The Laughing Cow

Krishnaland is now a myth, milk in the world’s largest production centre comes in plastic polypacks, Yashodhara no longer needs to churn buttermilk – where’s the market for unbranded products anyway? And so the past is wiped out. The cow is now a brand, its ownership subject to licensing through trademarks and registrations, not just a quadruped bovine companion, nor any more a ‘mother’ to countless Indians, not even the familiar silhouette in the mindscapes of our fields and streets.

How we have wounded ourselves in undertaking a journey that has cut us off from our roots, yet given us no future!No wonder the cow is laughing.

It laughs at us from street corners, as we sightlessly, unseeingly, drive past its forlorn figure so alien in our steel-and-chrome lives and in our air-conditioned sedans – but perhaps it sheds a tear too (if only we were able to look a little closer).

It laughs at us when we go in fear of mad cow disease, because, of course, it is mankind that has gone mad, not the cow – but it leaches blood, not milk, when herds are hastily consigned to abattoirs to feed our bloodlust (yet we refuse to hear its lows of pain).

It laughs at us when the poison we inject into her udders turns into poison with which we feed our children – even though it has starved its calves (but milk is now pasteurised, so the sacrifice goes unrecognised).

And it laughs at us when our designer totes and pumps and bags in the softest calf leather come at price tags that would keep an entire family fed for a whole year, but at our gates we ignore her pus and boils and injuries inflicted by our carelessness – the pain she can forgive, but the abandonment might take a little longer.

And so the mad cow laughs, and we are oblivious even of the laughter. Our cheeses are brie or blue, our milk is toned, our yoghurt flavoured, our margarine needs advertising, our leather is beaten and branded, and perhaps we might need geographical identification for the long-horned Brindavan cow, her eyes so beautiful, you could fall in love with them – if you had but the patience to look.

And the cow laughs some more because she will be avenged. As she breathes the air of betrayal and exploitation, she swishes her tail and turns her back and looks into the far void… Does she see a future where she is relevant and loved once more, or another, darker world where mankind sees past her because it can no longer find her?

Is there pastoral bliss or ignominy in the calendar of its future, a time when she will exist amidst reverence, or go extinct amidst apocalypse? Will Krishna dance any more on the hood of the serpent, or turn blue from the poison in her udders?
Who, then, will have the last laugh?


Mr. Kishore Singh