Winter beds + the Chaos in a Coupe launch

Two dog-related updates:

1) A big shout-out to Jagjit Singh and Stray Talk India for their thoughtfulness in converting thousands of paint drums into winter beds for community dogs (and making them available free of cost). They have been doing this for a few years now. Yesterday I went to Gurgaon, met Jagjit briefly, and brought back a couple of beds for my dogs downstairs - this is Choti/Mia testing her new bed out.

Between the Supreme Court mess and the Diwali/Karva Chauth/Dussehra/Chahath Puja/what have you firecracker “celebrations”, the past few months have been a torrid time for street animals and for their carers (and of course it continues with no end in sight) - with the Delhi chill also starting to set in, some of us are doing what we can to at least keep our (sterilised and vaccinated) animals as safe and comfortable as possible.

(Am also attending online and offline meetings - including the ones by our Stray Buddy group - and getting some solace from the words of wisdom being shared by people who aren’t just “animal activists” but who also understand the complicated workings of inter-species coexistence and harmony very well, and are constantly working to improve things for both human animals and non-human animals. Good to see at least a few educational institutions/colleges sending out official letters expressing support for their campus animals. I hope more such people emerge and continue raising their voices.)

2) At the launch of Divya Dugar’s book Chaos in a Coupe: Travelling Across India with Three Dogs last week, Hemali Sodhi (who midwived this book with A Suitable Agency) and I continued our time-honoured tradition of posing with calcium bones. Elsewhere, as you can see, Udayan Mitra and I had eyes only for one of the canine chief guests who came up on stage during the book unveiling.

The event went very nicely: terrific attendance (with some tolerable humans there too), and warm stories by audience members at the end about Divya’s generosity and kindnesses. The book offers plenty of evidence of this. I have followed Divya’s travelling adventures with her indie dogs (plus human family) on Instagram for a few years, and as expected much of the book is about the challenges and exhilarations of such travel – booking coupes in advance, hitchhiking across faraway places with dogs in tow, handling dogs with different personalities and whims (or motion-sickness issues) in a variety of situations. But even for someone like me who has never travelled with dogs at all, there is plenty to relate to. Some of the passages that resonated for me were the ones where Dugar describes how her relationship with indie/street dogs first began in Nizamuddin circa 2008-09 (after not having been interested in animals at all until her early twenties) and how this opened her eyes to a whole new world; about the complications, heartaches and worries involved in gradually taking on responsibility for sentient creatures that aren’t fully yours (something that I wrote about in my “Part-Time Dogs” essay for Hemali’s The Book of Dog). This is particularly relevant in the stories about how her Tigress and Pari, initially street dogs, ended up being adopted and turned into full-fledged house kids; one of the book’s loveliest passages is the one about Pari’s first night in this new capacity.

Please look out for the book - as well as the Chaos in a Coupe Instagram page…