India, Jan. 25 -- The Sukhna lake is the crown jewel of Le Corbusier's ecological legacy, a counterpart to his heritage of architectural marvels. By damming the Sukhna choe (completed 1958), a perennial source of water was created. It resulted in a concentration of biodiversity around and in the waterbody that graces the north-eastern face of the City Beautiful. While ambling along the Sukhna promenade, the keen eye spots birds, fishes and the occasional snake. A solitary checkered keelback or Asiatic water snake (non-venomous) is sometimes observed basking on the embankment running down to the water. Last week, an extraordinarily alert eye caught a spectacle of the natural world. Entwined keelbacks were indulging in group basking just 20 feet from the promenade but so well concealed in the marshy, drab bushes that it was near impossible to spot them. Sohan Singh, a keen naturalist armed with a new pair of 7x35 binoculars, waylaid me near the regulator spillway end of the lake on Monday. He pointed to a shine in a small opening in the winter-weary, drooping bushes where six to seven keelbacks were so entwined that one could not make out heads or tails. Another specimen was basking two feet away. Communal basking has been recorded in keelbacks in other parts of India, but an instance of this behaviour has rarely, if ever, been captured at the Sukhna. I requested an accomplished wildlife photographer, Lalit M Bansal, to rush over to the lake. Explaining the rationale for serpentine entanglement, Aditi Mukherjee, an expert who has studied similar behaviours among Bharatpur pythons, told this writer: "Most likely it is a case of inter-body heat transfer among keelbacks, to share heat and facilitate thermoregulation, and thus maintain body temperatures of the group within a certain range. Regular basking ensures fertility. It could also be reproductive behaviour in the guise of a mating ball, which is exhibited by other snake species, too." Pet ownership can be heartless. In the cities, the wails, whines and barks of pedigree dogs and puppies chained for hours and left alone strike a piteous, jarring note besides heaping considerable nuisances on luckless neighbours. Some of these dogs are abandoned surreptitiously by the owners miles away from their homes one fine night, leaving them to the proverbial devil's mercy. All the pretentious emotions expressed publicly for so-called beloved pets - as revealed on social media in the guise of posts such as 'O feeling so blessed and so loved with the sooo cute Jacky, Caesar, Pinky, Sheru etc' - are jettisoned in an unceremonious jiffy. Similarly, nine bunnies were dumped thoughtlessly in the bushes of the Sukhna lake's embankment by a soulless owner who just got tired of them or could not cope with their relentless breeding. The shivering white bunnies were found by some youngsters on Wednesday afternoon before the stray dogs got to them. The dogs would have reduced these innocent bundles of joy to smears of ripped fur and crimson blots on drifting leaves. Passing by the spot, I noticed the commotion. The youngsters did not know what to do with the bunnies, but were instead taking photos. I got two kind-hearted youngsters, Shivam and Pranav, to gather the bunnies. But some "educated" passersby advised us to let the bunnies remain in the jungle where they would find "bliss and freedom". This reflected a lack of understanding as the bunnies were exotics and not acclimated to the hazards of a life outside cages, food provisioning and human oversight. I had the forests and wildlife department despatch a rescue team to remove the bunnies from the immediate danger of dogs and cold. Later, Vinod Kumar Sonu, who is the president of Chandigarh Pet Lovers Association, very kindly took the rescued bunnies from the department and promised their rehabilitation in a caring home....