Spider Deserves to be Vishnu’s Incarnation

The table where I have kept my PC is a workplace of spiders. They build their webs faster than we remove them. So much so that I have learnt to respect them! Every time I see a spider rushing away, I don’t feel like killing it. I just chase it away.

No wonder Henry David Thoreau was moved to say: “If I were confined to a corner in a garret all my days, like a spider, the world would be just as large to me while I had my thoughts.”

It’s significant he chose spider and not any other life form.

Reuters on August 31, 2007 reported from Texas, USA:
“…A monstrous network of sheet-like webs covering several acres has been spun over trees in this state park 50 miles (80 kms) east of Dallas, baffling scientists who say it is an almost-unheard-of occurrence in the region.

"The dominant spiders here seem to be long-jawed spiders but this is unusual. Social spiders build communal nests in the tropics but the longjaws are not social," said Mike Quinn, a Texas state insect biologist.

"We still don't have a clear answer for what is going on here," he said as he stood beneath the ghostly canopy of webbing which shrouded a patch of oak and juniper trees.

The eerie scene evoked a B-grade horror movie. Thunder rumbled in the distance as spiders skittered across Quinn's wide-brimmed hat.

He was collecting samples by using a metal rod to thrash branches over a "beat sheet" -- a sheet nailed to criss-crossed pieces off wood into which bugs would fall.”

I was not surprised because I had watched, sometime in 2004-05, on Discovery channel, a film called “The Future Is Wild “. It projects, 100 million years from now, in “Hothouse World”, large spiders will build webs across canyons to farm the last mammals on earth. (Humans would be long gone before that!)

No insect is in the list of Vishnu’s incarnations that include fish, turtle, boar, man-lion, and dwarf. They, I always think, represent evolution. Spider deserves to be the first in the list.



Artist: Robert Kraus The New Yorker July 31, 1965