Sahyadrica

  OR The fabulous, fantastic, fascinating fly and our ridiculous, plain fascination for a sickly computer-simulated life Allegory on Life and Death (~1598), Joris and Jaccob Hoefnagel. Jacob Hoefnagel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. There is no escape from reality means the same as there is no world without insects. This uncharacteristic piece that started as an idea that disrupted my planned course of thought that had me announce of my hiatus last year presents itself as I get attracted to this preposterous idea of living in a bubble orchestrated, for all I know, by a child. Here, and since it has been resurrected, I go back to 1999 when I watched the movie The Matrix: my eyes squinting at the grainy green filter of the sixth simulated world, my mind screaming at the lack of non-human substance that drained life out of the movie’s substance. The movie itself amazed me, save for the, spoiler alert, use of humans, the most prolific consumer of all animals – as b...

Not five feet from an Indian Almond ( Terminalia catappa ) tree abuzz with insects is an open gutter. The sewer runs along the corners of houses, its soiled waters shadowed by an avenue of jamun ( Syzygium cumini ), kadam ( Neolamarckia cadamba ), and Indian almond trees. The almond and jamun trees are blossoming, their pale, snowy-flowers arranged as a whorl around slender, soft-green branchlets stick out from under a flush of broad dark-green leaves, liberating a strong sweetish aroma into the heavy summer air. This is in the middle of the city. Every time I enter or leave my office, I hear the trees abuzz with insects. Sharp, short buzz of insects hopping from one flower to another, lapping up the extremely sweet nectar contained in bowl-like flowers. The gutter is riddled with tubiflex worms. When I was a kid, my father would purchase live tubifex worms from aquarium stores for his fishes, and occasionally weird worms would come with it. The one I have a distinct memory of was...

I cannot put my finger on an insect and call it my favourite. Yes, the banner-bearers of the insect world, the butterflies and the moths, mesmerize me; I have an infatuation for the eagles of the insect world, the dragonflies and the damselflies. I adore the champions of this age, the beetles, the musicians, the piercers, the jumpers – one name is not enough to describe them – the true bugs. And the most industrious, the ants, bees, and wasps, the immortal cockroaches, the architects – the termites, the hunters and the herbivores, and all the rarities in-between with their own ingenious lives – they all amaze me equally. But the one that held my fascination for the longest time are also the most infuriating to understand, and they happen to be omnipresent. It flies! A male horsefly struts his stuff by hovering mid-air in a large courtship ball. This bias lies in you too. After all, it is not the butterfly that we recognize as soon as we begin to identify with the world. Nor the...

Update (November 27, 2017) : A detailed paper (with more pictures) has now been published. See it here . “With buzzing wings she hung aloft, Then near and nearer drew, Thinking only of her brilliant eyes, And green and purple hue-” - Mary Howitt 1821 A Robberfly scanning the grassland of SGNP Introduction There are over 1000 species of plants, 251 birds, 40 species of mammals, and it is estimated that there are approximately 5000 species of insects in Sanjay Gandhi National Park, and I estimate there to be more species of insects in Mumbai and the surrounding areas. Among insects, the diversity of butterflies is very well documented in Mumbai, and is the only insect in Class Insecta that is studied so well. Then there are arachnids that are well documented, yet not comprehensively put together into one pictured guide. In all these innumerable Orders we explore, what we don’t see is other creatures living not only in forests but in the city itself. Some insects are ...