmarting organisms that would overwhelm us if not for our internal vigilance. It is almost miraculous that we survive at all in an atmosphere saturated with viruses that exist only to replicate. Their behaviour is strange. They have no cellular structure, no heartbeat, no metabolism. They are obligate parasites that do nothing until they enter a host cell. Once inside they hijack the cell’s machinery, forcing it to produce viral copies instead of doing its usual work. Some viruses behave so cleverly that they seem to bend the rules of life itself. There are giant viruses whose genomes are so complex that they mimic cellular organisms. Others display behaviours that almost feel sentient, as if they network with fellow viruses or borrow protective coats from other viruses to survive. It is a world that sits right at the edge of what we define as living.

Every now and then one of these organisms mutates or leaps across species and reminds us how vulnerable we are. The recent resurgence of chikungunya in several countries is one such reminder. Anyone who has experienced it knows the misery of its joint pains and fever. There is no cure and the fever eventually ebbs, but the pain can linger stubbornly and make even daily chores a challenge. Viral illnesses are mostly like this. A small number can be cured, but most are managed. The Hepatitis C virus is a rare triumph because modern antivirals can eliminate it in more than ninety five percent of cases. Ebola too can be cleared fully with specific treatments. But chronic infections like HIV and Hepatitis B can only be held in check. Antibiotics are useless because they work on bacteria, not viruses. For most viral diseases we treat the symptoms and wait for the body’s defences to push the invader out.

When scientists warn us about the unpredictability of bird flu strains like H5N5, they are really reminding us of the delicate interaction between humanity and the viral world. From what I can gather, viruses shape evolution. They alter genes. They influence ecosystems. A world without viruses would collapse because they keep entire biological cycles functioning. They infect plants, animals, fungi and even bacteria. They are a necessary evil in the grand design of life. Total victory over them is neither possible nor desirable. The real achievement is our ability to coexist with them without being destroyed.

As I reflect on the Washington case, I realise that fear should not be the dominant emotion. Awareness is essential, vigilance matters, and responding with science instead of panic is what keeps us safe. The miracle is not that there are outbreaks. The miracle is that outbreaks are so rare when the world is saturated with trillions upon trillions of viral particles. Our survival is a quiet daily triumph of biology over chaos. Viruses were here long before us and will be here long after us, yet we continue to flourish in a world teeming with them. In the end, coexistence is the only equilibrium nature offers and the one we must continue to respect.