MIDWAY: Crime and punishment Whoever made the planet made it for one and all. The earth is a common place for all living beings to live in; the sun is a common source of light, heat and energy and the moon is a common body of beauty to behold at. Any one may grow a penchant to scale Mt. Everest, to cross Sahara Desert, to cruise in the Pacific Ocean or even to become a Space Tourist, simply because the fact remains: all that has been created belongs to us all. All the same, it seems that the vast creation belongs less to some and more to others. Dinosaurs, whatever the associated reason, chose to say adieu to this beautiful earth of ours 65 millions years ago. Many known species may have treaded in these fossil reptiles’ footsteps. And today, out of more than 12 millions species of living beings on the planet, many are on the brink of extinction. The most discreditable fact for man is that he happens to be the principal enemy causing extinction of many a living being. And lo and behold! The species of the cunning Homo sapiens, however, has not yet been declared endangered. And that explains why an eminent threat to the existence of other living beings is here to stay for donkey’s years. The fate of the tiger is a case in point. The appalling fact is that, hardly a century ago, more than 100,000 tigers roamed in the Asian jungles. Today, the number of this graceful solitary cat barely exceeds 7,000! And as if that were not enough, rubbing salt into the wound of the largest feline beast, man yells: It’s now official. Tiger disappears in a couple of decades! The self-proclaimed right of man may be put this way: He can warm the planet and melt the Himalayas because ‘all’ regions belong only to him; he can hunt rhinoceros and tigers because the forest belongs exclusively to him and not to these elegant animals; he can trap and kill dolphins and whales because the seas and the oceans belongs only to him and not to any other marine living beings, so on and so forth. And the rationale behind man’s beastly comportment is, of course, the fear of going extinct himself. Nevertheless, all of us may not like it, but nature will certainly make man’s extinction ineluctable, anyway. Else, who will punish him?