Dunkirk: Nolan walks further down the wrong path

In Dunkirk, Nolan falls for the same trap that ensnared him in Interstellar – that Zimmerman’s background score is a substitute for dialogues, and cinematographic grandeur, confounding nonlinearity and Bollywood-like heroism are substitutes for good old character development. In cinema, dialogue and character development still make for the compass, and technological shenanigans only for the oars. Clearly, Nolan’s beliefs have changed since the days of Following, Memento, The Prestige and The Dark Knight. While Dunkirk thankfully stops short of Interstellar’s meme-worthy sappiness and grandeur, it does have fuel-less planes shooting potent adversaries out of the sky. If grandeur and victory of good over evil were the criteria, only the hypocritical would admire Dunkirk while trashing Bahubali.

Besides the notion that it’s Nolan’s best work, the biggest misconception about Dunkirk is that it’s a war movie. That’s wrong for two reasons – Dunkirk doesn’t focus on war beyond its facade of guns and warplanes, and moreover, it’s hardly a movie. A movie is an on-screen narrative that begins at one point and ends at another – and sometimes at the same in case of gems such as Pulp Fiction - passing through several points during the course of its journey. Dunkirk eschews all attempts at a narrative. It just teeters at one spot like a drunkard. Wonder whether D(r)unkirk would be a more fitting name. In mathematical parlance, Dunkirk is not a flow but a stock; a stock of numerous, unconnected images that run past the viewer’s eyes in Nolan’s signature, though now tiresome, nonlinear fashion one after the other, with a very predictable attempt at the end to link them all together.

Dunkirk begins coherently by focusing on one desperate soldier, a Frenchman, who violates orders to join ranks with the fleeing British army. Except for the non-sequitur, awkward shot of the man taking a dump on the beach, one would think fleshing out this narrative would have made for a great movie, bringing out the travails of soldiers trapped in a merciless war. Sadly, it soon collapses into multiple threads – a dog fight, a bunch of British civilians ferrying to Dunkirk to take back their soldiers, and the original one of the French soldier – each of which is reduced to nothing but the stock of images referred above.

Sure, some of these images are worth gaping at, and to those who are easily impressed, Nolan will remain the most useful investment of their movie budget. The scene depicting a German bomber’s attack on a British minesweeper ship, and another of soldiers trapped underwater while the surface is set ablaze by oil, are some of the greatest sensory treats ever. Certain others – one, a soldier killing himself by sailing into the waves, and two, hundreds of British civilian boats reaching the shores of Dunkirk in a heart-swelling display of true patriotism - could have been made much more powerful but feel half-baked due to Nolan’s rush to distort time and replace individuals with larger-than-life, mind-boggling events. For the most part, Zimmerman’s persistently edge-of-the-seat background score also seems out of sync with what happens on screen.

In all fairness though, Nolan must be commended for historical accuracy – the Stucka dive bomber makes its characteristic whistling noise while diving down, and original models of warships and planes have been used wherever possible. The only noticeable departure from real events is the yellow-coloured nose of the German planes (in reality, this happened after Dunkirk evacuation was over), though that was done only to allow clear distinction for the viewer. Unfortunately though, such eye for detail is lost on all but the WWII-obsessed viewers.

In Dunkirk, Nolan has come a long way from his initial days of making tiny movies focused on a handful of characters. There are fighter planes, naval destroyers, U-boats, and phantasmagoric imagery. Sadly, all this has come at the expense of characters. I miss the Nolan of yore.

Men are finished

A few weeks back I watched an online debate on the topic “Men are finished”. It’s interesting that we’re having this debate at all. After all, men still overwhelmingly dominate politics, science, sports, even restaurant kitchens. Naturally, I dismissed the motion as absurd.

I was wrong.

Lately, I spent eight consecutive days trekking in the Himalayas with twenty strangers, sans internet. 15 of those strangers were men. This was one of the few times when I was forced to flock with birds of another feather. And man, of an entirely different feather they were.

While I am all for female equality and for shattering the glass ceiling imposed largely by men, I will never understand the “pride in being led by women”, as a friend described the situation where two women were walking ahead of the men. I will also never understand why a guy would spontaneously break into garba (which autocorrects to garbage) surrounded only by men in the middle of a cold night, and not spare them of even the gayest of its moves. Again, why would a guy dismiss as “a bit harsh” my confronting possibly the worst trek leader on planet earth, and give him the “benefit of doubt”, or, for that matter, be content with sipping watery tea simply because it’s “something warm” (why not drink piss instead)?

I have written extensively about the perils of political correctness, but this trip was an eye-opener even for me. The sample size should suffice, for all but one man behaved in this manner, and they belonged to varied socio-economic, demographic and geographic backgrounds. The younger the lot, the stronger the grip of PC. The stronger the grip of PC, the more emasculated the men. I suspect it also has something to do with the income group. As Manu Joseph put it in his novel Serious Men, “These days, men live like men only in the homes of the poor”. There’s no shame in being sensitive and living in a world where women do better, but there’s no pride in not calling a spade a spade and inviting subordination.

Men are not yet finished, but the process is underway. We won’t lose our dicks, but we’ll lose our defining traits.

The photo below captures what I want to say.

A letter to Trinity

Dear Trinity,

I couldn’t utter a word for a full minute after papa informed me on the phone that you were gone. He couldn’t say much either, except that you were no more. I knew you were on the brink when I saw you last. But I could only break my silence with a quivering ‘how come?’

In those thirteen years, we transitioned together – me, from adolescence to adulthood; you, from infancy to dust. In one lifetime, I could outlive you seven times. Boon or bane?

I never told you this and you never asked, but your name, Trinity, was inspired by The Matrix. There was considerable opposition to it since people thought it would be tough for you to grasp, but they were wrong. You leapt all the way up to my face, sometimes even defeating my maneuvers to evade your prying tongue, whenever I called out to you. I wonder where you got all that energy from, for you were always wafer thin. While you were not stupendous at spotting the ball once it was lost (remember how you made me do the fetching every time that happened?), that nose of yours sure did a great job of picking out the well-camouflaged pieces of chicken in your big bowl of food, and leaving the rest behind. You’re probably unaware of the joke, but after all our attempts to make you eat failed, we blamed it on your figure-consciousness. Was there an element of truth to that? I hope not, because you’d grown terribly weak in later years.

You were thin, yes, but none could question your agility and speed. Hey, you often outran the much stronger Alex when the three of us played fetch-the-ball! Wait, did you ever stop to consider that he let you win? Ok, maybe not always. But he did love you too much to see you lose too often, and this despite the fact that you were always more curious about the contents in his bowl of food than your own. After all, you gave birth to the only offspring he ever had, nine of them, all in one go. It’s a good thing you weren’t human, for they often give up on their wives if they birth all daughters. I think you were far too dazed to notice that I pulled each one of your kids out of your body with my own hands. Rather messy day, that. I hope you never got to know that one of them didn’t survive. Don’t worry, we gave her an honourable burial in the park right in front of the house. Yes yes, that same park, of which you once chased out an unsuspecting stray while I was giving you a walk. Poor guy, why were you so disapproving of others of your kind? Coming back, I want to apologise to you for keeping you confined to that little room where you gave birth, for nearly two months. I could see you wanting to escape as the eight crawlers went all milky way on you, but I had little choice. But hey, as a one year old mother, you did a great job. The sad bit is that it made sure you stayed thin all your life.

Trinity (foreground) getting curious about Alex's bowl

You were about six weeks old when Papa and I brought you home, in 2004. You might be surprised to know that unlike your kind, humans carefully pick and choose the recipient(s) of their affection. It’s natural that you feel disappointed in me for not recalling precisely why I picked you from a large group, but I did like the way you circled around my feet and licked them.

Do you remember your first meeting with Alex, the four year old big guy already at home, when we let your nose and his do the talking from across the net door that you later tore apart? That was because we were terribly afraid of what he would do to you, only we were fearing for the wrong dog. Soon you were making us run after you, trying to stop you from jumping up to bite his nose, placed about two feet higher than your mouth.

Gosh, you never let that pattern reverse for the next eight years you and Alex were together, did you? And you didn’t even need to jump to bite him after the first few months. I can probably understand the fun in dominating one’s partner, but why did you get so jealous at his being called ‘good dog’ or being patted on the head? Intervening forcefully to divert attention towards yourself to steal the mantle of ‘good dog’ wasn’t the best strategy, you know. Poor guy, except visibly seeking solitude at times, he loved you too much to complain. Despite everything, I know you did too, for you never recovered from the shock of his death on March 9, 2012.

Trinity refusing to let go of the ball, as always

Trinity (left) and Alex (right); Trinity is the one being chided but it's Alex who seems sorry as she wags her tail

The two of you made for an odd couple. While he was ferocious and uncouth - his love for sampling human blood of varying delights and the habit of making a show of nature’s calls, put us through considerable heartburn and embarrassment - you never bit a soul and your cat-like discretion in potty matters was often admired by the three homo sapiens in the family during secretive, closed-door deliberations about the two of you (whenever we found out you were eavesdropping we changed the subject to stop you from gloating about it to Alex). We never did figure out, however, the switching of personalities between the two of you when it came to animals. While Alex floundered with the mice in the kitchen, you made sure the cheese always stayed protected. Mummy confirms that in the court of mice, you would be tried for over 100 brutal murders. But hey, I am not scared for you because I know you’d kill them all before they could sentence you. 

Know the reason why I preferred playing fetch-the-ball with Alex? Because while he let go of the ball as soon as he got back to me after fetching it, the only way of making you do so was to poke a finger in your ear. Also, even as he saluted every time he was asked to do so, why did you simply collapse on the ground and play dead?!

             Alex, on being asked to salute

Trinity, on being asked to do the same

And of course, of course you know damn well what your homo sapiens remember you most for - that incessant, inexplicable wailing which was the most endearing, irritating and confusing thing about you all at once. I know it was your love for us that made you whip up a storm of cries as soon as you were left alone, but sometimes, waking up your homo sapiens groggy-eyed in the middle of the night doesn’t exactly win you their love, you know. Are you even aware of the flak I got from mummy-papa for letting you lick my face, my bribe for shutting you up?

I hope you realise that the only time papa raised his hand on you, towards the end of your life, was a desperate attempt to stop you from waking up the neighbours. He deeply regrets it now, realising that the terminal decline and paralysis you struggled with in your later years had increased your craving for us. The only thing he regrets more is that none of your three homo sapiens was around you in your final moments, to hold you tight as your breathing slowed on the night of May 23. We could never think about putting you to sleep, but papa said, and I agreed, that what happened was for the best. He wondered whether you’d have fought to live longer had someone been around. That broke my heart, the last I saw you was on April 16. If it’s any consolation, we did sit beside you after you were gone. Although I don’t believe that the dead look down, if it’s true, I hope it made you wag your tail. And if there’s really a world for the dead, that ball we buried alongside you will make sure you, Alex and I have something to keep ourselves busy with, when I join the two of you there.

Trinity’s resting place

It took your death, Trinity, more than five years after Alex’s, for me to muster the courage to have another look at the captured moments of either of you. It’s true what they say about a man with nothing to lose - with your departure, the ‘Alex-Trinity’ era of my home, my family and my life is well and truly over. While I was unable to take another look at Alex’s motionless body lying in the veranda on the morning of his death, I spent considerable time next to yours, caressing you. To borrow a line from my favourite TV series, loving the two of you has been the most profound, intense and painful experience of my life, almost too much to bear. 

Each day I died a bit thinking you'd leave me behind, and now that you have, I feel liberated. The only thing that scares me is that, with my death, your memories will be gone forever too. Hopefully this tiny space will prove me wrong even far in the future, as someone, somewhere will keep stumbling upon it.

Yours,

Whatever you called me

Rekindling My Love for Shooting

For non-contraband civilian folk who didn’t have the pleasure of being born in US of A, laying hands upon guns is usually the stuff of dreams, rarely ever realised. Since obtaining a license in India is near-impossible, getting experience with shooting usually requires engagement with state authorities such as the police/army, and man, which middle class Indian wants that?!

Thanks to my current job, I am one of the state authorities. Albeit strictly civilian, I do get chances to interact with the police. Last week, during a conversation with a senior police officer, the subject of Indian police’s prowess in shooting came up. Whenever the topic of shooting is broached, I rarely forget to boast about the .22 rifle district-level championship I won as a kid. This time, though, neither was the topic changed nor the eyes rolled. Instead, I was extended an offer to rekindle my love for shooting at a police firing range.

I was there the very next morning. The office accompanying me boasted about the array of arsenal being used for training that day - pistols and revolvers, carbines, AK-47s, Self-Loading Rifle (SLR), British-era 3NOT3 rifles, and Light Machine Guns (LMGs). I was in disbelief at the mention of that last weapon - LMGs and pot bellies go together only in writing.

To prove me wrong, he took me to the sight where the guns were carefully lined up next to one another. Indeed, the LMG was there. None of the guns was loaded, but next to each lay its bullets. The bullets of the British-era 3NOT3 were perhaps longer than even those of the LMG. Though I’ve fired revolvers previously, they seemed tiny to me, almost innocuous. The myth was quickly dispelled on being informed that a single shot could burst open two skulls lined up one behind the other, from a 50 metre range. With the officer’s permission, I picked up each and every gun, and found out that the LMG is not so L, after all.

From about 100 metres away, the roar of LMGs and the crackling sounds of other guns rang in my ears. Guns of different types going off one after the other lent the range the aura of a mini battlefield. The air was heavy with the smell of gunpowder and hot iron. The adrenaline was running thick, yes, but I’d be lying if I denied the unmistakable trepidation within.

I first took a crack at the now-obsolete 3NOT3. After a brief demo, I loaded a single bullet, locked it by pushing the lever ahead, placed my slightly shaky left hand firmly under the barrel, secured the butt of the rifle on my right shoulder, shut the left eye and looked at the target with the right keeping it in line with the two little pointers on the gun, and placed the index finger of the right hand lightly on the trigger. Then, I steadied my breath – it’s necessary to hit the target. I felt a jolt on my right shoulder. Before I could open my left eye, I saw a puff of dust rise up behind the target. The bullet had covered the more than 200 metre distance before my ear could register the first of the many deafening shots that would soon numb it. The butterflies had died down. I smelt gunpowder from so up close after really long. I liked it. After 15 shots with the 3NOT3, I checked the target. For someone shooting after well over a decade, I’d done reasonably well. My left hand was in considerable pain and I could hear almost nothing, not even the LMGs in the vicinity. No wonder the weight of the rifle and the time taken to load each bullet have rendered it useless, except, of course, for Indian police.

I moved on to the revolver, the carbine, and soon on to the Kalashnikov. Though I didn’t get a crack at the LMG, the AK was a different experience altogether. It is extremely lightweight and maneuverable, almost like a toy, yet gives a feeling far more manly than the 3NOT3, SLR, carbine, or the revolver. Not for nothing is it the most lethal weapon on the planet - the weapon of choice for many armies and almost all terrorists. I shot several rounds in the semi-automatic/repeat fire mode, wherein each squeeze of the trigger dispatches a solitary messenger of death. Finally, I shot 5 rounds in the automatic/burst mode, the one used for mass killings. Firing 5 bullets with a single squeeze was exhilarating and much easier than I’d imagined, and I wanted to go for a higher number, but was denied permission. I have no regrets whatsoever. Shooting an AK-47 is perhaps best compared to making love to a beautiful woman, for the touch, smell and sound of both intoxicate a man like nothing else can.

While shooting the AK - the only photo of me at the range, and the right one. The policeman is trying to prevent the shells from going astray

The insignia of rifle butts on my right shoulder

While walking off the range, the AK in my hand, I spotted some animals, mainly cows, far away. They looked tiny. For a fleeting second I thought – could my Kalashnikov get to them? Given my love for animals, it was a scary thought. Surely, it wasn’t entirely voluntary. No wonder little children can be made to kill with this beautiful beast.

I think I have a few trips to the range lined up.

Review of Jon Krakauer's Under The Banner of Heaven

Originally written for Goodreads, reproduced below:

I’d have easily given it 5, had it been Krakauer’s first novel I read. But that happened to be Into Thin Air – one of the few truly deserving of 5 stars - so this one has to settle for 4, owing largely to tedious details of the history of Mormonism that could have been easily avoided.

The book starts off with an electric shock to the brains of those who consider US as the last bastion of law and order in modern times. The Fundamentalist Mormon theocracies that dominate parts of Northwestern US and Canada are perhaps worse than Saudi Arabia, where women are treated as sex slaves, underage marriages and polygamy are rampant, and asking questions is a heresy.

But the book is far from a mere crime thriller, or a critique of Fundamentalist Mormonism for that matter. It's a brilliant, wholesome commentary on the nature of religion itself.

In the postscript, Krakauer says, “those who write about religion owe it to their readers to come clean about their own theological frame of reference”, so here’s mine – I am an atheist, and I firmly believe all religions are basically tools of mind control to allow its founders/leaders to exercise unencumbered authority over their followers.

Now that I have confessed to my confirmation bias, I will go ahead with the main bit of the review.

Reading about the mindless horrors committed by Lafferty Brothers – the near-decapitation of a young mother and her 15 month old daughter - at apparently the commandment of god, it’s natural to presume they were nothing but two mentally deranged individuals whose crime should be treated similar to that of another psychopathic murderer, without maligning Mormonism, or any other religion, on its pretext.

However, like a great music composition, this book reaches its crescendo towards the very end, when it establishes conclusively – by going into painstaking details of the trials of Lafferty Brothers – that these were two otherwise perfectly sane individuals who suffered from unwavering faith in their religion and the infallibility of their own actions. More worryingly, by deftly weaving together the story of Lafferty Brothers and that of the founders of Mormonism, Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, the readers are informed that the brothers shared these traits with the two founders, and derived complete justification for their most heinous actions from them. Such justification, given the call for “blood atonement” given by the founders as well as their complete disregard for laws of man in favour of laws of god, is only logical.

Perhaps Fundamentalist Mormonism is especially bad - its stalwarts rape their own minor daughters and take tens of wives - but an intelligent reader should be able to make the leap from the story of Lafferty Brothers to religion in general, and from Smith and Young to founders of all religions – ultimately, all religions are forms of mind control and all founders were deeply narcissistic individuals who were undoubtedly virtuous in some ways but, “at need a great liar and a great scoundrel” (words, not used by Krakauer, to describe Young) who were not afraid to lie, maim, kill and rape to establish their version of truth as the only valid one. At the risk of being labelled a bigot, I’d say this is most true of Abrahamic religions and their founders. In their narcissism, the founders of religions shared a trait also found in Hitler, Osama, Caesar, Napoleon, and indeed al-Baghdadi (founder of ISIS) – all great leaders cum murderers in history.

The unfortunate bit is that the control of religion over human psyche, despite millennia of scientific progress, has hardly loosened. If there was Joseph Smith then, there is Donald Trump now – an example of an individual who suffers from the same unabashed narcissism and an entrenched sense of infallibility. If Smith was a prophet, Trump is a demigod. The names change, the cycle perpetuates. Animal Farm isn’t one of the best books ever for no reason.

In Into Thin Air, Krakauer erred in blaming Boukreev for loss of lives, so I was open to reading logical rebuttals to this book by Mormons. Sadly, as expected, they consist of nothing but ad hominem attacks on the author, and laughable reiterations of their belief in Mormonism being the “one true faith”. If anything, they only strengthen my belief in the evil inherent to religion.  

The Doors

At the beginning, it was a big room full of people. My school friends, colony friends, and cousins, lots of cousins. Those in the room were mostly my age, though I could spot my elder cousins too. And oh, mummy-papa. They were always around.

Most people in the room were chatty and sociable. Not all of them talked among each other, but almost everyone talked with me. I liked it. I was too busy with friends and cousins to spend much time with mummy-papa, though from the corner of my eye I always saw them smiling beatifically at me. Only a very few people, along the fringes of the room, didn’t talk to me, though some of them did talk to mummy-papa. I didn’t care much about those people.

Everyone in the room always walked, usually in a straight line. I didn’t mind it because I walked with them. Sometimes I would pause to spend time with some of them; they would pause too, but we found ourselves walking again, I had no clue why.

Every now and then I came upon a closed door. I was apprehensive of opening it, but found myself opening it anyway, I had no clue why. Walking through a door meant entering a new, though similar, room. It wasn’t so bad because most of the people around me walked through the same door that I did, so we kept seeing each other in the new room. Some people, though, did not. In case they walked through a different door, I never saw them again, I had no clue why. This usually happened with my school friends. My cousins and mummy-papa always queued up behind me to walk through the same door.

Sometimes after walking through a door, I saw unknown faces entering the new room through other doors that opened into it. Then, the unknown faces walked with me - they also became school friends. I liked it.

One day, I noticed someone who had been walking with me since the beginning was missing. I turned around and ran to the door I had come through to go back to the previous room. Maybe he was languishing at the end of the queue, and someone had shut the door. I tried really hard but the door never unlocked, I had no clue why. Soon, I found myself walking towards the next room.

After walking through hundreds of doors, I came upon another. As was usual, I waited for others to queue up behind me. But no one did. I looked around and saw everyone standing against a door of their own. Each and every one. I had no clue why. I tried really hard to not open the door, but found myself opening it anyway, I had no clue why.

Opening this door put me in an unusually big room. I saw uncountable new faces walking into it through still more uncountable doors. I looked around but I could see none of the old faces, only the new ones. I was scared. I ran back to the door and saw mummy-papa standing there. They were not walking with me but their presence in the same room was comforting. Somehow they’d managed to sneak in through the door when I was urging my friends and cousins to do so, which they never did. I hugged mummy-papa tight and asked them about others. They said every one of them had entered an unusually big room of their own, called college. I wondered why they didn’t walk into my room, it was big enough to accommodate them. I didn’t try unlocking the door because I knew it wouldn’t yield.

Some of the new people in this unusually big room soon became chatty and sociable - they became college friends. I liked it. The new big room was also likeable because there were no doors to walk through here. There was a lot of walking alright, but sans doors. My favourite faces were always visible, walking with me. Sometimes some of them turned less chatty, but they kept walking with me. The dreaded memory of walking through the last door was now distant.

While walking through this big room I was also bombarded with a host of old faces that had gone missing a long time back. They entered through blue-coloured “f”-shaped doors. I never cared much about them.

The best part about the new room was the discovery of hidden doors that lay off the walking path. Passing through them allowed me to enter another, smaller room where some of my old favourite faces became visible again. This place had a nice smell, I called it home. They told me they’d found secret doors in unusually big rooms of their own.

Mummy-papa were the only ones present in both the rooms, though I talked much more with them in the smaller one. Out there in the bigger one, I only saw them from the corner of my eye – smiling beatifically at me, as always. I sometimes wanted to spend more time in the smaller room, but I found myself walking back to the door that opened into the bigger room, I had no clue why. With time, however, I discovered that some of the old faces in the smaller room had become blurred or invisible, I had no clue why.

One day, my long walk in the big room was abruptly interrupted by a door. Trying to keep out memories of the previous door, I shut my eyes and desperately hoped for others to queue up behind me. But no one did. I looked around and saw everyone standing against a door of their own. Each and every one. For the first time, I had a clue why. Then, mummy-papa quietly queued up behind me. This time, I didn’t let them go unnoticed. Only they walked through this door with me, no one else. Not even one.

The new room that I walked into was much smaller than the previous one. I knew no one here and far fewer unknown faces entered it. It smelt bad, I called it workplace. Some of them were good, but it wasn’t the same as any of the previous rooms. I didn’t like it. To my delight I found that hidden doors to home still existed, but it was much harder to walk through them, and the faces on the other side had become ever more blurred and diminished.

I continue to walk through doors, or more accurately, somnambulate through them, for there’s hardly a familiar face to be left behind anymore. Well, mummy-papa are still around, but their presence grows stronger and clearer by the day.

I do secretly wish, though, for a really long walk in the opposite direction.

Animal Euthanasia - Mercy or Murder?

I signed a death warrant today. My first. She was barely a month old.

She was the feeblest of the six siblings born in my office premises. For the past few days, I’d been feeding her milk and bread. The results had been encouraging. Her bulging, big black eyes no more threatened to pop out of their socket. She had grown increasingly competitive against the siblings for her mother’s milk. Her gait had progressed from tottering to walking on the cobble path where she was born. In short, she’d gone from looking like a genetically-altered mouse gone wrong, to a real puppy. The increased pace of walking meant I had to often run after her to protect her from the vehicles passing by. I didn’t mind doing it, though; those tiny paws never took her far and her lighter-than-feather, mud-stained white body fitted in the length of my palm. The wagging of the thin, short tail whenever I picked her up was an added incentive.

Today I found her on the cobble path - prostrate on her right side, shaking uncontrollably. Her big eyes were shut tight and there were yellow white stains on the mouth, probably from dried up vomit and froth. A guy sitting nearby said nonchalantly that he’d been observing her in that state for over half an hour – “kisi ne gaadi chadha di hogi.” But I knew she hadn’t been run over. She wasn’t squealing at all and there were no injury marks.

In the car, she kept sneaking underneath the seat where I sat. At the hospital I had to drag her out by the tail when the lure of biscuits and a pat on the head proved futile. This time, though, the tail didn’t wag as she remained motionless in my arms. Once inside the hospital, her movements were completely incoherent – she was crouching, darting backwards more than forwards, and falling over repeatedly. The only moment of sanity was when she snuck into the V made by my shoes while I was standing, speaking to the doctor. I have a picture of the moment, but I will avoid putting it here.

The doctor said she didn’t have more than a week to live. It would be a gruesome death. Uncontrollable seizures, incoherent actions, and frothing at the mouth were symptoms of the last stage of distemper – a brutal canine killer.

The doctor and I agreed that euthanasia was the best option. Taking her back would infect the entire family. Leaving her anywhere else would mean death, either from the disease, or from causes ranging from starvation to a mauling by other dogs.

As a last ditch attempt to keep her alive, I took her to a dog-friendly NGO. But they refused to keep her because she would infect every other dog they had. Had she been human she’d have felt pretty unwanted right about then. Maybe she felt it anyway.

They brought a piece of paper with the words “PTS” scribbled on it, and asked for my consent, so that she could be Put To Sleep. That’s when I signed her death warrant.

To be honest, it turned out far easier for me than I imagined. Her condition checked all the boxes that justify euthanasia. Immeasurable suffering – check; imminent death – check; absence of caretakers – check.

In retrospect, it wasn’t. If it were, I’d have held her in my arms till her very last moment, making her feel wanted – to the extent possible – as humans killed her without her knowledge. I would have been there to calm her down as she flinched for the last time at the feeling of something sharp poking her. I didn’t do that. Instead, I left her to her fate after signing her death warrant. Being by her side would have been too much to bear, though I did stress upon them, twice, that she be given a painless death.

That humans treat non-humans as inferior comes as no surprise, but to think human euthanasia is allowed in very few jurisdictions - strictly with prior consent of the patient, except in the rarest of rare cases - while animal euthanasia is rampant in every corner of the world must be disturbing at least to some. The reasoning is that since animals, or their families, can’t give consent – at least not in the form humans would understand – we should choose on their behalf given our higher intelligence.

The above reasoning is on morally shaky ground, for it neglects the fact that animals can’t consent because they simply won’t consent - for lack of intelligence or otherwise – to being killed. They would much rather rot to death than kill themselves. This is apparent from the fact that animals never commit suicide, or kill one of their own in deep suffering. Whatever little evidence exists in favour of this is far from conclusive. Humans, on the other hand, commit suicide by the lakhs every year. So, while humans might want to end their lives under certain circumstances, animals simply don’t.

Let’s think of some humans who would never want to kill themselves, no matter how wretched their lives – mentally challenged? babies? Hmm, we don’t call putting them to sleep ‘euthanasia’. We call it murder. Humans murder uncountable animals for entertainment, food, money, and sometimes because they’re ugly or boring, so why shy away from calling this particular act, murder?

The reason has to do with keeping our conscience clear. Some humans are kinder than others - just enough to not be able to live with an animal’s blood on their hands, but not enough to care for it when it’s terminally-ill. In the context of animals, PTS/euthanasia are clever terms invented by this class of humans.

I, of course, am one of them. Given that distemper doesn’t affect humans, it was perfectly possible for me to take the puppy back to my place and care for her till her last day. But that would have taken time away from writing this piece, or reading a book, or a morning run. To avoid the trouble, I chose to murder, oops, euthanize her, and convinced myself that I chose the best for her, not for myself. My not holding her tight while she died confirms this self-deception – doing so would have made the murder all too real. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that euthanasia and euphemism share the first two letters.

Though I supported Aruna Shanbaug’s euthanasia back when the case was being heard, I am now glad that the SC didn’t buckle down. The woman was comatose and couldn’t have consented. If in future we do euthanize someone without their consent, let’s all just accept that we were too bored with taking care of them, or with spending our money/taxes on them.

I went back to the office after murdering her. The mother was sniffing around, probably looking for her daughter who was whisked away and later murdered by a group of conspiring humans, without her knowledge. The siblings were running after the mother to catch hold of her dangling breasts, blithely delighted that there was now one less competitor.