Tonu had written nearly two hundred pages of the novel, when he got a block. It was less of a writers block, and more of a disenchantment with the lack of a plot. It had the same basic characters – Neil the expatriate Indian living in British Columbia, Mabel the teenage turned twenty something that still nursed a crush on Neil. Karen the neighborly single mother binging up a daughter. Added to this basic mix was Mabel’s relatives, and Neil’s sorrow at losing his parents back in India recently.

But he thought the story was going nowhere without a strong plot, and he could not think of a plot that had some drama.

So, Tonu stopped writing it and took a month to settle himself. That was in December. He spent most of it traveling around in British Columbia, Yukon, Northwest Territories, and south east in Washington state, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. He covered a lot of land all by himself.

Returning back, he took an hour to select a domain for himself and install the package for a suitable blog software. By the end of the day, he was off and running.

This time, instead of writing continuously on a story, he wrote independent blogs, a few pages at a time. Some of them would relate to the story, or about the writing of the story. Others reflected his thoughts of the moment, about anything.

Within the story, he had brought in a ten thousand year old perceived ancestor, as well as prehistoric animals.

Outside his window, he could see a world that was dusted by snow. It felt good. Perhaps this was the last century one would see snow in these latitudes. Folks were talking about a general 2 degree rise in world temperature, but the change was not supposed to be uniform. Climate uncertainty is one of the suspected outcomes, the other being a rising sea level as more of the ice locked on land as glaciers melt and reach the ocean.

Plastic in the ocean and inside stomachs of dead baby albatrosses generated some discussion on Facebook. He initially suspected that the pictures might be doctored. But as it turned out, they were not. There was a dead zone in the pacific ocean where floating junk collected and turned the open ocean into a plastic garbage dump of humongous size.

He even had a sample of an eBook on his iPad called Plastic Ocean, by Capt Charles Moore with Cassandra Phillips. It described how a sea captain’s chance discovery launched a determined quest to save the oceans. The eBook cost $13.99 on the iTunes book store. Tonu had a free sample version that contained 47 pages only.

Places where floating junk collected are called ocean gyre. It is where surface ocean currents are circular, and may be combined with large wind movements. These seem to help concentrate floating debri. It is in one of these gyres that a plastic oceans is being born, collecting huge quantities of floating junk, thanks to man.

Five major gyres on the planets oceans are the North and South Atlantic, the north and south pacific and the Indian ocean gyre. And it is the north Pacific Gyre, between the American west coast and Asia, that the greatest and growing floating dump exists.

Madhusree had put up a picture of a dead albatross, which I mistook for a gull, with loads of plastic pieces in its stomach. But I had originally thought the picture was doctored. It did not look natural. However, I was mistaken.

The dead bird is a powerful symbol, but the root issue is far more relevant, and dangerous. Plastic has been invented more or less in our generation. And in one generation, it has succeeded it really screwing up the world.

That too, was just one symbol out of many that directly pointed to the unholy influence of man, the creature supposedly created by God after His own image, that turns out to be the destroyer of environment and habitation.

Tonu thought if man the destroyer of environment was a powerful enough theme to provide an angle in the story, with some relevance in the life and times of Neil, the thirty something bachelor from India coping with his hormones in Canada.

He had more sample eBooks on his iPad that awaited his decision if he wanted to purchase them. One such eBook was named “The 10,000 Year Explosion”. This was a book that explored how the last ten millennia might have accelerated human genetic evolution, and gave rise to lactose tolerance, blue eyes, and many other traits by which one could trace one’s ethnic footprints from the recent past, spanning the last ten thousand years when human civilization got off the ground. The book was written by Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending, and cost about 21 dollars. It was not cheap.

Then there was a book by Robert Sapolsky that he was looking at as well. It was named A Primate’s Memoir.

But books aside, there was this situation with the world, where all news snippets could be woven into a pattern, a quilt with a patchwork, and a general picture would begin to emerge.

Tonu was not a bitter person by nature, neither apathetic. But he often felt that human civilization itself was a self fulfilling evil omen. The very thought of human endeavor, and his “god given” right or penchant for wanting to better his life perpetually, and seeking weekly forgiveness of his sins, was disastrous for the planet and its inhabitants, including fellow humans. Worse, he did not even know what sin was being committed.

This feeling got firmer and firmer in his mind, as time moved on. Even so as he saw that the world was not ready or interested to confront the issue at this level, or to dig deeper to find roots of any issue if that makes supporting their their difficult.

Claiming that there were far too many humans for the planet was a non-starter. Humans had a God given right to multiply, at whatever expense. They constituted the market size, for merchandise and for faith. Everyone wants a growing market, so every vendor can grow in it.

But, if issues reach a precipice, population might begin to adjust itself through series of mass catastrophe, before Gaia had her revenge and the animal kingdom and human civilization reach a sort of sustaining equilibrium with zero market growth year upon year.

That equilibrium, to Tonu, appeared elusive in the short term. There appeared insufficient incentive for man to restrict his greed. And since Man was not homogenous, and one segment was willing to expand its lifestyle at the cost of another, one could in some limited measure, find himself progressing, and thus be interested to continue the status quo, except it was not a status quo but a steady downward slide.

Long term, he had no illusion that he did not have the vision. Looking back into history and comparing the past with the present, he could easily see that people have mostly not been able to predict the future, even short term, that accurately. Every theory is considered ironclad, till it fails. After that, the theory is bust, and another new one replaces it, again based on that failed philosophy of perpetual growth machine.

Most glaring failure of man was to form a global Governance system, even after realizing that the planet was one and humans, despite their differences, were now more a global community that ideally should be subject to the same rule, and same governance across itself. This had not happened, allowing exploitation of one group by another – the same story that started many civilizations ago, and continues to date.

Tonu checked up the page count.

Hmm.. It was past 120 already.

He had typed almost four pages of nothing – not a damn thing. At the end of it, he came back to square one – a fundamental question of where he came from, how, and why. This was a question, he had no doubt, people before him have asked, all the way back to where man had a brain and thought capacity complex enough to ask that question. That ice age ancestor of his likely asked the same question to an un-responsive gray sky over central Asian steppes.

Add to that the realization that not just Tonu, or his ice age ancestor, but the entire human species was wasting time as well as wasting the planet.

So much for writing about a notional Indian trying to settle in Canada.