The Furious Days with the Dog in the Night Time

The incidents I am about to narrate are true. Some scenes may be graphic in nature, but this has nothing to do with my blog. I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Some time back, when I used to get home in the evening, he used to bully me. He would block my path, growl, chase me around and make me angry enough to kill him. But before you misunderstand, I’m not a housewife, I’m not talking about my husband, and this is not the story of Provoked. (I may be known to eat the occasional box of special K cereal for special women, but this does not make me a girl!) This is the story of Man v/s Canine : when animals attack.

It’s true. The blasted dog used to attack me almost every other day. Err..night. On the nights it didn’t happen, I think the dog was silently watching me from the shadows, just to mess with my mind. Oh, he is wise, that mongrel. He is clever and calculating. He knows what I am afraid of most and he is not afraid to use any tactics, however shameless.

Why, the other day, he even had me attacked by a crow. But let me get back to that later. Let me lay down the basics; give you an idea of what it was like to come face to face with my canine nemesis.

Imagine a boxing arena, well lit and with thousands of spectators. The dog is in one corner and I, in the other. I’m wearing formal pants. The dog isn’t wearing any. (I told you he was shameless.) Thus, it continued night after night. Having to negate a road occupied by a pant-less dog. Now you know how I feel. No?

I know I can take on the dog if I want to (being a pretty big guy, I’ve heard things ranging from the harmless ‘aren’t you too big to be human?’ to the downright insulting ‘mommy, can I ride that camel’) , but he knows and I know too that I don’t want to get bitten. I have weight on my side, but he has rabies. The disease, I mean. Not the tiny creatures that grow into adults. Babies, I mean. Not the disease. You get what I mean. Anyhow, the dog knows that I’m scared of him. This is enough for him to block my road and make it almost impossible to get home without swinging from trees.

After weeks of doing so, I grew tired. I mean, there is only so much swinging that a man’s forearms can take. Anyhow, I decided to call in reinforcements.

Some weeks back, when I had my friends Lattim and Algnam (names written backwards to protect privacy) with me, I decided that it was time to take down the dog.

We confronted the mangy mutt at his favorite haunt (the middle of the road leading to my house) and tried to come up with a plan of attack. The conversation went something like this

Me: What say we throw something at it?

Dog: woof!

Me: Who invited you to the discussion?

Dog: woof!

Lattim: Sounds like a plan. But I think he’s onto us. Look at him barking. Son of a….

Dog: bow!

Me: Just ignore him. What shall we throw? Sticks and stones?

Dog: woof bow!

Lattim: Naa, those may only break his bones.

Dog: bow woof!

Me: Then what? Words? Call him names?

Dog: Raul! (strange howl, not a Spanish footballer’s name. Besides, we should be calling the dog names. Not the other way around.)

Lattim: Naa, words will never hurt him. We need something more potent. Something that can scare the life out of this dog. We need him to run for his life and never return.

Lattim fell into thought. I looked for rocks.

Now, it may be noted that this Lattim is a very resourceful guy. He thinks big. While I was eyeing a little rock, Lattim (who had been going to the gym for a few weeks) grabbed Algnam (a girl, btw), strapped her over his shoulder like a bazooka, and made for the dog while howling a fierce war cry. (in retrospection, the war cry may just have been Algnam screaming for her life. (No girl really wants to be thrown on a dog(or anything else for that matter))). Meanwhile, I gathered rocks in one hand, a stout stick in the other and charged at the dog from a different angle. While Lattim threatened the dog with the girl, I swirled the stick about my head and loosened a flurry of rocks. Algnam continued screaming at high pitched frequencies that only the dog could hear.

Obviously, this is too much for any dog to take. He whipped his tail between his legs and made for the mountains. He has not been seen since. Apparently, man had won the battle over canine(The operative word being apparently).

A few days after the incident, while I was walking in broad daylight, a crow snuck up on me and scratched my head. Honest to God, he did. While running from the crazed crow, I have a sneaky suspicion that I caught a glimpse of a dark shadow behind a tree. The shadow of a dog. And he was giving me the middle finger.

Mayawati Menace

In what could end months of mental torture endured by the common man, the Government of India may finally have figured out what to do with the Mayawati statues that have been popping up all over the country. As one may remember, the population explosion in Mayawati statues had started with an innocuous figurine that had appeared all of a sudden in UP. At that point, it had been dismissed as a random event.

However, over the course of a few months, it had reached a point where one could not turn around without bumping into a Mayawati statue. According to a victim of the statue menace, Kuttappan Singh Yadav, ‘I was taking my morning shower. By chance, my soap fell down. When I straightened myself after picking it up, Wham! There was a Mayawati statue along with me in the shower’ Kuttappan, who went into seizures on taking one look at the statue, is now suffering from chronic epilepsy.

Incidents like this have become all too common in the country, with statues turning up at every nook and cranny. In some remote corners of UP and Bihar, parents have stopped sending their children to school for fear of them being terrorized by the statues. Some kids, who dared to look at the statues indirectly through the clever use of mirrors and artificial lighting, have not slept since. Curiously enough, they have been screaming at night and complaining about the silence of the lambs.

Clearly, this has been a nation that went through its darkest hours in the last few months. However, there is now a glimmer of hope. Economists have suggested that the statues be exported. As they are to be found in abundance, there is no difficulty in declaring them as a natural resource and thereby bringing them under a list of commodities that the government can trade in.

The only problem that remains to be solved is ‘who in the blue hell will want to import them?’ Though this is a pressing concern, there have been positive signs from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Parts of the country, which are thick with jungles, are often plagued by animal attacks. Wild life experts believe that the statues could find employment as scarecrows; except, they won’t be scaring crows. They will be scaring rhinos.

Meanwhile, experts have also declared that the Mayawati statues rank third in the list of scariest things known to man; and animal. The second scariest is a portrait of a smiling Mamta Banerjee that is locked away in a secret vault in the CIA headquarters at Langley. At moments of national peril, the US pulls this portrait out to interrogate terrorists. Topping the list, as the scariest thing in the world, is the vision of Uma Bharti in tight jeans and a tank top. (To imagine the horror, please visualize). Thankfully, no one has ever seen this. Should this event ever transpire, the universe as we know it will end.

Mayawati, who was contacted for her views on the matter, shockingly turned out to be a statue herself. Unfortunately, she is now indistinguishable from the hundreds of other statues and is hence unavailable for comment.

In other news, National Geographic has come out with its much anticipated list of evolutionary mistakes, a.k.a. creatures that should never have been allowed to evolve. This list, which includes the likes of the extinct Dodo and the soon to be extinct Panda, has been topped by Karan Thapar. He is closely followed by Arnab Goswami.

Rakhi Sawant, who many had expected to be on the list, has interestingly been disqualified from consideration and instead been classified as a mythical creature. It appears that history should remember her as one who may or may not have existed. Much like a Minotaur; only worse.