For 300 years, every dog had its day here



From Parvesh Sharma | TNN
TNN


Khanpur (Patiala):

In Punjab village, bark before you eat

Khanpur (Patiala): Unknown to most outside Patiala, a diktat by Alaa Singh (1695-1765) is cast in stone by villagers, and is followed till this day and dogs get to eat before worshippers at the temple — all three meals of the day.
Following tradition, head priest Anand Giri comes out thrice to the temple gate each day and, before food is served to villagers, starts howling like a dog to call the canines to the table. Within minutes a bunch of dogs gather and are, with due respect reserved for them, offered the best that the langar (community kitchen) has on its menu. “Its an old tradition and I always bark out to all the dogs here before start of a langar,’’ he said.
Fellow villager Khushdeep Singh added, “We never treat dogs the way others do. In fact, we never even raise a finger when our children are attacked or crops destroyed.’’ But good run that started for dogs here 300 hundred years ago, may just be completing its course.
The younger g e n e r at i o n , though still unable to rebel against what they see as a weird ritual, are both dismissive and embarassed.
“You know,’’ said Gursevak Singh, a student, “it’s okay to treat dogs well, but to worship them and make them eat before us is ridiculous. Though we have got used to it because almost everyone here behaves that way, it becomes awkward when we have visitors come over to our place. To hear the priest howling like that is just too much.’’

POVERTY IN INDIA - LOOKING FOR REASONS

Extract from an article of Jug Suraiya in Indian Times

Sixty-two years after independence, even as India boasts an economy widely acknowledged to be the second fastest growing in the world, there is another, alternative India which continues to be mired in the most appalling poverty. According to a recent World Bank report, 25 per cent of India’s population – that’s a projected 313 million human beings – will be living in “extreme poverty”, calculated at $1.25 a day, in 2015. India ranks only a little better than sub-Saharan Africa where the corresponding figure will be 37.1per cent, while that for China will be 6.1 per cent. In 1990, China’s “extreme poverty” population was 60.2 per cent, while that of India’s was 51.3 per cent. By 2005, totalitarian China had managed to reduce its figure to 15.9 per cent, while democratic India’s poverty quantum came down merely to 41.6 per cent. China had political dictatorship, but relative freedom from poverty; India enjoyed political freedom (at least in theory), but suffered under the brutal despotism of poverty.
This is not to argue the merits of dictatorship versus democracy. Without argument, democracy is better than dictatorship. If for no other reason than that in a democracy you can have a democracy-vsdictatorship debate; in a dictatorship you can’t. What can, and must, be argued, however, is that Indian democracy has tragically failed to protect so many of its citizens, for so long, from extreme economic degradation. The reasons for this – the many sins of omission and commission responsible for this shameful state of affairs – would fill entire libraries. But without going into details – where the Devil is said to lurk – it could, and ought, to be said that this national scandal clearly amounts to a case of massive and sustained malpractice on the part of all the governments elected into office since independence.
The answer to such questions is that our lawmakers see themselves, and have conditioned us to see them, as being above the laws they enact and enforce upon us. And till that changes, our much-celebrated dance of democracy will, for millions, remain a danse macabre. A dance of living death.

STREETDOG'S COMPLAINT- FROM BRINDLE

Brindle
Woof! I’m Brindle, the street dog who adopted Bunnylady and Jugfellow some years ago. The reason i’m writing this is because Jugfellow is too upset to write his column himself. Why? Because, once again, some misguided residents of the National Media Centre, the cooperative housing society near Gurgaon where we live, have started off on the so-called ‘stray dog menace’. This happens with unfailing regularity, not just in the NMC but also in that macrocosm of the NMC that we call India. From Kochi to Kolkata, Bagdogra to Bangalore, someone or the other will bring up the stray dog menace, causing a whole lot of innocent, perfectly harmless street dogs to be rounded up and, more often than not, put to death in the most inhumane and cruel manner.
People never seem to understand that the Indian street dog (please don’t call us strays) are hardy, intelligent, affectionate creatures, often much more so that their pedigreed, imported counterparts, who have been viciously inbred by exploitative breeders. Street dogs have to be all these things in order to survive. Far from harming people, they are – when properly vaccinated against rabies and other diseases – man’s best pals, to coin a phrase. They act as excellent guards for the neighbourhood, alerting everyone to the intrusion of strangers by barking. Yet people keep on wanting to get rid of them. Not realising that nature abhors a vacuum and if you get rid of one lot of street dogs, another lot will inevitably take their place.
There is no such thing as a ‘stray dog menace’. There is only a ‘stray human menace’. Who is it that has strayed from the straight and narrow of God’s plan (and please don’t tell me that God is dog spelt backwards, because if i’ve heard that once i’ve heard it for the umpteenth time)?
Is it dogs, who live together amicably in the casteless, creedless democracy of doggydom, who have strayed? Or is it humans, with their caste conflicts and their religious wars, their whites and their blacks, their Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs and Christians, their Maoists and their monarchists, their Indias and their Pakistans, their terrorists and their victims, who are the real strays? And the real menace. Not only to each other, but to all of the rest of creation as well.
It wasn’t dogs who created 9/11, and 26/11, and al-Qaeda, and the Sri Lankan civil war, and the Taliban, and not one but two world wars. All these are human creations. And what wondrous creations. Can you imagine a dog creative enough to devise 65,000 nuclear warheads capable of killing every living creature on this planet a hundred times over? No. Only humans are creative enough to have done that. Though they have yet to prove themselves creative and clever enough to find a cure for the common cold. Or AIDS, or cancer, or a score of other killer diseases.
Humans have been too busy doing other things. Like polluting the planet and destroying its environment. The world’s forest cover has been thinned from 7.6 billion hectares in the pre-industrial age to 2.8 billion hectares. And that’s fast disappearing. Between 1700 and 1900, thanks to human activity, more than 20,000 species of plants, 593 species of birds, over 400 species of animals and 209 species of amphibians became extinct. Today, humans wipe out one species every day on an average. Tell me about the ‘stray dog menace’.
Unlike humans, who think the universe and everything in it was created only for their benefit to do with as they will, we dogs believe in the co-fraternity of all living things. And that includes cats. Cats? Oh, lor, what have Bunnylady and Jugfellow done? They’ve let Himal into the place. And Himal is a cat! Who insists on literally rubbing shoulders with me. Yuck. So, while there’s no such thing as a stray dog menace, if you were to talk about a stray cat menace, you might get me to agree. Or maybe not. For the basic dharma that doggydom teaches is to live and let live. Which means cats too. Where’s that damn Himal gone to…?

Web Linkshttp://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/jugglebandhi/
Contactsjug.suraiya@timesgroup.com

Printed without the permission of Jug Surai... I admire a lot and would like to recommend his books like JUGGLING ACT as compensation

SAD BUT TRUE WORDS

It is our ethos to uglify places, rather than to beautify them. We seem to be happiest when surrounded by hordes of people in the most cramped conditions as imaginable. The communal way of living excludes any privacy, having space for itself is obscene according to the Indian mind. Wether it is shopping or driving, one must necessarily fight for every inch of shoulder space. Some of course romanticise in the chaos. And the romatics are right, though for different reasons; we can't help it, because it is in our genetic code to use brick and mortar in the most aesthetically offensive way possible. The Indian way is all about how bad things can be made to look, not how pretty.
(citation ou of Indian times, sotto voce by Yamini Lohia.)