Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Cruelty to Animals

In the end, only kindness matters.
-- Jewel
A sight that one often comes across on the roads of Chennai (or, for that matter, on any Indian road) is that of an emaciated bull struggling to pull an overloaded cart, frothing at the mouth, while its master keeps whipping it in order to spur it up the incline. The only way I can reconcile this injustice in my mind is by taking recourse to karma: may be the bull had done some evil things in a previous life for which it is now payback time. May be it was a Hitler, or who knows, it could even be that it played the role of the cart-driver in an earlier avatar. But even assuming that this 'explanation' is true, the current suffering of the poor creature still doesn't seem right. Screw karma.