Diary 2026 - Sweet September

September—the season of stray big clouds floating in the azure blue sky, like big wagons acquiring different shapes. This is the season of the retreating monsoon, and instead of the grey and black widespread canvas of monsoon clouds, like in the earlier months, which results in widespread rains, here in September you have sudden drizzles sent down by these mischievously floating clouds.

So, a sudden drizzle here, sunshine there, and due to the rainy season, the trees have a lush green canopy.

There has been lots of nesting by the birds, and a few survivors. Like in a typical nest of a bird—suppose there are four eggs—two or three of them are able to successfully come out of the nest for the first few days of basic training in survival. After a couple of days, I think hardly one or two survive, and at the end of it, possibly just one bird takes full wing to start an independent life for Mother Creation from its end. That's what we call successful nesting.

This is the season of gentle breeze, and you can see lots of children flying kites from rooftops, kites swaying against the various shapes of clouds in the sky.

For the past few days, a group of Asian green bee-eaters has arrived in the area. It's a beautiful bird, sending down trill, trill notes as it flies, taking dives with agility, stalking its prey mid-air—mosquitoes, moths, bees and flies.

Honeybees, I think, hardly form the core of their staple diet as of now because there is hardly any honeycomb left. But yes, houseflies have increased tremendously. So should we rechristen them as fly-eaters instead of bee-eaters?

On the Parijat tree, on its grey trunk, I could see a circular mating of monkey caterpillars. This is the particular pattern that they make in order to stay as a unit and survive.

The trees in the garden have nourished their canopy to such an extent that now the entire garden has a roofing of leaves, with barely any sky visible above.

And look at Mother Nature's beautiful way of maintaining balance. You have these voracious leaf-eaters, the caterpillars, who eat up entire leaves. Just like if you have many rats, you will have snakes. If you have rats, you will have cats. Just a balancing act.

They survive in a group, in a colony, these monkey caterpillars. But those who have fallen from the colony on the leafy Parijat are waging a long survival fight to go and make a shelter somewhere, crawling on the ground, their fate decided by so many chance factors, accidental circumstances which decide whether they reach home. Many of them get squashed under human feet, and possibly, while being left alone in the open on the ground, crawling slowly, some naughty bird with time on its hands tries to break the fuzzy resistance of their bristly hair.

Some of the caterpillars even manage to reach inside the room, and one of them I found in my shoes. I wonder what it would have eaten there.

As far as caterpillars are concerned, it's a very symbolic tale of transformation, like so many other species, phenomena and processes going on on Earth.

The larval stage, the caterpillar, is its feeding stage, with fuzzy hair spikes serving as a defence mechanism against predatory birds. And if it manages to reach the pupa stage, these monkey caterpillars don't form a smooth chrysalis like butterflies. Instead, they spin a silken cocoon, weaving their shed hairs into the silk to make it stronger and save themselves from the predatory beaks of birds.

And inside this cocoon, the famous metamorphosis occurs, and a moth comes out to take flight as an independent entity, taking its lineage further into the cosmic folds of expansion.

These monkey caterpillars are processionary caterpillars, and I found a little colony of them on the host tree, the leafy Parijat, the night-flowering jasmine, trying to survive as a colony, as a unit, aggregating on the trunk and then moving up to devour and eat the green leaves.

The solitary monkey caterpillar that I see crawling on the yard bricks looks like a fuzzy, thick, brownish mass crawling from a distance. But as I look closely, I see its fine, long, brownish-grey bristles spiked along a greyish or dark brown body.

But the Parijat loop was quite interesting, where they were aggregated as a unit. During the daytime heat, they form a circular mat on the tree's main trunk, almost blending with the tree trunk's colour to hide and remain cool. And they break the pattern, as if waking up at dusk, and move in a file or a procession line, heading towards the leafy canopy to eat the green foliage through the night.

And after surviving this phase, they will spin cocoons and then metamorphose into monkey moths.

The monkey moth is a medium-to-large fuzzy moth, having broadish tan or brownish-yellow wings streaked with delicate, wavy patterns—a nice design of Mother Nature on their wings. They are called monkey moths because the adult moth's face and legs have thick, woolly hairs resembling a little monkey's fur.

And one has to be careful. Forget about birds—even humans have to be careful about touching them because they have urticating, that is, stinging hairs. They can give you itching and rashes. And if your hand brushes a bit more forcefully against them, you may end up having bristles stuck in your skin.

And as a colony, they are quite strong eaters. They skeletonize the leaves, meaning they eat the entire leaf, leaving only the veins.

Now, as far as their procession is concerned, they are kind of follow-the-leader champions. If you see them breaking their loop and starting to crawl up the trunk to reach the leafy canopy, it will count as a kind of military-grade procession. The leader leaves an invisible silk trail or pheromone trail, and the leader's rear is followed by the follower's head, which is almost touching the leader's rear.

Like the locked compartments of a train, the entire chain of these caterpillars then moves up the tree.

And there have been very funny experiments in the past to test to what extent they can go into this processionary linear path.

While they are resting during the day to keep themselves safe as well as cool during the hot September sunny noons, it's a big fuzzy group hug. In the hot day, they don't hide individually under the leaves. Rather, they form a tight circular mat. It is a kind of group hug to stay cool and stay safe.

They look like a big hairy circular mass, a single one, and possibly it scares the birds. They find it to be something very big. And if a predator still reaches them, the entire group mat pulsates with a violent hairy rhythm to scare away the bird.

So that gives the moral that strength lies in unity—one and one makes eleven.

These lessons are clearly written over there in Mother Nature. We just should take small pauses and read them. This is an entire endless book of endless lessons of wisdom and practicality.

So these are characterized by synchronized marching with military precision, group hugging to survive as a unit, and when the metamorphosis takes place, these are miniature winged monkeys on closer look—the monkey moths, a kind of funny flying winged monkey.

Now there was this entomologist, Jean-Henri Fabre.

He was an interesting guy. He had the patience to watch and muse over the small world of insects and bugs. Alongside, he had the masterful playing spirit of a child, full of puns and jokes. And when these came together, they would provide funny anecdotes along with so many nice golden bits of truth that he extracted from the existential fabric of Mother Nature.

So he performed an experiment on these processionary caterpillars. It turns out to be a classic dark comedy as well, and the experiment earns the title of the "Circle of Doom."

He saw the hairy caterpillars in his garden. Very cleverly, he coaxed them onto a very big clay flowerpot with a broad rim, and then he manoeuvred them to move around the rim of the flowerpot in a circle.

The leader took the lead, and as it was moving on a circular path, very soon it found itself at the rear end of the last caterpillar.

So now everyone was a leader as well as a follower at the same time, in a closed loop. No leader, all followers—or all followers, no leader—in a never-ending marathon.

So symbolic of the way things go in the human world as well.

So we have to choose our leader very, very wisely.

The poor caterpillars, blindly trusting the chemical trail of the one in front of them, went on marching in the freezing cold at night. During the hot day they paused briefly and rested in a mat. Then, with the arrival of the new sun, they again started on the same circular path.

And it went on for seven days.

On the seventh day, a few starving and exhausted caterpillars stumbled out of the loop. Either it was incidental, or maybe they were pioneer caterpillars, just like you have pioneers in the human world. They laid out a new chemical trail, and the remaining exhausted and wearied followers again followed them—to food and safety this time.

So possibly there are pioneers in the human world as well who have the capacity in them to break the wearied, fatal and doomed loop, and they create an offbeat path that leads to something new.

In real life, there have been a few instances which are quite funny. Jamie Dornan, the star of Fifty Shades of Grey, was playing golf with his friends in Portugal. They were so engrossed in playing that Jamie and his friend brushed quite vigorously and forcefully against a line of pine processionary caterpillars, and they had many bristles sticking into their skin.

They took it to be a minor itch, rubbed themselves with their palms and went on playing.

By evening, Jamie's friend's left arm went completely numb, and his heart was racing. He thought he was having a heart attack. Dornan himself found his hands and legs going numb.

So a medical emergency was declared. They were taken to a hospital, and doctors told them that they had borne the brunt of a passing line of marching caterpillars and ended up having many bristles in their skin. After rubbing, the reaction had become much worse.

Coming back to Jean-Henri Fabre, he had the patience of a lama in a cave, and he combined his childish sense of humour with a lama's patience and meditative presence. It made a very, very striking combination for looking deep into the lives of bugs and insects, even though it made the life of that particular individual bug or insect quite difficult for some time.

His dung beetle prank is quite famous.

Dung beetles roll balls of poop to bury, and while one rolls its booty, a friendly beetle may arrive, apparently to help.

But don't get it wrong.

It comes to steal it.

And there is a fight. The owner beetle has to chase it away.

Now, in order to test the value of the hard-earned dung ball for its owner beetle, Jean-Henri did an experiment. He saw in his backyard, which was his experimental stage to study beetles and bugs, a beetle rolling its dung ball.

After reaching its destination, just when it was about to bury its ball in the ground, Jean-Henri struck a metal pin through the ball and anchored it into the ground to make it unmovable by the beetle.

The beetle kept pushing.

It tried its best from all sides—top, bottom and sides. It even dug underneath to get at it, using all parts of its body to move the ball.

Having failed to do so, it allowed even the thief friend, who had come to steal away its dung ball, to come and push it, as if checking, let us see whether both of us can move it or not.

But then, finding that it was having no effect, it chased the thief away again.

Finally, when the owner beetle realized that the ball could not be moved, it chewed it up again to make a new dung ball and spent hours on it.

So that is the spirit of being possessive about one's booty.

At so many levels, we humans are just repeating the same thing, only on a larger scale. These basic characteristics that we come across in humans seem to be written into the code of existence, and we are just mere, poor, instinctively drawn followers on the path, almost helpless in doing so.

The other experiment that Jean-Henri did was about the cicadas.

The summer air of southern France would leave the entire area buzzing with cicadas, raising such a high-pitched ruckus. People thought that possibly these were mating calls or some sort of communication.

But Jean-Henri had other thoughts.

He arranged a festive cannon, of the type used for blasting on festive occasions, and set it up under a tree in his backyard.

The tree was almost shaking with the high-pitched sound made by hundreds of cicadas. It was such a big vibrational commotion that it would even drill a hole in your mind. It was so strong.

So he blasted the cannon.

The thunder was so loud that his hat fell off his head. It was such a loud bang that even the panes in his windows shook with the effect.

But much to his surprise, the cicadas did not stop buzzing even for a fraction of a second.

They went on with the same high-pitched ease as earlier.

So now it turned out that cicadas could not possibly hear their own noise. They were deaf.

And that makes them a very noisy little bug, because you have such high-pitched intensity and force to make a loud noise, and at the same time, you cannot hear either your own or others' noise.

So that possibly sums up their excitement in making the air so noisy during the musty, hot days.

Post script: And mother existence provides me a live demo of Jean-Henri's experiment. A stray monkey caterpillar, beating its lonely path away from collective security, happens to get onto the rim of a plastic bucket. Now, this, according to me, is quite incidental. Had it gone some linear or curving or serpentine way, I mean anything short of a circular one, it would have at least moved ahead, searching for some chemical trail of a fellow caterpillar, seeking a chance to arrive some leafy shelter even after taking a long cut. At least there was a probability of it reaching some bush or plant if it was lucky not to be squashed under human feet or turned into a hairy uneatable protein ball some over-curious babbler. But it happens to be unlucky to be on a perfect circle. The rim seems inviting, a clear path, an enticing loop. And since they have this natural trait of leaving their pheromones in their wake, it gets into a vicious circle of circular chemical trail. Then its own trail seems like left by some other caterpillar's and there it goes on and one, caught in the vicious circle of its own traits, tendency. It's so difficult to break the futile loop of inherent tendencies and collective identities. And here lies a great lesson for we humans as well. We have to break the loop if we really want to grow and evolve. We have to seek our own path, however lengthy, haphazard, random it seems to be. It should at least not close into a loop. Because in that case you end up reaching from where you had started. 

I saw it at night and the poor thing looked tired the next morning after the nightlong procession on its circular path, going after its own scent. So I picked it up on a leaf and left it among food and safety among plants. So maybe luck too plays a massive part in where we land up, as big as chance. But then luck is nothing but a positive chance. 

Post Post-script: Most often the futile loop laid by someone else, and later consolidated by scores of other followers, becomes our own loop of futility. The collective confirmatory chemical trail, taking you in the same beaten circle. So this morning here is another follower of the trail. The previous caterpillar, salvaged by luck through my hands, left its pheromone trail across the circular rim and here comes the instinctive follower, going in circles thinking it will lead it to food and shelter.