Here we are, to probably the favorite and certainly the happiest letter of the alphabet. G for Gai, which is Hindi for, oh yeah, cow.
Coming to India you expect cows to be hanging around in the streets, blocking the traffic and what not, well, that is exactly how it is.
I will begin saying that, thanks to a late but still effective baptism in the countryside culture, I find cows to be the most beautiful animal. They are so big and sweet-eyed, and they carry around their fat and smelly body in a way that makes me smile, especially when they are big milk cows with their udders hanging under their belly. At one point in my life I had, together with one quite bizarre and inventive mind, the plan of buying a cow and putting it in a courtyard. Luckily the courtyard happened to belong to a grandma that, much wiser than us, simply said “you girls must be insane” and closed the issue forever.
Anyway, my passion for our big fat milky friend didn’t really fade, to the point that I followed to the other side of the world the first and only guy who ever promised to buy me a cow. No, in the end I didn’t get one, that “you must be insane” is still in my ears and somehow makes me doubt that getting a cow as a pet would not exactly be the best of the ideas.
What is great, though, is that there’s no need to have a cow all for yourself here, because they are everywhere. One can easily have a close look at them just driving on the back of a scooter as I do: so many times I end up looking one of them right in the giant eyes, being less than a meter far from her!
Today, for instance, I was walking in the streets of Mc Leod Gang when I heard, very loud, one of those prayer chorus that it’s common to hear in town, amplified by the speakers on top of the Namgyam Monastery (where the Dalai Lama lives), where monks pray non-stop in this month of the year. Its intensity was growing as I was walking and I began to wonder if there was another monastery nearby, because the sound of the prayers was really quite loud to be coming from the monastery at the end of town. But, ever so disrespectfully ignorant, I was wrong: it was not the monks’ chorus, but just a huge cow mooing very loudly and walking down the road. Everyone stepped back to let her walk, some scared, some worshiping, some, like me, simply amused. All the cars stopped, and stopped even honking, which is a true rarity.
I live in a country where a big black and white cow causes the same effect that some Hollywood movie star would create somewhere else. Can it really get any better?
This is for the only cow-lover who will follow the cow-lover who followed the guy who promised to buy the cow. And to the world on top of the hill.
i absolutely adore these animals. gentle beasts. maybe i should think about living in india 🙂
[…] everyone knows, there’s no better place in the world than India, if you’re a cow. You’re respected, somewhat worshiped, and people really do take care of you. So much that […]