Dog Pound

There are a lot of dogs in my University campus. The strangest thing about these canines, and mind you, they ARE a very strange lot, is that they hardly bark.

They're just so used to people petting them, feeding them (from chicken leftovers to curd-rice) and cuddling them, they just don't feel the need to bark at anyone. They know very well that no one's ever going to hurt them. It also probably never occurs to them that some people are actually rather afraid of them. If they recognize you, they will quietly trot up to you and graze their noses against your feet or shins. Sometimes I almost expect them to actually say, "Hello! How are you today?"

Of course like humans, some of the doggies are more popular than others, like Lelu and Tommy. Lelu is your mutt-next-door. He will not mind if you pull his ears or make him wear a paper hat. He will still come wagging after you next day. Tommy, on the other hand, is a regal one. He is definitely well aware of his prowess over the other dogs and is proud of his bushy tail. But you should see him when he stares at your food while you are eating. He can make the saddest puppy-dog eyes you can imagine.

There's another one, we call him Lelo. That one's totally bonkers. He runs aimlessly, then stops  randomly, sleeps on his back with his limbs in the air, lolls his tongue out all the time. Sometimes he will come to you for a cuddle and just refuse to leave. At others, he will not even see you, even though he's looking your way.

Them you will find all over the campus. And when I say all over, I mean ALL over. I've seen Lelu in the corner of my washroom. I've seen Tommy on the first floor of the Men's hostel. They are the cafeteria too. The strangest encounter yet was the time when, in my Twentieth Century American Fiction class, in strolled a dog. No one was much bothered to chase it out. It sat quietly in a corner and listened to the rest of the lecture. And then it came out with us, wearing the expression "what're you looking at?" on it's face.

It's not a dog-eat-dog world out here. We all are living peacefully. Besides, they are really good entertainment.

Jurassic Jacket

When Spielberg's Jurassic Park released in 1993, we got to watch it in our country in 1995 (it was an era previous to digitization and film rolls were dispatched by hand) and I was five years old.


Obviously, I was scared to death, even though I could barely understand what was going on. I got the gist though: being chased by ginormous meat-eating lizards twice the size of a normal car is NOT cool.


Then came the nightmares which inevitably involved me being gobbled by a T-Rex or a Velociraptor. I assume it got really bad and my parents got worried.


So they took me to a fair where they had moving Dino models, life-sized. I never understood why they thought this encounter would help, it just caused me to throw a fit.


However, the next attempt was more fruitful than the previous one. I don't specifically remember who it was, but my parents bought me a jacket. It was purple with red collars and cuffs. And it had the Jurassic Park logo. You know, the one they had on the movie poster and on the automatic cars and all the merchandise.


Strangely, maybe because it was so comfy and warm and cool, the Jacket instilled a sense of protection in me. In my befuddled childhood brain, the Jacket transformed all dinosaurs into cuddly teddy-like creatures. I now presume that this Jacket is the root to my Dino-obsession.

Wearing this Jacket, I could now watch the Jurassic Park three times in a row, without flicking an eyelid. My nightmares turned into over-imaginative tea-parties with "civilized" dinos, who found belching offensive. Once I even dreamed that I had a pet dinosaur whom I had to send to a pet-school, but it was weeping when I went to see it off!


Ever since then, I've watched Jurassic Park almost a hundred and twenty times. I can almost recite the script off by heart.


And, I wore that Jacket till I was thirteen, when it started flaking out like multi-coloured dandruff.


I never owned another jacket that came anywhere close to that one.

The Cat Named...

No, you're not going to find the name in here. It's still in the title. The cat really was called ... That's what her name was.

My Granny had all these come-and-go pets, including this cat and some pigeons.

My mother always said the cat was older than me, but I never could believe it. She was white with black patches and a sort of pitiable face.

She had actually learnt to eat veggies because Granny being a vegetarian would only give her daal-bhaat. That cat had the weirdest dietary preferences. She would eat ordinary crackers, sweets, and sometimes even toffees.

She always gave birth to her kittens in Granny's house, and Granny obligingly played the midwife. She cleared out biscuit cartons and put newspapers in them. When the kittens were old enough, my cousin and I spent all day running after and cuddling them. We made swings from towels and forts with pillows to play with them.

They say you cannot teach a cat to do tricks. But I taught this one to sit down if I stroked its back with a stick. I realized later that this wasn't a very wise thing to do, because, now, whenever someone wanted to scare her away, she would sit down and start meowing at the sight of the stick.

I've never owned any pets. This nameless cat was the closest thing I had to a pet. She died of old age in 2009.