Gerald D'Cunha

    “The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.” Charles De Gaulle T hapa is a young security guard in our Colony (where my classes are situated). A Nepali, he lives in a small shelter provided to him by the Society. As he is an in-house guard, almost every person in the Colony knows him… That includes every dog living here, too. Our Colony has several members from the dog family. My heart doesn’t allow me to call them ‘street dogs’, or ‘homeless dogs’. For, our Colony is their home… They live under the parked cars, rest over the benches, play with each other in our open spaces… And, above all, they serve us as additional security-guards alongside Thapa and his associates. Thapa carries in his hand a sturdy stick; dogs rally behind him. There is a fine bonding between him and the canines. He has given a name for each one of them… This morning, I was walking behind Thapa. As usual, a couple of dogs walked by his sides, regularly playing with h...

  “Not all friends know they have lost you.” Joyce Rachelle   S o, today is the ‘Friendship Day’. I am not going to greet my best friends – ‘A Happy Friendship Day, dost ’. Nor I am going to get   greetings from them. Frankly, like you, I, too, have a very, very few friends who have been there in all weathers – in good times and bad times. As we all know, we do not need to go singing along the village streets – “Yeh dosti, hum kabhi nahi thodenge’… Kabhi nahi thodenge? Come on! Life is real, not reel. In real life, Gandhis and Bachchans breakaway… Amitabh Bachchan, Amar Singh and Anil Ambani can never declare to the world: “Khana peena saath hai/Marna jeena saath hai/Saari zindagi” Come on friend, let’s be real! I have had plenty of friends through out my 63 years of life. Like you, a few – very, very few – have been around in good weathers and bad weathers, both. If I express by bitterness over many of my friends not being around – and call them ‘fair-weath...