In which I grouch (some more) and project on helpless giraffes

Summer is back (boo Hyderabad) and my complete inability to write anything sensible has driven me once more to whine here. Hurrah for the internet. Its such an awesome magnet for self-pitiers and whiners and idlers and idiots.

I feel all caged. I long for mountains and rivers and forests and rocks and cars and trains and even (shock!) long long uphill climbs.
At a pinch exciting milkshake will also do.

Talking of caged and exciting, I went to Mysore zoo some time ago, as a general liker of animals I didn’t quite know what to think. On one hand, its nice to see a giraffe; and nicer when it sees you, and arches its lovely and impossible neck, and flares its wonderful nostrils downwards for your benefit.

But it is dreary as hell – sort of like visiting a friend in jail (not that I have done so or anything) but I imagine it feels similar.

Long-legged people like giraffes (named, hilariously, according to my cousin, Henry, Honey and their kid Jai Chamarajendra Wodeyar) ought to be seen against an eternal horizon, not in a tiny plot of grass that they can, like Vamana, cross in three strides.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, there were tigers and leopards and jaguars in tiny little cages, two at a time. Some slept like the dead (perhaps they were) the others just went on pacing, pacing, pacing. If being too little for your universe gives you angst, what does being too damn big for your miserable cage give you? At a guess, utter apathy.

Seeing apes in a zoo is a lot like seeing relatives who have come down in the world and live now in tiny homes crammed with the things which were once so precious to them, helpless to change anything. Particularly harrowing for it and me was a hairless (hopefully old and not terminally chemotherapically ill) chimp that looked more like gollum than anybody else. It was small and wizened and utterly utterly hairless. Its skin was a greyish brown and its bones stuck out and it sat with its back to the people yelling “hello dost” to it. If the purpose of gollum is as a constant reminder to Frodo about just how he could’ve ended up, a hairless chimp is startlingly and horrifyingly human. I had a strong urge to get it a nice soft shawl and send it to bed with a glass of hot cocoa and a dispirin. We left the ape area in a hurry after that, unable to deal with the loneliness of the only gorilla in India.

I do not understand why these animals must be kept singly – or even in pairs. Why not a good six or ten of them so they can fight and politic and hang out together and have orgies and generally have something to do?

They said they had a wolf and a wallaby. Then it turned out they both died about a year ago. I do not blame them – stuck on a patch of grass with no company and nothing to do and nothing to look forward to, so would I die.

I seem to have written myself into a dead end.

Haha.

Oh well.

I suppose this is how Henry, Honey and Jai Chamarajendra Wodeyar feel every 30 seconds.

Hello sucky coursework. Did you miss me?