Wildlife Gallery: 'One Mind' (and engineering absences)

My apologies for the week-long absence. I find myself having been dragged into the bottomless depths of the delectable soup also known as "Scriptwriting 101 for engineering documentaries".

Over these past few days my mind has drifted back to the dreaded surroundings of my schoolboy physics classes, where I was perpetually at a loss to understand what on earth was going on. All those fulcrums and spectrometers never gave me the comfort I sought in the biology lab or the Drosophila breeding room.

I am discovering (thanks to Discovery), that every documentary writer - like a Galapagos Giant Tortoise - has a niche, for which they are uniquely built. Mine is not Engineering.

Although this project, due to hit screens near you some time later this year, has given me the opportunity to broaden my technical writing skills and vocabulary - and of course, my CV - it still fails to ignite the spark that explodes every time I take up the challenge of another wildlife subject.

And since every engineering story these days is based around the premise of 'Man taming Nature', the project obviously doesn't sit very comfortably with my usual sensibilities. But nevertheless as someone very wise keeps telling me, it pays in the long run not to pigeon-hole oneself. Therefore like a good monitor lizard, I will adapt myself to the current environment and embrace these 'tensile strengths' and 'ergonomic designs' and 'relative quotients' as if they were my own flesh and blood.

I hope to be Lost in the Jungle once more by the end of this weekend after my juggernaut of a script has been delivered.

By way of compensation, I leave you with another favourite from my wildlife gallery: 'One Mind'

Charith Pelpola
Elephas maximus maximus
Udawalawe National Park
Sri Lanka
(c) Studio Times Ltd.



Aaahhh... now isn't that better...