Of Cows and Guns

I had prepared hard and cracked the entrance exam to the county’s most prestigious management institution. All that lay between me and every Indian’s dream was an essay and an interview. I gingerly turned over the paper to look at the topic – ‘Gun Control’. Damn! Why are all this people so obsessed with America and Americanism? Couldn’t they have chosen a topic more suitable to Indian ethos? Say our dear old domestic cow! As I sat blank thinking about guns and cows, the Dana Lyons song refrain began to play in my head.

We will fight for bovine freedom

And hold our large heads high

We will run free with the buffalo, or die

Cows with guns

Yeah! That must be it. Cows with guns! An uprising against a popularly elected government. An assault on democracy. How can the great American nation protect its lofty ideals? By banning guns? But wait! Ban guns? What are we talking about? Aren’t guns one of greatest gifts of science to mankind? If not guns, then ban the damn cows. That’s it. Ban the cows. Hasn’t our own Indian government done it? These Americans have so much to learn from us and we think we need to learn from them. Hasn’t it always been the case? We invent something and some damn white skinned clown or the other pops up and puts his label on it and makes it his own.

Take this song Cows with Guns itself for instance. These Americans act as if it is an original concept they have cooked up in their beef grills. But the truth is that our mythology talked of armed bovines centuries back. The entire armies of Vishwamitra were supposedly decimated by the divine cow Kamadhenu during his siege of Vashista’s ashram. These Americans must have come to India, read through our mythologies, stolen our ideas and then added some of their own bovine excreta on top of it to make up this song.

I know what you are thinking. How am I equating the Indian beef ban to American cow ban? Isn’t it just the opposite? Let me tell you – it isn’t. Isn't death the only thing that separates cow from beef? Our Indian philosophy says death cannot change who you really are. So why should it change the holy cow? In practical terms, our nation’s father has the answer. For this is exactly what the whole philosophy of Ahimsa is all about. If we do not go killing the cows, then the cows won’t come killing us. So we all live happily ever after. That is the essence of Non Violence. This idea itself was borrowed from the animal kingdom. A bird to be precise – the ostrich. This wise bird as soon as it sees hunters, goes and buries its head in the sand. The logic being that if it is not able to see the hunters, the hunters won't be able to see it. Gandhiji probably encountered a few ostriches during his stay in South Africa and learnt this profound philosophy by observing them. Now the inheritors of the great nation founded by him have extended this philosophy to the matter of cows and guns.

Now you may ask, why all this non-violence thingy? Why not just do preemptive strikes on all the bovine camps in the famed cow belt and bring the cattle class to its knees? Well there is a small problem – these beasts play a very important role in protecting the country’s traffic ecosystem. They are in fact the sole reasons we have so few accidents on Indian roads despite such dismal adherence to traffic rules. They play the role of natural traffic regulators, placing themselves at strategic spots on the road at great personal risk to themselves to slow the mad rush of traffic. So we need to tread sensitively to ensure this fragile balance is maintained.

One might think why we are wasting time discussing this trivial issue of bovines and firearms. The point is that this actually represents a broader question of religion versus science that has challenged societies from the time of birth of civilizations. The beef stands for religion and gun for science. What kind of society do we want to build? That will decide which we want to ban and which we want to promote.

I quickly scribbled out all my arguments and came out of the hall, a smug expression on my face, proud of my unique logic. I was sure all the other candidates would have written some mundane cliched facts, regurgitating whatever they had mugged up from newspapers and coaching guides. The B-School would be proud to have an original thinker like me.

Since then the wait has been on. It is three years and still I haven’t got a call. Who knows? Someday I may get a call. Or maybe I am just a victim of a McDonald and Burger King conspiracy to suppress original voices and take over the world.