I must assure you, before you begin, that what follows is not an exegesis on consciousness – a task for which I’m abysmally ill-equipped. I only want to draw your attention to a gripping story I read this month. If prelude to my notes on the book seem like a tail that’s wagging the dog, blame is mine, novice in this art as I am.   One overarching feature of our species is consciousness. If asked to define it, most of us will flounder. But we know instinctively what is being conscious. We know consciousness is not merely ‘not being unconscious’. Every living organism is conscious in this sense; even single-celled amoebae respond to external stimulus in some way. Consciousness is being able to think of self as an aware, living entity; the ‘I’ surveying the world. It is the ability to form an opinion on the world and self. It is possessing a theory of mind, which enables us to impute reason as to why people behave in a fashion. It is the capacity to confabulate in our mind’s eye, how

  Where Have We Come From? History of the species is written on the genes of its each individual. Genome is a palimpsest. Eons scribble on it – in a simple language comprising four alphabets and twenty odd, three-lettered words – as the organism evolves over geological ages.   Life originated on earth nearly three thousand five hundred million years ago. Humans have been around for about 0.4 million years. Thus, a major portion of the book of our genome was written when we were not humans; if the book had one page for each million years, human story would occupy less than half a page in the three thousand five-hundred-page book.   Modern humans originated in Africa. Story of our African parentage is indelibly etched in each cell of our body, numbering trillions. These etchings tell us a singularly fascinating tale of our ancestors as they travelled out of Africa and established home in the wider world. They were then, hunter-gatherers. Civilisations were born many millennia lat