Sorry times indeed

Well for starters, I’ve been in India for over a month now. Got here for my brother's wedding and all. Will be writing about it sometime... the entire party, drives etc...

This first though... Also, let me tell you this isn't a sequel or anything. It does have "Sorry times" in the title and might have a passing reference to the ToI, but that's about it.

I headed out to a shuttle court last evening to get some of the old fitness back. Or rather to get rid of the layer of fat that seems to be clouding everything up... Jeez... never thought I’d ever want to shed weight in all my life... well u get to see strange days if u live long enough or unhealthy enough.
Played around 4 hours straight and by the end of it, seemed to get a bit of the old smash back. Damn satisfying I tell u... especially after the way i played in the first hour. I wouldn’t talk much about that as its real embarrassing.

Anyway, the court being down the lane parallel to my lane, i generally walk up to the place.
Scene's me returning home al close to 10pm... Close to exhausted turn into my lane. Now most of that area (down the lane) is kinda dark. Not many houses in that half and the usual Bangalore deal with street lights completely surrounded by tree branches. So the roads are mostly a bunch of shadows post dusk.
So me walking in the quiet dark road and from out of nowhere, a dog turns up and starts barking its head off. I decide to walk on ignoring it before it’s joined by another canine... and then a third which was right in front of me. So now I have 3 dogs within a yards radius of me... and a broken brick... and damn good aim (play a good round of shuttle and you'd know a thing or 2 about hitting the target). I picked up the stone (momentarily leaving my position severely compromised) and this got the dogs way more aggressive, and worse, they have damn good reinforcements. I was in no time surrounded by around 12-15 mongrels... all equally ready to bite. Me armed with a brick and a flimsy racquet. Made a few quick calculations, Figured I could take 3 dogs down at max. The rest - if the reaction to me picking the stone was anything to go by - wouldn’t run at the sight of an attacking aggressive human. So all I could do was walk along hoping not be attacked. Trust me it was hard to just walk along with so many dogs all around you and being real aggressive.
Point to note... I’m one of those fairly huge chaps. Meaning the dogs have had their day attacking kids and have now moved to attacking adults as well.

Back to the incident, I walked up in silence to the upper half of the road which has a few more houses and is less dark... all the while tapping the racquet against my shin for god knows what.

On reaching home, I asked dad about the whole deal and why nobody's done anything about it, which is quite surprising in the locality I live in. Most people here don’t take nonsense and are generally the types authorities hate, in that they demand their rights are a very united bunch. So most "requests" are signed by like 500 people and are brought to the authorities by a coupla arm twister type characters.

Dad tells me that there have been 3 complaints already about the state of our road. The first 2 having the authority characters telling them that there's no point taking it forth as the animal rights NGOs would eventually turn up and force the whole thing shut. The third time around, a man new to the place got bit pretty badly. This pissed the locals off big time. They got the authorities to get to work in spite of the warnings. As predicted, an NGO did eventually turn up and gave everybody a whole load of crap that had nothing to do with anything, they probably even threatened to go on a fast. That's how things work out nowadays.

Now why aren’t issues like this in the newspapers? Why do we have headlines like 'the richer get more sex' instead. Is it because the moron who wrote it isn't rich? or lacks a sex life? or both? Fine, it doesn’t matter what the newspapers say now, but shouldn’t what the newspapers don’t say matter. Or is it a bigger matter or concern for the editors that the people richer than them get to have more sex as against arbit innocents walking on the roads getting unnecessarily attacked by dogs?

As for the NGO characters, I’d love to have a few of them walking on different streets in Bangalore after dark... alone.

Oh and there's an NGO I know a bit about. This one isn’t even from Bangalore but I wouldn’t be surprised if most NGOs are almost the same in their respective lifecycles. This particular NGO was started by a few neighbors or something who were fairly passionate about animal welfare and all... the whole org was a part time thing then and voluntary. The problems started when it grew. Now it’s a full time thing. People work there full time and earn full time salaries. The initial members got pushed to the sidelines and people who were more interested in appearing on the newspapers seemed to take centre stage. The place is now filled with people who're either there for the pics in the papers or because they didn’t find a job anywhere else... u know this can be easy money if you’re so inclined. These people are terribly misguided and the ones in the know don’t make up the numbers and aren’t involved in the decision making.
I had been to a party with these jokers. The usual friday night speeches and booze. A whole lot of people bragging about their latest achievement. They had stopped the government from moving a herd of donkeys from a particular place where they were causing traffic jams. The reason for all this being, they (the ngo) believe donkeys get depressed on being forced out of their territory. I almost puked... quite a few times. It took a lot out of me to keep from laughing that day. I decided to never be stupid enough to be dragged to anything of the sort again.

oh yeah the killer statement was "if we allow these people to move donkeys today, god knows what they will do tomorrow" I probably laughed, if I did, it probably got covered up by the boisterous applause. If it wasn’t, who cares?
What do you expect the humans to do? Make out with the donkeys? And what's with referring to humans as 'them'? Ok u want to display love for animals and all... but calling humans 'them' is taking things too far don’t u think?

Not all animal rights orgs are as bad as I just described. But really, protecting animals that have taken to attacking innocent bystanders is real stupid...
Ridiculous times to live in... having such losers taking all the decisions. I wonder if most such people even know what animal rights stand for.
There a few smart ones who know what they stand for, but they are surrounded by political minded cheapos, morons without a clue... kinda similar to me being surrounded by the dogs. I guess it’s their compassion towards animals that keeps them going; lesser mortals would've quit or gone on shooting sprees.