“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you
across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived. The odors of fruits
waft me to my southern home, to my childhood frolics in the peach orchard.
Other odors, instantaneous and fleeting, cause my heart to dilate joyously or
contract with remembered grief. Even as I think of smells, my nose is full of
scents that start awake sweet memories of summers gone and ripening fields far
away.”
-Helen Keller
Helen Keller wrote
that half a century ago and interestingly
enough, the 2004 Nobel Prize for Medicine was won by Richard Axel and
Linda B. Buck for their “discoveries of odorant receptors and their
organization of the olfactory system”.
Today, Axel’s research continues to
focus on olfactory perception…how the sense of smell is established during
development, how it may change over time, and ultimately how certain smells can
elicit appropriate thoughts and behaviours…
During a recent International Symposium on Science Education and Sustainable
Development held at Trivandrum, I came across a gentleman who had
stayed in my home town twenty years ago. He nostalgically
recalled the smell of the city… of
copra being crushed to oil…of
jasmine which the
women folk adorn… He lamented …
in its place today all you inhale as you take an early morning stroll is the
smell of burning garbage and
plastic!
The
change in consumption pattern in the last twenty years and the preference for plastic bags
which is ultimately burnt, made me recall a news report which appeared a fortnight ago… of plastic bottles piling up in Sabirimala, a popular
Pilgrim centre.
Then, the gentleman, Mr Paul Calvert of EcoSolutions, Yorkshire posed
a question to the participants of the Symposium…why don’t you carry aluminum bottles?
Some of those piled up plastic bottles are likely to be recycled…
but some others burnt….And if our children have a refined
olfactory perception will they at least protest?....
