76/ 100 Bullet

This is Bullet, and he has made a mistake.

So I am back home in Scotland again. India was an absolute delight and I have a hard drive full of new photographs of Indian dogs along with the colours and textures that make the richness of life there so irresistible to travellers.

If you’ve been following along with my 100 Dogs of India project you will know that I made it to day 75 with my photographs from our previous three visits to India in 2018, 2019 and 2025 and I was very excited to complete my project with images from this most recent trip.

At the end of post 75 I set out my goals and, even though I say so myself, I am quite happy to have managed to achieve all but one of them quite well.

Goal 1: Take notes. I always think I will remember stuff, then I forget ✔️

Goal 2: Try and make more photographs of dogs as they interact with people ✔️

Goal 3: Speak much more to people to find out how they live alongside the dogs ✔️

Goal 4: Avoid the giardia ❌ (for some reason they really love me)

The first problem a photographer has to solve when faced with a large amount of material is where to begin. Do you just pluck images from the set of 2500 images willy-nilly, or work through them chronologically and methodically? This time I decided to just begin with the very last dog I photographed – Bullet.

Goal 3 was about trying to find out a little bit more about each dog, how they lived alongside people and how the people lived alongside them. Certainly I can, and do, watch their behaviour for hours and see how they live but I wanted to dig a bit deeper. On this trip I made a point of asking people if the dog was theirs, who owned it, who fed it and, most interestingly, did it have a name? Up until this point in my project there was only one name that I knew of and you can read about Kalu here

We first saw the sandy-coloured dog in the photograph above running around, barking at the trees and scaring shoppers in the uber-cool Hauz Khas Village. The village is a small cluster of boutiques, European-style cafes, bookshops and tattoo parlours next to Hauz Khas Deer Park in the south of New Delhi. The entire place seemed to be populated by cool students who were impressing their dates with fancy cakes and selfies in front of shops selling clothes that cost half a month’s wages.

Most people could see that the dog wasn’t going to bother them as he was clearly fixated on doing whatever it was he had taken a fancy to, but other folk were pretty terrified by this hefty beast rampaging up and down the narrow lanes beside the record shops and piercing studios.

He popped into a pottery studio while we were there so I took the opportunity to ask the chap working behind a desk whether he knew anything about this very vocal pup. He told us that he wasn’t owned by anybody in particular and that he simply belongs to the village itself. Everyone feeds him and keeps an eye on him whilst, in return, he does his best to protect them from his nemesis – the mischievous monkeys. During his monkey-chasing he is known to run about a lot and, as a result, he had been given the name Bullet.

When I made the photograph above Bullet had, for reasons known only to him, pushed open a glass door to a tattoo parlour and gone inside to bark at the rhesus macaques from behind a glass window. I took some photographs and then tried to help him leave but he wasn’t happy about that. He clearly wanted to get outside again, but he didn’t want me to stand and hold the door for him either. In the end I managed to prop the door open just enough, keeping myself well clear of his exit, to let him barge through and run off to chase the monkeys he didn’t know he would never catch.

Incidentally, my own dog Chip may not have monkeys to chase but his own personal enemies are the wood pigeons in our garden. Every single summer he will spend almost all of his time in the garden staring up at them where they are courting each other on the telephone wire that passes above.

Last year there was an accidental meeting of dog and bird and each seemed so surprised at the situation that they appeared to mutually agree to go their separate ways without incident. Would Bullet and a little monkey feel the same way if one accidentally dropped out of a tree into his path I wonder?