“All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.”

Monday, June 14, 2010

Bovine God

There are times I wish that I could add humor to my writing. But, humor doesn't seem to be my forte. I can of course appreciate humor, but it has to have the right amount of wit mixed in it, for an example I dig Calvin n Hobbes, or Dilbert or Wodehouse, but cannot tolerate senseless Bollywood movies....

Now that I have accepted that I am not a funny person, I will proceed to narrate a descriptive, which in the hands of a more humorously inclined raconteur, would have had the audience in peals of laughter.

Why exactly would I even want to write a post whose effectiveness would primarily depend on a jocular style of narration and yet having in the former paragraph, clarified to the reader that this particular quality would remain absent to a large extent in the passage, I do not know myself. One reason would be that my brain has sensed humor in what the eye beheld, but the writer in me has not evolved to that degree of smoothness of expression that it might be able to convey to paper the exact feelings that the mind appreciated, yet the blogger in me wants to pen it down for the benefit of refreshing my memory with the same thoughts experienced first hand years later, lest my memory makes me forget it.

The post has to do with a Cow. The sacred animal, attributed with Godlike properties in India. The animal which is reverently touched whenever seen outside any temple here. The animal which has unhindered access to the streets, roads and in the case of this post, even the highways!

My building happens to face the highway and the third floor balcony that i sit in just happens to be at the right height above the ground, low enough to view the street and high enough to not let people realize that I am watching.

This particular evening I was watching a cow which was meandering near a shop under my building. It must have been the dearth of green grass there, that it decided to venture slowly to the middle of the highway over to the divider in between.

If i were to narrate the calm passage of the cow to the middle of a busy highway where even humans would need to look left, right and then left and then right again and repeat this procedure atleast 10 times before they reach the same destination as the cow , I could have written up atleast a good 50 lines more. But I shall instead proceed to summarise that paragraph by reminding the reader that this happened in India where our Cow is a God... and Gods can, without the slightest doubt, reach whereever they want to!

The divider in the middle of the highway is around 1 m wide and has green plants and shrubs growing in the patch of soil in it. These plants have been, i believe, planted by the motive of making the highway decorative. But the cow who apparently seems to have no regard for beautification and is quite determined on munching on any vegetation that it can lay it's pink tongue on starts the task.

The traffic police pays absolute dis-regard to the venerated animal. No one comes to take the cow back to where it came from. The cow happily munched for a good 2 hours. A ten metre section of the divider on the highway now lay bare admist the green foliage on either ends.

I turn away...and switch on the tv dispirited.