Sahyadrica

The skull of the Mithun (Ward, R., 1903) and the Piophilid fly (Curtis, P., 1826) In the Nyishi culture, the significance of Mithun, Bos frontalis , as the sacred animal, is crucial in death as in life. It is the crux of social prestige where the animal is gifted by the groom to the bride’s family as a marriage custom, and no major ritual or ceremony is complete without an offering of the Mithun. A sacrificial animal that represents the spirit of culture and nature, they are semi-domesticated and unlike cattle. Their behaviour of spending time in the forests away from villages is akin to their cousin the Gaur, Bos gaurus , their owners seldom if ever see them. A large bovid of the Eastern Himalaya, its presence is calming. In the foothills, the trails through the dense forests are likely made by the Mithun – trails leading away from villages in the valleys mostly start as such. On a trek up the mountains, a Mithun would follow you out of curiosity or pointedly look at you walk by. Desp...

  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...