COW APPRECIATION DAY! OR MAYBE NOT! #WRITEAPAGEADAY #BLOGCHATTER
Valentine’s day is round the corner, a day which has
attained significance over the past decade, maybe. It is a day dedicated to red
hearts, romance and love, a day that has crept in from the West, despite our
very own Indian occasions like Karwa Chauth in most of the North of India and
Thiruvathira in Kerala when wives fast for the long life of their husbands.
The origin of this colourful day is attributed to Saint Valentine
who was supposed to have secretly performed marriage ceremonies, defying the
Emperor’s orders, so that the newly wed husbands would not have to go to war.
The festival may also have its origins in the Roman feast of Lupercalia, which
was a celebration of the advent of spring, ending with fertility rites after a
lottery in which women and men were paired off. Yet another unhappy tale speaks
of an imprisoned priest named Valentine who cured a young girl, his jailor’s
daughter, of blindness. It is suggested that he wrote a letter to the girl, maybe
assuming that she would be grateful for the miracle, signing it as ‘your
Valentine’. Unhappily, he was martyred in the end, which actually should have
cast a gloomy shade over the festival.
Instead, a profusion of greeting cards, ribbons, Cupid
figurines, candy and red roses blossom every year on the 14th of
February, turning this day into a extravaganza of full blown romance. Girls
blush in the hope of receiving gifts from their beaus, boys stand in line to
woo their maidens. Of course, there are the naysayers who hate the sight of the
mush and the florid sentiment and end up cracking down on stores that sell all
the paraphernalia and waylaying young lovers who are trying to pour out their
hearts to one another.
This year was supposed to see a different kind of love
expressed in India where the Animal Welfare Board had asked its citizens to celebrate
‘Cow Hug’ Day to better promote Hindu values. Their claim was that embracing
the cow would not only foster “emotional richness”, but also increase “individual
and collective happiness”. Before they could actually test the idea out, the
Board withdrew their appeal, perhaps due to the hundreds of jokes and memes
that erupted. As one read, “Jokes apart, cow hugging has benefits. However, the
cow must know you too.”
India Today proclaimed – “No Cow Hug Day. You can hug
cows, with consent, on any day.”
The cow has been called Kamdhenu and Gaumata, terms of
endearment, over the decades, a symbolic mother to all those who venerate her. As
she grazes on grass, chewing the cud, her beautiful bovine eyes staring into nothingness,
imagine her shock when suddenly, she is accosted by a crowd of huggers trying
to reach out and get their share of emotional richness and individual
happiness. The natural impulse of any panic-stricken creature would be to rear
back, direct kicks or gore the intruders. Like I said earlier, you can hug
cows, with consent!
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Before the appeal was withdrawn, another idea was ‘moo’ted,
that of creating a cow sanctuary to round up stray cattle and house them so
that cow huggers could make a beeline towards them and hug them under one roof,
rather than hunting around for them on roads and creating traffic jams for all
those rushing to buy red roses and hearts for the love of their lives. Priorities
are priorities, after all!
Last week, I had gone on a short trip with my sisters and
mother. We stayed at a resort and spent time chatting, discussing, arguing…
doing everything that a close-knit family does. I guess people have always had
cows on their mind. There was actually a frieze work of two cows on one of the
outer walls of our rooms.
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The next cow that I encountered was on a trek that we
undertook. It was a tiny little creature, tied to a tree. I have always been
fascinated by dogs, cats and cows. This one was a calf and as I attempted to
make conversation with it, it looked at me with suspicion lurking in its large
eyes, and moved away rapidly as I stretched a hand out towards it. Cows are
skittish creatures, and it is probably safer not to hug them, unless, as
aforementioned, they know you.
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Finally, it is better not to get cowed down by the different kinds of cows that exist – the cash cows, the farmyard cows, the sacred cows, and especially, the holy cows.
As the inimitable Ogden Nash put it, “The cow is of the
bovine ilk; one end is moo, the other, milk.”
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