Why is Gaurav a vegetarian in the movie ?

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In his new book What a Plant Knows (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and his articles in Scientific American, Prof. Daniel Chamovitz, Director of TAU’s Manna Center for Plant Biosciences, says that the discovery of similarities between plants and humans is making an impact in the scientific community. Like humans, Prof. Chamovitz says, plants also have senses such as sight, smell, touch, and taste.

The notion that plants are capable of feeling emotions was first recorded in 1848, when Dr. Gustav Theodor Fechner, a German experimental psychologist, suggested that plants are capable of emotions and that one could promote healthy growth with talk, attention, attitude, and affection.

Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose, began to conduct experiments on plants in the year 1900. He found that every plant and every part of a plant appeared to have a sensitive nervous system and responded to shock by a spasm just as an animal muscle does. In addition Bose found that plants grew more quickly amidst pleasant music and more slowly amidst loud noise or harsh sounds. He also claimed that plants can feel pain, understand affection etc., from the analysis of the nature of variation of the cell membrane potential of plants under different circumstances. According to him, a plant treated with care and affection gives out a different vibration compared to a plant subjected to torture. One visitor to his laboratory, the vegetarian playwright George Bernard Shaw, was intensely disturbed upon witnessing a demonstration in which a cabbage had convulsions as it boiled to death.

In the 1960s Cleve Backster, an interrogation specialist with the CIA, conducted research that led him to believe that plants can communicate with other lifeforms. Backsters interest in the subject began in February 1966 when he tried to measure the rate at which water rises from a philodendrons root into its leaves. Because a polygraph or lie detector can measure electrical resistance, which would alter when the plant was watered, he attached a polygraph to one of the plants leaves. Backster stated that, to his immense surprise, the tracing began to show a pattern typical of the response you get when you subject a human to emotional stimulation of short duration.


According to The International Laboratory for Plant Neurobiology,
Plants are dynamic and highly sensitive organisms that actively and competitively forage for limited resources, both above and below ground; they accurately compute their circumstances, use sophisticated cost-benefit analysis, and take defined actions to mitigate and control diverse environmental insults. Plants are capable of a refined recognition of self and non-self and are territorial in behaviour. This new view sees plants as information processing organisms with complex communication throughout the individual plant. Plants are as sophisticated in behaviour as animals but their potential has been masked because it operates on time scales many orders of magnitude less than that operating in animals.

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