The Spider and the Fly

For those of you who don't know, I recently gave the last exam of my B.Tech course.  To acknowledge the fact that a phase of my life however good or bad was finally getting over, I decided to end it in style by not leaving things to the last moment and study the subject in a planned and organized manner. (I had three days to study yeah, but who's counting?)

So I woke up at 4.00 in the morning, and set about to finally get to know the delightful subject they call soft computing. My mother brought me a steaming mug of coffee (I have very few needs in the morning, and all of them involve coffee.) to ensure that I don't fall back to sleep (Occasional dozing spells are unavoidable, though).  After staring at the same paragraph for 20 minutes I realized that successful early morning study requires one vital ingredient: last minute panic. Maybe a bit of sleep would clear my head and make space for neural networks.

So I laid my head down on the table and was just about to doze off when I heard this weird buzzing sound. I glanced at my mobile and it was not coming from there, so I looked around and saw this monster fly merrily buzzing around the room. Sensing my perusal (or the smell of my coffee) it speedily made its way towards me.  I ducked (In my defence, it was really big) and waved it off. Fully awake in the wake of the aforementioned events I began another valiant attempt to study. By now I had slowly gotten used to that buzzing. But after some time the buzzing escalated and became a drone. Curious, I looked around but could find no trace of the fly, yet the sound continued. Finally I looked up and saw the reason for all that commotion.        

It seemed that my early morning companion had got stuck in a spider’s web. Giving the fly credit, it was making a valiant effort to get out of the death trap, but the more it struggled, the more it got caught in those gossamer strands of the web. Sensing the erratic vibrations coming from its creation (interesting fact: spiders shoot webbing from their posteriors; Peter Parker was one lucky asshole (pun intended).) the spider slowly made its way to it’s soon to be meal. One quick jab and its prey slowly gave up its fight as the venom began coursing through the body. Once the fly became completely inert, the spider made its move. It started twirling the fly between two of its legs, like a giant candy floss machine, or one of those gift wrapping machines. Within minutes the fly was wrapped and stored away for later use.

You may think why exactly I wrote this, if somebody wanted to look up ‘Spider feeding processes’, there’s always Wikipedia. No, the main purpose was to contemplate my behaviour during this entire incident. ‘But, he did nothing’, you might think. And there’s the crux of the thing, I did nothing. All I needed to do was to get a stick and rupture that cobweb. I would have contributed to keeping the house clean, and the fly would live still. But instead, I chose to just watch the entire process. In my defence, I thought by saving the fly I deprived the spider of its meal, and even that was not fair. So I found myself contemplating a (totally unnecessary, soft computing remember??) moral conundrum, something not entirely unlike to one that King Shibi faced. But unlike that case, there was no viable solution. And while doing all this heavy thinking, a sound justification finally occurred to me. I simply didn’t care. It made no difference to me and my conscience would be clear irrespective of the fly’s life or death. If this was between a peacock and cat, I surely would have acted because a peacock meant something to me.

So finally assuaging myself, I resumed my studies. All this assessment had made me thirsty, so I turned to my mug of coffee. And what did I find?? A dead fly was floating in MY COFFEE!! I glanced up and saw a tear in that cobweb. Apparently the dead weight was too much to support and gravity did the rest.

So in the end the fly lost its life, the spider lost its meal and I lost MY COFFEE!! There’s a moral somewhere in this damned tale and for the life of me, I can’t figure it out. (Apart from ‘Don’t keep the coffee waiting’, that is.).