Arshid Malik
What is with the dogs in Kashmir? One they are multiplying faster than bacteria and second they have really hit the note of brutality. Where are the good old days when dogs were spotted around the huge waste generated from ostentatious marriage ceremonies which used to be generally disposed off on bunds and river banks? Dogs were a rare site back then and nowadays the turnovers of pharmaceutical companies which manufacture anti-tetanus shots have skyrocketed owing to the mammoth number of dog-bite victims landing on chemist shops and hospitals every single day. What went wrong in the chain of evolution and nature’s balance that sent dogs in Kashmir multiplying like microbes and infesting every street and by lane in the Valley? Maybe we started generating much more garbage than we did earlier and in the absence of a disposal system the population of dogs went high. Is that it, or is something else in store for us to discover and see.
One of my associates who happens to be a “hallucinated conspiracy theory buff” told me a few weeks back that it is the establishment that has let the dogs loose on us to make us feel really uncomfortable on the streets as they want us to stay indoors so that that the security personnel can relax. I hope you got the point. Well, his was a really tall story which had no possibly no links to ground realities but that is the way he wanted to visualize it and I just let him be while nodding my head in real time slow motion.
With the dog population hitting an all time high people are really scared to venture out into the lanes and streets especially during night time. Well they have every reason to be scared as everyday local news dailies are dotted with news about the latest victims of “dog fury”. A week ago I read a news story about a woman who took the easy route to her workplace via an orchard and was attacked by dogs and she rarely managed to save her life. This is very bad and it makes me nervous as I often take the easy route as I am too lethargic to work myself out by taking the longer yet safer route. I have certainly changed my mind and “thanks to the dogs”
I am getting leaner and I fear that someday I will totally disappear “thanks to dogs” again as they are the ones who will feast on me if the situation turns from worse to wild. Well, I am definitely not cutting jokes around here but really visualizing my future at the “paws” of city dogs. And that is while the authorities “cannot” and “have not” been able to mobilize genuine efforts to contain the threat that dogs have become for the citizenry. They have certainly been able to contain the fury of the common people – the most evolved species on planet earth – in the recent past who were only protesting against abuses and atrocities by shooting them dead but they cannot contain an outrage led by canines and that I am not really able to understand. Well, I do agree that my levels of comprehension are way low than the average “Babu”.
Now the point is that the common people of Kashmir who are facing threats to their life from every dimension of space and time could have been spared the latest threat posed by canines if the authorities were interested in saving people, especially womenfolk and kids – most attacked victims – but it seems that they are drafting a major cross-conceptual and cross-platform plan in “consultation with the global expertise falling in the category of managing dogs” to eradicate the dog menace and that is really taking a long time. Good for them and in the meantime the dogs, the grapevine tells me, are also drafting a major counter plan to fizzle all global plans that seek to eradicate them.
I was informed sometime ago that the authorities did their best on their own when they caught and collected dogs from the streets of the cities in Kashmir and transported them – without charging them reasonable fare charges – to villages and let them loose. What were they thinking? Village people are immune to dog attacks! Well the truth is that people who get bitten by dogs in the cities have permanent and quick access to medical facilities while the village people don’t. So the logic doesn’t really work around itself. I may not eventually be able to certify the authenticity of this “information” but my instinct tells me it must be true.
We are on the verge of a menace assuming the proportions of a catastrophe and there is nothing we, commoners, can do except wait on the news about the latest attack or else plan to salvage ourselves in case we stand face to snout with a canine on steroids.
