This includes the blood-and-gore of cat and cattle chases across the African Savannah, the food chain, the apparent wastage of a freshly birthed life disembowelled promptly after. For an aspiring vegan who is soft on non-humans, is terrified of slaughter houses and avoids animal sacrificing places of worship like the proverbial plague, this appears to be a puzzling contradiction.

But there isn’t, let me reinstate.

Humans have done enough on this earth to stake a rift with their humble animal origins. I do not consider humans as Nature’s. Maybe the ethnic aboriginal groups still are, but for the rest, smartphone totting, techno gibberish spouting inhabitants of sheet glass and RC (reinforced concrete, but the religious aspersion could do just as fittingly), the title no longer holds.

There is a system and predefined order to all things natural, a discipline – which I admire but hopelessly lack – a cut throat no-nonsense persona, a grandeur sans mercy. Nature is an innocence, an unadulterated old school, a timelessness, the incorruptible. Nature is tough love, ruthless but kind, gentle but hard-hitting.

Nature, sadly today, in a planet choking with over-breeding humans, is little more than my hopeless eulogy, an awesome unplumbed terrain. This earth shall die faster than the universe will be known.

There is an exactitude and utility to nature’s design.

One of the two profoundest insights I grew up listening to, the words were reiterated so many times that they imprinted in my DNA, seeped into the chinks of my existential spine, was a life lesson borrowed from the wilderness.

“Nature is very accepting. It never duplicates…each leaf in each tree is different, yet they all exist peacefully together.”

The person who would say it through my deeply impressionable formative years, was a simple human, a fallible erring one: my father.

The other, a long-winding calculation of probabilties in the gene pool, the chance of my birth. Such fervent existential postulates set me thinking about this universe and its mathematical choices. Scientists have found precision in natural phenomenon, in the whirls of a corolla, phyllotaxy of leaves, magnitude of breaking waves, the mysterious celestial pathways whoozing out of nothing back into nothingness.

Often through the infamous load-sheddings of Calcutta, I would lie in our miniscule apology of a courtyard, staring up. Later, when we had a rooftop to claim our own, that tiny slice of cosmology expanded. The allure of the twinkling deep demystified into a humbling surrender. One lifetime, with all its glory and its gore, would amount to not enough.

There is peace in not fighting. There is immense relief in knowing that one day, Nature would take final charge and wipe itself off. The impenetrable history book will shut itself firmly, the universe will yawn and lapse into its silent chaos, gently without a murmur.

I will be gone way before.

Oh Lord, for the sweet peace of it. Serene, matter-of-fact, blissful oblivion...of letting go, without a fuss. Life at last will take me, a fawn snapped at the neck and dragged back through the jungle grass, still warm, voluminously spilling.

If Nature doesn't design garbage, which despite all evidences to the contrary and no tangible proof in favour of, is a believe I hold onto like a petulant child to her favourite blanket, it better hurry taking stock of what I'm worth.

It better make up its mind how best to answer for this failed design. Because I, the lazy incompetent fatalist, have failed in my justification of its grand wastage.