Who let the dogs out ...

Then there was this time when Nitin, Deepak, Nee2 Venky and I met at Chola's in Kandivali. Nee2 and Deepak were soon to take a "working-vacation" to Malaysia. Nee2 would be "working" on some training while Deepak was to chug along for a "vacation". So it was Nitin all the way giving gyan about Malaysia. After Nee2 and Deepak left, the rest of us decided to hang around for a while longer. There was a roundabout with a God's statue in the middle of the road. We removed our shoes and went in to sit down near the statue. It was late at night with not many souls on the road. But after a while, we noticed that the dons of the area started to lurk around the roundabout. Did I say "dons"? Oops - I meant "dogs"! Oh well, its one and the same, isn't it? Come night and dogs become the dons of the road. Come day and dons are hunted by police like dogs. All right, so presently we realized that only one of Venky's shoes was to be seen. After much eye-search, the other was spotted some 30 feet away, and was being eyed by some 20 odd street dogs. I decided to play the retriever and walked off bravely in the direction of the dogs to shoo them away. In the meantime, Venky began to scream frantically - he did not want me involved in any dog fight. All the same, I acted brave ... and deaf (the deafness caused by my extra loud heart-beat) and got inside the ring of dogs (like Abhimanyu got inside the chakravuyh). Thankfully, I was able to get out too with the shoe in my hand; only to find that there was no way Venky would put on that shoe. Nitin and I tried to rationalize with him, but he was not to change his stand. Both of us were rather perplexed when Venky walked off bare footed.

It was only a year or so later that I got to know the reason why Venky wouldn’t wear the shoes. He told me he thought he would get rabies! (Yeah, right! Just like you gets AIDS by touching an HIV+ person?)