We are Family - an old woman adopts street pups in Bangalore!

As the sun was setting and the entire market was bathed in the evening golden sunlight for the final few minutes of magic, I reached the end of the sprawling KR Market in Bangalore.

Just as I was about to turn back and look for some bananas and coconut water for my evening snack, I saw this old woman with a tiny pup at a distance. Being a true-blue dog lover, I was intrigued and decided to say hello to her, and maybe play with the pup for a short while. However as I got closer I realised that there was not just one pup, but five and all of them were lapping up milk from a tray. The old woman  (let's call her amma) was helping the ones who were weaker while their famished birth mother (lets call her ma) looked on with love.

Amma with her family :)

Lovely pups drinking milk :)

It was such a beautiful sight that I felt a tear in my corner of my eye. Amma smiled and nodded her head when I showed her the camera and asked if I could take some pictures. I have forgotten whatever little Kannada I knew during my Mysore days, but sometimes it's really not needed. Smiles can do all the talking 😃

I felt quite sad looking at them all, but amma also filled me with hope. While on one hand we also have young doctors-in-the-making throwing a dog from rooftop for a fun video and teenagers burnt small puppies alive, here was a poor woman who was feeding so many pups and giving them a fresh lease of life. The most horrific of these all was the story from the same city when a few months back an old woman killed eight pups right in front of their mother for making too much noise. This might just be the tip of the iceberg of animal abuse in India, but thanks to social media some of these get reported and the perpetrators of these crimes do get punished.

This was one of the reasons I felt so compelled to write a positive about human-dog relationship.

Feeling the weaker ones separately...

And here is ma

I sat with them for a while and in a while ma also became more comfortable with me around. I don't try picking the pups, and with food around they were least interested in my love calls. Amma's humble shop was the last in the line and there were no buyers, and she was only interested in making sure the pups feed well.

Sometimes money and education do nothing, and one has to travel and meet people like amma to for a reassurance that humanity isn't dead afterall. I don't want to sound preachy, but I hope we all do realise that earth doesn't just belong to us humans but to all other animals as well.

Amma with her kid :)

Finally one of them in the box :)