Nature has its own revered action plan. It’s the human beings who do not see the need to play the balancing act. The Rautes have spent their lives in the jungles since times immemorial, yet they knew how to maintain the ecological balance. Their acts for me-eting the basic needs was just to pluck the extras from nature’s bounty leaving the ecology intact. They can be dubbed as the conservationists in the real sense of the word. But, we, the so-called civilized and conservation conscious beings, are so selfish that indiscriminate destruction of natural resources are uppermost in our minds. The downhill slide seems to have begun for this most intelligent animal on Planet Earth. In the same beat, an intelligent friend of ours, the swine, is also at the receiving end. It’s all because of the flu that originates from them. It’s not their fault that the flu that gets them has the potential to pass on to man. The swine flu virus is the culprit, but the pigs have to pay the price by being laid off through culling. One wonders if man’s fiddling with nature in the lab has brought about Frankenstein’s curse in the form of bird and swine flu, Ebola, SARS and so on. The lesson is to play a fair game and not be a voracious terminator or tinkerer of all that so generously sustains us on this earth.