Why a good Hindu worries if his cow thinks he's dumb
The year can surely be dedicated to the cow! All cows in general and my cow - "vikas" - in particular.
Oozing with milk and divinity in equal measure, our bovine benefactor was always part of our social consciousness - we worshipped it notionally, at least - but now it has a tenacious hold on our intellect as well. Veer Savarkar and Golwalkar Guruji will be mighty pleased.
For the first time perhaps our democracy is being described as "mature". As we turn 71, we are discussing on the dining table such fascinating subjects as cow slaughter, food fascism and saffron toiletries. I thoroughly enjoy such healthy, albeit one-sided, debates: they help us as a nation to focus better on the business of governance.
The only person who ever dares interrupt our discourse on the dining table is my "sanskari" wife, to instruct the domestic help to garnish the strictly vegetarian food with Hindutva. I was always a meat-eater and especially fond of the exotic tunde kebabs, but in tinda and bhindi now lies my salvation.
The ideological differences were always there - both children are also strictly vegetarian like their mother and "sanskari" in equal measure - but somehow I had managed to reconcile the differences.
However, after Dear Yogi clamped the ban on illegal slaughter-houses, all hell broke loose and the entire argument about a "secular" all-inclusive diet boomeranged in my face. A part of the problem now is that I get my breakfast only after I have fed the cows and cleared the dung.
Honestly, my heart melts when I notice a scrawny malnourished cow loitering on the road, poking its head into a trash can, scouring for plastic and other garbage. My immediate impulse is to hug the animal and take it home, so that it can meet mother.
In a way our bovine friend is doing us a great service: An article tells me it is consuming tonnes of non-biodegradable plastic and preserving it in its four compartment belly for us, just in case we ever need it.
Of course, a cow rummaging through trash is not a pretty sight but I don't have the heart to tell the animal what we have done to grass and other grazing grounds in our urban habitats. If I do, the cows will surely think that we are rather dumb.
Of course, I have seen well fed cows, too: they have as many as six breakfasts in the span of a few minutes with housewives in a scramble to stuff them with the first chapati that is cooked in the house.
An article I read said that this is considered auspicious, just as the last chapati cooked in the house goes to the dog, to appease ghosts and apparitions in the twilight zone.
My humble plea to my countrymen is: Even if you don't worship the cow notionally but still have this overweening sense of gratitude for your daily intake of milk, please take better care of the animal. This might be a tall order because for some inexplicable reason, we have switched our affections to dogs, cats and even crows.
And this despite our home minister Rajnath Singh citing research by American scientists which says that cows and humans share 80 per cent of the same genes! So do mice and men, but that is a rather prickly issue.
There are some unprincipled political analysts who have opined that there is a devil's pact between the RSS and the BJP; since the RSS has helped the BJP wrest power in Uttar Pradesh, the latter has given the former free run in implementation of its saffron agenda.
As part of this Faustian pact, cow protection has been "outsourced to self-appointed cow vigilantes", which alone can reclaim and restore the glory of "gau mata". There have been some teething problems, though: apparently such has been their sanskari upbringing that these gau rakshaks are not able to tell the difference between different kinds of meats and kormas and keep lynching the guy with the wrong steak.
But gau rakshaks are badly needed. These poorly informed, mugged up constipated liberal intellectuals, who see in "gau raksha" a camouflaged communal agenda, don't understand that the State possibly can't chaperone the poor animal from birth to death.
Take my poor and feeble cow "Vikas" - I took very good care of it all these years - but once it was old, it made for a rather pathetic spectacle. I put "Vikas" on "growth" hormones but it did not help; we tried dressing it up in dainty clothes - some people from CSO and RBI came and did the needful - but it did not help.
Drop in at my barn sometime, my wife is away. You may not be able to meet my cow anymore but I can surely offer you some exotic tunde kebabs garnished with Hindutva.
I run a huge risk, though: In my house a narrative has been constructed around my "spurious nationalism" and hints are being dropped that if I break my culinary vow and cross the red lines, I would be deported to Gujranwala in Pakistan, where my ancestors used to graze cows.