New Mutt in the Backyard

The amount of resentment heaped on the new mutt by existing resident mutts is directly proportional to the cuteness and likability of the new mutt. Mom adopted this excuse for a dog because he was hit by a car (silly Bangalore drivers and sillier Bangalore puppies). She named him ‘Puchkey’, which means ‘small’ in Bengali. The kid thought it would be a nice idea to alter the spelling of the name. ‘Pooch-K’ is phonetically consistent with the Bengali pronunciation, and ,in the opinion of the kid, it adds a dash of ‘hipness’ to the name (like ‘Jay-Z’).

Sure, every dog has its day. Why must all dogs have their ‘days’ at our house?

The Loss of Dignity

Recent events have reminded us of the famous prayer at Alcoholics Anonymous ; ‘Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot control, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference’. In this case, what we’re about to talk about belongs to the first category.

There has been a lot of talk of doggy fashion. Our half Americanized human bought herself a ‘Cornell University’ sweatshirt. The only thing worse than having a human who buys university merchandise for herself is having one who discovers that the university store has merchandise for dogs! Yes fellow pooches, if you have a human studying at Cornell, you’re quite likely to end up with pooch-customized Cornell memorabilia.

There are red poochie t-shirts with the Cornell logo on them. There are also leashes, collars, and  dog treats with the university logo. Why our human gravitated towards the t-shirts and not the treats is beyond our understanding of human cognition. She gleefully gave mom a rather visual description of these t-shirts and promised to bring one home for Toffee.

Mom was ahead of the little kid this time. She had once bought the kid this tiny red top that the kid refused to wear in our rather patriarchal country. So she fished it out from the kid’s pile of discarded clothes and made Toffee wear it. Poor Toffee. For a dog, clothing is the last hurdle. That final line you cross when you decide to compromise yet another canine attribute so you can inch closer towards being human. Toffee hid in her bed for a great deal of time. When she mustered enough courage to step outside the house for a walk, what a furor did it create! The rest of us were stunned. We came closer to take a discerning look. Something was wrong, very wrong. We just couldn’t tell what it was. Even other humans on the street stopped to stare. It was so hurtful.

Mom and the kid had a Skype call the other day. The kid took a snapshot of Toffee. The humiliation is quite evident in the lowered eyes. You get that sinking feeling, the kind that tells you that you have no trace of dignity. Here’s that unfortunate picture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, all this is clearly beyond our control. In such unfortunate times, we choose to be serene and wise.

P.S. :  1. If a dog wears a Cornell University t-shirt, is he/she likely to be called ‘Big Red Dog’ in the future? Google Cornell Big Red to see what we mean.

2. On the bright side, we’re looking forward to seeing the kid and getting new toys.

Wardrobe Malfunction Averted!

This blog may be on hiatus, but we couldn’t help ourselves. Potential wardrobe malfunctions can be traumatic, even for a mutt. We’re so glad that our human, the one in Ithaca, was a little unlucky on her sartorial quest to get us clothes. We may have escaped once, but we’re keeping our paws crossed,observing the situation and keeping our ears pricked up for any mention of ‘doggy clothes’ around the house.

Our human visits Ithaca mall more often than she visited malls in Bangalore (it doesn’t matter that the girl who was once an employed, tax paying citizen in India is now an unemployed grad student in New York state). We know that she feels tempted to go to shops like ‘Gap’ and that she just walks past them to resist temptation. Unfortunately,there was this one time when the sartorial itch got the better of her and she walked into ‘Pampered Pets’ (if you can’t buy clothes for yourself, you can buy some for your dog). To her delight,and our horror, there was a clearance sale, and there was an obscene discount on doggy winter wear!

Our human mulled over whatever was left in the store. The manufacturers classified clothes on the basis of the length of the dog’s torso rather than the weight of the dog. She tried to remember how long Toffee was, but it didn’t help. She went over to the store manager and they spent quite a while figuring out whether Toffee would fit into the woolen pullover (it turns out that she mentioned Dalmatians and Border Collies as references, but we think that all that talk only confused the store manager). The gentleman finally had the good sense to ask her how much Toffee weighed.

Lady luck was certainly on Toffee’s side because our human had very zealously weighed Toffee before moving out (don’t ask for details). It turned out that the sweater was too small for a dog of Toffee’s weight. Our owner asked whether there would be a sale of doggy T-shirts for the summer, but it turns out that doggy tees are not a big hit in Ithaca(what a relief). The human was still undeterred and asked about booties for dogs. We’re so happy that they only had winter boots with woolen lining and that our owner still had a sense of how hot Indian summers can get.

Our human is currently dejected because of her misadventure in ‘Pampered Pets’. It didn’t help her when the store manager told her that the next set of clothes would come only in the winter. Unlike cats, we don’t have 9 lives. We urge other humans in Ithaca to deter our human from hunting for depressing doggy merchandise online and in stores. Even dogs are entitled to some dignity.

Blog on Hiatus,Mutts on Holiday

Our overzealous human who updates this blog is temporarily on hiatus. Now that she’s in graduate school,she has better things to do with her time than to edit a mutt tabloid. The title may seem a little confusing because it says ‘Mutts on Holiday’, but don’t buy into all that human trickery. For our human, anyone who doesn’t go to school or work is on a perpetual vacation. (We would like to submit a petition to someone with real authority so that we can override the hold that our human has over our lexicon.)

So, we’re not on holiday. We will continue to do what we’ve been doing all our lives. It’s just that the updates to this blog will be a little more infrequent this year. We’re glad, because in a way, it saves us the embarrassment of having our secrets out in the open, for the time being. If you still want to know what we’re up to, ask our human to give you the undocumented, off the record version that is surprisingly authentic and completely lacking in embellishment.

When Humans go to Grad School

The perception of education varies from one species to the next. For cats, having an education is all about the statistical analysis of the extent to which another gullible species can be exploited. For us dogs, it’s about being wild enough to survive nature, tough enough to survive the streets and mellow enough to survive ‘human conditions’. When humans talk of education they mention words like ‘tuition’, ‘degrees’, ‘academia’ and a lot of tongue twisting jargon that makes no sense to us. We sometimes wonder how they have the nerve to call themselves educated when they can’t even fish out a wishbone from a dumpster!

Our human decided that she needed a masters degree. We watched her wring her hands in frustration, look vacantly at the screen of the laptop, lug gigantic suitcases from one place to another and stare obsessively at the weighing machine as she weighed her luggage. We hate the sight of suitcases. We know that a suitcase is a sign of impending travel, it means that one or more humans are going away and effectively leaving us in the lurch. Poor Toffee was  a witness to this drama day in and day out. For a while we wondered if mom was going to go on a trip and leave us to the whims and fancies of the younger human who can’t tell the difference between dry bread and bread soaked in milk.

Before you get the wrong idea, we were just as sad to watch the little kid go. She gave her harried mom hurried lessons on how to use Skype. She also expects us to communicate with her via Skype(it has something to do with her “Macbook Paw” idea). Such travesty for something as trivial as ‘human education’. She talks to mom on Skype about how she sees squirrels much bigger than the ones we love to hunt. She promised us that she would get us lots of goodies from the US of A(we hear that American mutts are a lot more spoilt than the kid could ever spoil us). The only thing that has got us worried is all the talk of squeaky clean pooches coming out of a pet spa in ‘Ithaca Mall’.

You be good kid. Bring us a bunch of munchies,toys and silk cushions and forget that you ever saw a doggy spa.

Portrait of a Pooch

It seems that not only do humans have opposable thumbs, they also have more free time to spare than they claim. One of our owners likes to write, exaggerate and paint. She tried to make a little portrait of Toffee, the photogenic pooch. The one thing that we hate about photography is that human beings who are normally worthy of respect, reduce themselves to deplorable cooing idiots. What makes portraiture more annoying than photography is that you’re expected to sit absolutely still. How is a pooch, especially a free thinking mutt, expected to sit like a lawn ornament while some ‘arty’ human keeps scribbling on some scrap of paper? Luckily our ‘arty’ owner knew better. She took a picture with her camera phone and made this little sketch. Here’s Toffee in pencil (it isn’t enough for our owner that she’s already posted this on her other blog).

An Open Letter to People Celebrating Diwali

To all the harbingers of good cheer,

It has come to our knowledge that in the following days all you good people will celebrate Diwali. We understand that it is commonly referred to as ‘the festival of lights’.As far as we dogs are concerned, it’s the ‘festival of loud noises’. We have sensitive ears.Our ears are far more sensitive than yours will ever be. To add to this predicament,we can also hear sounds in the ultrasound spectrum.Imagine what it’s like to be a deaf person who gets a cochlear implant and hears for the first time.That’s how it is for us.The fact that we can’t trace these sounds back to their origin is what makes it infuriating and scary.

Another unfortunate consequence of this festival is that our owners seem to be suffering from progressive deafness.Not because of the sounds of crackers, but because of our screaming.Visualize this; some moron lights a cracker that gives off a 100dB, something as loud as a Vuvuzela, and Toffee lets out a 200dB yell right within earshot of the humans.If these humans go deaf, they won’t be able to decipher whatever little they understand of ‘canine talk’.

So, for the sake of maintaining human-canine relations at acceptable diplomatic levels,please keep it down.

Thank you,

Yours truly,

A bunch of mutts.