Rejoice. We will now have a National Microbe.

In the course of the essential news related reading which I must do every single day in my capacity as someone who needs to get something to outrage vociferously about while on twitter, I often come across some gems that have me sputtering out my daily coffee through my nostrils. Today was a two nostril sputter worthy item of news that grabbed my attention and held it firm while I scanned the columns of closely spaced alphabets.
We will now have a National Microbe. Yes. Go back and read that again and think back to these humble celled organisms known primarily for multiplying violently and causing everything from curd to set to dough to rise or the bile in the stomach to lurch forth. According to a news report, “The Centre for Environment Education (CEE) has, with the blessings of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, shortlisted eight candidates that people can vote for. These are lactobacillus, rhizobium, blue mold, wild yeast, bacteriophage T4, spirogyra, e-coli and mucor.”
Lactobacillus, doing the valiant job of changing milk into yoghurt, keeping the flora and the fauna of the guts in thriving ecological state could be a prime candidate to win the sweepstakes. Then there is rhizobium which I vaguely remember from biology class way back in Grade eight but must run screaming to googlebaba in order to find out whatever it is that Rhizobium does best for it to merit a listing amongst these candidates. What I learnt is that rhizobium is a soil bacteria that fixes nitrogen in the soil. Given how jugaad is our national obsession, these little fixers could well be a suitable winner of the National Microbe award and float around on our soil wearing sash and crown or whatever it is that National whatevers wear to denote their exalted status. Blue mold, the next contender, does yeoman service in turning cheese blue and most unappealing which is a good thing to do with cheeses given that some of them can give a corpse left out in the sun a run for their money’s worth in terms of bracing the air. Then there is spirogyra. For all the effort I took in drawing diagrams of the same in biology class, I have a soft corner of sorts for Spirogyra, I think back fondly to the many slides I mucked up and got yelled at before I could clearly discern whatever it is the good nun teaching us biology was trying to explain to us. There is e-coli which is a Very Bad Microbe and which has resulted in much, err, upset situations and which frankly deserves to be sent to the naughty corner in the Microbe School. There’s Mighty Mucor and of course, yeast, the stuff that multiplies even more rapidly like rabbits and given the rate at which our population is going forth and doing the multiplying business can definitely be a worthy contender, respresentative as it would be of this noteworthy tendency to produce offspring and perpetuate our genetic heritage regardless of whether said genetic heritage is worth perpetuating.
Do go to the link in the news report and vote for the microbe of your choice. It would be yeoman service. Wouldn’t do to have nasties like E-coli win just because none of us went out of our way to vote. Just like, well, you know.

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