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...