My initial fascination with this phrase was partly to do with the fact that there is a scientific parlance to it. Bacteria are Mobile Republics, famously so. They think only of themselves and their survival, this while they reproduce and eat with unequalled ferocity. But these are bugs. For a human to declare herself as a Mobile Republic, and then a decade on, for another human to give a live demonstration of it, runs contrary to how different species adapt to their own particular environment. When a colony of bacteria are dropped in a test tube full of nutritious liquid, these single-celled Mobile Republics double in number every 20 minutes, without a care in the world that they are thrashing about in limited space and resources. In no time, a few thousand Mobile Republics become millions of tiny, identical Mobile Republics until, but naturally, there begins a fight for food. The nutrients start to run out, the minerals are soon exhausted. Water, that’s all there’s left. Strangely, the billion Mobile Republics sense this unfortunate turn of events. It’s called Quorum Sensing. They secrete what are called autoinducers – signalling molecules – that help alter gene expression. In other words, the bacteria slow down, hibernate, wait for death. But these are single-celled Mobile Republics. Human beings, on the other hand, are multi-cellular, and no one type of human cell can behave like a Mobile Republic or there’d be calamity. Cancer is another name for it. The kidney cells must know when to stop reproducing, so must the neurons or the skin cells. Humans cannot be Mobile Republics for, in a strange way, that would amount to being as selfish as a bug.