Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Volte-face

On a recent visit to Helsinki, a friend and I spotted a pigeon that was stranded on the pavement, near a shopping mall. Either it had forgotten how to fly or had been grounded by an injury. A couple of teenaged girls went over, knelt down and stroked the bird gently, struggling to hold back their tears.

Seeing this, my friend who is a passionate, and even fanatical, vegetarian commented, “These shameless Finns! They have absolutely no qualms or compunction whatsoever in slitting the throat of any reptile, bird, fish, rodent or mammal for food- from reindeer and boars to wild ducks and salmon . So, why all this phony fuss over a wounded pigeon? Who are they trying to fool? Why this hypocrisy!

“Fair observation”, I said, “but tell me, for a person whose avowed mission in life is to not harm animals, how come you are wearing a leather belt? Leather doesn’t exactly grow on trees?

“Ha, the belt? You ask me why I wear a leather belt. Otherwise my pants don’t stay up. That’s why”, he replied instantly, not even making eye contact with me.

6 comments:

A Motley Tunic said...

Something is wrong with your site feed. It is not updating after sep 16th.

Raj said...

Ha, I was wondering why Sowmya has not been visiting my blog ,of late.

I changed over to beta.blogger. perhaps this upset the RSS feeds?

Chitra said...

Well...this is how people 'justify' themselves...

dazedandconfused said...

yeah that's the way, show them the mirror...

Lalita said...

Possibly your changing to beta has some issues. I suddenly find you have been prolific and I have been remiss or my browser decided I need rehab from reading Raj and stopped refreshing.

Raj, please, please. Do close quotes, will you?

Escape.... Great Escape said...

maybe your attack on self rigtheousness caused RSS to malfunction...