Hariyaali : The k9 in need of a miracle

Hari (short for Hariyaali) the canine who beat all odds to survive with stakes against her. She has been nurtured and treated by a few friends of mine .This is a tale of a survivor, who is need of another miracle. 

Hari was injured in a motorbike accident at two months of age. She survived due to the love of some of her very first admirers—kind-hearted garage mechanics, who fed and bandaged her till the wounds healed. But the accident left her (due to lack of proper medical attention) with a misshapen foreleg with almost no paw pad. Once she began to walk again, the injury not only made her limp but caused her paw to rub against the ground. Out on the rough road, this constant rubbing led to a chronic wound that bled and pained every time she moved. Life on the streets is not easy and even a small handicap can severely hamper the chances of survival. Poor Hari has had three more near-fatal episodes since her accident. The last was when the wound on her paw developed a septic infection. Each time a lucky intervention managed to save her.

While her trysts with life seem miraculous enough for her name, Hari’s tale has a lot more magic in it. What would you expect a dog that has been through such trauma to be like? Nervous, unsocial, wary? Hari turns out to be the antithesis of all such fears. She continues to amaze with her strength and patience, delight with her boundless friendship and inspire with her calmness of nature, a darling indeed.

For instance, despite having been in pain for most of her ten months of life, she has borne all the long treatments with a patience that never ceases to astonish doctors and onlookers alike. Through innumerable bandages and saline treatments, she has sat with an almost Zen-like calm. More amazing is the unfathomable trust and love Hari possesses for humans and dogs alike. It’s like she wants to reach out and connect to the entire world. And this makes her irresistible to anyone who meets her. For sure, a few moments with her will melt any heart.

On October 7, Hari’s problem leg was amputated in order that she may lead a healthier, injury-free life. However, as the story of her life goes, this too ended up being an ordeal. The surgery has developed complications which have led to a life-threatening infection. The skin below the stitches has given way so that a hole in the chest has left the underlying bone exposed. The medical care to save her life is underway, but the expenses for her treatment are already touching 25,000 Rs.

What Hari needs now is another miracle that will save her life and hopefully end this cycle of sickness and put her on the road to full recovery and a normal life. Please make it happen by contributing for her treatment or by sharing this on your Facebook page so someone who can help will come across it.

Please also spread the word about Hari’s adoption. As a tripod, life on the streets will not be easy for her. And Hari with her gregarious nature and amazing calmness deserves a loving home which she is sure to light up with her magic!

For more information mail me on: veloce0raptor@gmail.com

Three letter solution to the five letter problem

This is not an attempt to mock any system of belief.

To begin with let me make it clear I don’t know what it means to have blind faith in a deity. Faith presupposes un-questionability. I used a prefix blind to make it plain to the modern reader who just like me might not know what faith is. Yet in life that is all we seem to seek. Faith in governance, in marriage, in our partners, in our gadgets and so on. Yet we are always let down, Trust me, even the iPhone can break down. Faith removes the uncertainty, which physics tells us is that foundation of our reality. Now this poses a problem. Life without faith seems empty. Imagine a life where faith cannot be a reality. If you cannot don’t worry and neither could I. That’s life without faith for you, inconceivable. Our very fabric of existence seems to have been woven around this thing called faith.

So how do we tackle this problem? We need to have faith in something or some being without which this life is apparently meaningless. But to place your faith in a being or a thing, let’s say, is like letting a three year old drive your expensive sports car. He might get it right in the straights but what about those tough corners or parallel parking. There is sure going to be a lot of dents and scratches. I guess this question might have popped in the minds of all the great and not great thinkers long back. There is no possible reality based solution. Everything that is real is also transient. That which lives dies, that which is built is destroyed. So we had to look beyond to place our trust and then faith. We looked into nature and there we found only dynamism, not the firm rooted concept with we seem to want to objectify. We wanted surreal properties, unquestionable characters.

The only possible solution to that seemingly unsolvable problem was to place your faith in a concept. This concept had to be fool-proof. All the kinks and possible problems had to be ironed out. So mankind went about creating extensive stories to create a hypothetical creature which is like man, so that we can associate with it, yet it rises above man in all aspects. This was a killer move. Now the concept becomes a shining beacon for mankind to follow and possibly evolve. However it seems thinkers overlooked one problem. They forgot there were other thinkers as well in the world, who thought about this problem in a similar manner. You can’t really blame them, the so called thinkers were spread across in time and space and there was no Skype or Gtalk available back then.

Fine, these concepts were developed. Faith in concepts came with its set of problems. One, it must be spread and second, it does not allow for existence of other concepts. With time and development of communication, concepts clashed. Mutual infidels clashed. We are still waging this battle.

One offbeat solution was spirituality, which tries to unify all these concepts together, with talks like different paths same destination and stuff. It works for some. But what about the masses who cannot look beyond the over simplified, objectified version?

There is no possible solution in sight for them. They are a dying race. For peaceful existence we have to let go the oversimplified concept and look for some sort of union or just simply perish. This involves mental work.

We have to somehow extract faith from our system and accept uncertainty as the eventuality of living. That is possible only if we can let go of the society and de-evolve (I had to make it up as there is no antonym for evolve). They were right when they tried to burn the first guy who discovered fire. It is the very knowledge which created this computer and urges me to write this piece, our greatest undoing. Uncertainty can be only experienced in our primeval form. Einstein was partly wrong when he said ‘god does not play dice’. There was no god to begin with but the dice were rolled.

Paradox

Our true great peace is in the wars we fight
Happiness in the depression we face
Joy in the eyes of misery we see
Life is a paradox for us humans
We chase after our own tails all our life
Never quite reaching, and never letting it go
To live our life in this vain state we needed a villain
Maybe that's why we have created this world
an antithesis to life itself
We go to war with ourselves
lost out on the true meaning of peace
We have worked out everything except maybe how to live.

Uniting to conserve our wildlife

Every speech, every article written about the state of wildlife in India begins with or contains the famous quote from Gandhi –“ One can measure the greatness and the moral progress of a nation by looking at how it treats its animals”. Even here I am making a reference to it. This article is not about the greatness of India’s wild heritage. A lot has been said about it in the media, and over coffee tables. This is an article about a few people involved (even remotely) with wildlife conservation. This is about how we feel. This is about the state of the system as we have come to see it. With this simple introduction I will dive into the point of contention…

Travel to any protected area where wildlife is officially supposed to exist, which is not in the ‘A list’, and talk to the locals. All you will hear are stories about the lack of effort from the Forest Department (FD) and state government. Before you conclude that this is yet another article complaining about the inadequacies of these officials, we would like to request you to put aside these doubts and read on. In our encounter with various states’ FDs we have more often than not encountered insurmountable difficulties, from plain indifference to abject hatred. That’s one part of the story. What we, as people living in civilization, don’t hear is that there are a few people still scattered around who rise above the normal rut to do good work. It is these people we seek out and help in our own capacity. Be it writing a simple proposal or a requisition letter or actively participating in conservation efforts. This story is dedicated to those people.

Fighting against all odds

The Indian forests largely have inaccessible and inhospitable terrain. Life here is not simple; most of us can’t survive there for a weekend without running water, electricity, network and internet. It is where these few able and capable forest staff works. They need help in the form of volunteers and people who come to recognize their work appreciate them and help them in whatever simple way it might be possible. This might be our first step towards wildlife conservation. Helping those involved, making their life simple. All the readers are informed enough to know that we are at the brink of losing everything. Not just the Tiger, the damage is done across all species. The tiger is simply a mascot to bring to your notice all that is wrong in the wild. There should be more public involvement and that will be the only way to bring in transparency to the FD work.

How you can help

You can start with taking some time off and contacting the nearest FD. Get involved by doing simple odd jobs, build contacts and get more people involved. We are not asking you to become the big brother, we are asking you to assist as a concerned responsible individual. Directly help the people caught in the crossfire or fund a tribal kid’s education. There are various means and ways to do it. Google will show you the way. Make sure you monitor it. Understand that this is an effort for the survival of our species, of humanity. There are people working for conservation, sadly however there is a larger number working against it. This has to change this has to be a people’s effort.

We humbly request you to take an effort in this direction and get as many people as possible involved. We need not just the tigers in our jungle, but also the leopards and gaurs and a whole lot other wonderful creatures. There is not much time left. This Wildlife Week we can, each and every one of us, work towards making that one simple change. If you cannot contribute time, help those who can. The simplest way is to help the FD of this country function better. We are always willing to help those who are lost. Let this be a new beginning and all we can hope for is the best

any queries mail us at
gupta.meetu@rediffmail.com
praveenzone@rediffmail.com