59.Do we develop the olfactory perception in our children?

 “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?

Easily said than done…Which traveller would drink water made available in costly  containers when sealed plastic bottles are cheaper?

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?....