Musk

By Siddharth Singh (c) 2009

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Okay I admit I staged this. This leaf, like many others in the environs,  was lying in the garden next to this small pier in Dal Lake in Kashmir, India. I just placed it appropriately on the wooden pier, and viola!

22 thoughts on “Musk

    • Sorry, I had been busy!

      New snaps on the way! Just had a great trip to Rajasthan. I have a few good pics to put up!

      Cheers!

    • I would love to read that book… Since I haven’t yet, I couldn’t quite get your reference. I understand that you are implying that the leaf looks like a hand… does this give the leaf some sort of evolutionary advantage?

  1. Reading Dawkins’ “The Greatest Show on Earth,” I developed a much greater understanding of how all living organisms are related as branches on the evolutionary “tree.” The chapters on mammals and the emphasis on the bone structure that all mammals have – same number of bones in a similar alignment – with wonderful variations selected for environmental conditions – was awe inspiring. (And I use “awe” here in the sense of a rational human wanting to know more — not in some sort of quasi-metaphysical “spiritual” sense). The picture of the bat in the book that showed how the fingers and arms developed into the wing structure, but show the same basic fingers and arms that human primates have was mesmerizing to me. And I was delighted to find that the hoof of a horse is equivalent to our primate middle finger naturally selected over time to support what a horse needs to do to survive. So, when I saw your picture of the leaf with its palmate shape and those veins running through it, I instantly thought of a hand and how interconnected all life is. I wonder if that interconnection underlies, in part, the enjoyment humans find in pictures of leaves and trees.

    • That’s very well explained, Lynne. I find life to be such an enigma, not in spite, but because science has been successful at explaining it so well.

  2. no doubt you staged it but atleast you got the perfect eye to catch wht others hardly get through & next time expecting somthing more realistic from you as this part of kashmir is very familiar to the world.

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