Warning: The world's ending

Yes it is. No don’t run for your life right now. You still have time to read this before the world actually begins to end! You are not getting what I am saying, eh?

Well, I am not one of those 2012 how-will-the-world-end theorists. Neither am I from some sort of a religious group that has successfully formulated the exact date and time by the help of some ancient cryptic text for the end of the world to come. I already here the groans of those who have come here to find another far fetched end-of-the-world theories.

But I am not going to deny the fact that the world is going to end. It will folks, it will. But not this year, and not the way you may have imagined. There will be no freaky earth quakes the eat up entire nations, no magma exploding out off non-volcanic craters, no great floods that will swallow the continents entirely, no alien armada that will suddenly attack earth, no meteors and asteroids bombarding the planet, no moon crashing on earth, no sudden severe changes in temperature that will wipe out all life, no planet X is going to come and hit our planet, no mysteries ‘web-bot’ predictions are going to come true, no zombie attacks, no mutant animals gone wild and definitely no nanobots are going to take over the world.

That does not mean that the world is not ending. It is ending as I write this, slowly dying an inevitable death. The world will end. But not as we perceive its end, wherein all life form will be terminated or the entire planet will be destroyed. The world that we know and are so attached to will cease to be: and change will come, so different, so alien that we will not be able to recognize it were we to come back and see the world. The same way as a primitive man would not be able to recognize our world as the same place he’d lived on and that we are the same species.

So go on and live your life without worrying about the end of the world, the world is coming to an end, but not in your life time!

The Pitcher Plant of India

A pitcher plant is a carnivores plant that 'eats' flies, insects and insect larvae to get nutrition. Insectivores or carnivores plants are actually fascinating, they look like normal plants, with roots, stems and lovely flowers; but when you see them in action, you see a wonderful mechanism provided by nature to them to become accomplished hunters. It is indeed marvelous to see a plant capture a fly and then digest it leaving just a husk behind.

Now that you are familiar with the category the pitcher plant belongs to, let us become a little more specific about this particular genus. The pitcher plant is called so because it has a pitcher like  cupped form of leaves with a lid. In this 'pitcher' these plants capture their prey. These plants belong to the nepenthes genus.

During my stay in the village of Meghalaya, we went to this power plant which is situated up in the Khasi Hills. Here I saw a peculiar sort of a plant every where among the hills.





 


The locals told me it was the Tiew rakot plant, found here in abundance; but when the power plant engineer told me it was the pitcher plant, and was an endangered species I couldn't believe my eyes and my ears! I remember asking him,'The pitcher plant? The one that eats flies and insects?'. The answer I got was affirmative, and the feeling I got was that I was a part of one of the Discovery Channel shows!


I could not believe my stroke of luck to find an endangered carnivores plant in the hills of India. But there were more surprises in store for me. Do you see a pitcher like growth in the above image? With a closed lid?
Well that is the food bowl of the plant. All the insects, flies, larvae are caught in that pitcher shaped organ and then digested in it. Gross, isn't it?


So, here I am amid the scenic beauty of the Khasi Hills, still trying to digest the fact that I am here among the abundant growth of pitcher plants, when I see my lovely local friends jumping up and down the hilly slopes there hands full of the pitchers of the plant.

I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw them opening the pitcher and drinking its contents as if it were the elixir of life. It took a lot of self control not to throw up to see them drinking from the fly digesting innards of a plant. What I found out later was that this 'water' trapped in the pitchers was of medicinal value and could cure stomach and kidney problems. They asked me to sample one, but for me the idea was still too gross, I just did not have that sort of guts to taste that fluid. Yuck! Anyways to try and convince my friends not to offer me this drink, without hurting their feelings was a tough job. But eventually they stopped forcing me.

They filled the rest in a bottle and after that I remained thirsty till we reached back to the village, eyeing each bottle of water offered to me suspiciously. I do believe them, it must be having some undiscovered medicinal value. But for me I was satisfied to carry a specimen of the plant to take back home. Later, at home I did a bit of research and found that it was the only pitcher plant India has and goes by the botanical name of Nepenthes khasiana. 

It is a marvelous plant, the wonders of Creator reflecting in its uniqueness. All I hope and pray is that it should not become an extinct species. Discovery Channel, here I come!