6/ 100 Bread Slice Dog
Sometimes, in an effort to be kind you actually create more problems. Hopefully you might notice the adverse effects of your good intentions and alter your practice, but then it is also quite likely that you will continue on, ignoring the blindingly obvious.
Slightly north of the city of Jaipur is the huge manmade Man Sagar lake. Named after Raja Man Singh, the then ruler of Amer, who constructed it in 1610 by damming the Dravyavati river. Sitting in the middle of the lake is the half-sunken Jal Mahal palace and tourists and locals alike flock here to see this magnificent spectacle.
A whole industry has sprung up to cater for the thousands of visitors who stand on the ramshackle pavement to look out across the water each day. There are food and drinks stalls lining the roadside, serving you anything as long as you can fry it. There are men walking around with luridly-bright sticks of candy floss weaving between hundreds of groups of people using the palace as a backdrop for their endless selfies. Then there are people selling food for something else that really intrigued us, because in the lake are fish.
The Hindu people believe strongly in karma and this often manifests itself as acts of kindness involving feeding animals. At some point someone must have started tossing a few crumbs into the lake to feed the large fish that lazily floated by the water’s edge. Perhaps they felt good about it. After all, feeding fish is thought to help with such things as pacifying Negative Planets, helping departed souls and, perhaps most encouragingly, wealth and prosperity.
The two dogs in today’s photograph had claimed this particular plastic covered patch as their own and were there outside our apartment, in this exact configuration, every one of the six days we spent in Jaipur. Like the tides, the litter pile would grow throughout the day and night and the dogs rose and fell with it, adjusting the little depressions they slept in as they went.
I suppose over time more and more people started throwing food into the lake (rather than the starving mouths of their fellow people) to get their own slice of good karma. The result of this is that today there is almost more bread than water. The lake is filled with toxic blue-green algae, the weed is choking the lake and the fish are dying. In the boat photograph above the men are rowing along the edge of the water to scoop them out.
People actually make bread dough on the floor by the lake where it is chopped into grape-sized pieces and sold to visitors as offerings to the fish (see below). You can also buy slices of your best white sliced loaf just to chuck into the soup with everyone else’s uneaten offerings.
I can’t help but wonder at what point people will start to take notice that they are killing the very things that they are trying to extract some positive energy from?
