GOLFIE

This blog is not my story. It is kind of a second-hand story, for it has been taken from Other Half’s repertoire of life experiences.
Two days back he returned from his evening round of golf and announced to me, “By Jove, Golfie has really grown!!!” The delight in his voice spilled over onto his smile and eyes shining, he remarked, “He is a now a big strapping fella, full of health and life…”
So then, this story is actually about Golfie. And his saviour, Sandy Boy. First let me start with Golfie and in due course, the story will on its own, run into Sandy Boy.

Golfie is this stray Indie dog, muddy brown in colour; and when I had happened to meet him a few months back, he was a just a toddler- a scrawny little thing with ribs sticking out from his emaciated frame and a thin, almost hairless tail. But in spite of his poor health, he was a friendly little fellow with a furiously wagging tail and adoration of the entire human race dancing in his great liquid eyes. He was still recovering from his illness and hence the scrawny look but everything about him shouted that he would soon recover.

Golfie had been discovered about a month previously, a malnourished decrepit little mongrel pup dying under a shrub on the Golf course by Other Half and his three golf buddies. It had looked like the dreaded Parvo viral diarrhoea to Other Half and he had declared that the pup would surely succumb soon if not treated. It was then, as if on a whim, Sandy Boy had announced: I will take the pup with me. Everyone was enormously surprised and to explain why, I must tell you a little about Sandy Boy.

Sandy Boy is the archetypal soldier: tall, sturdy, gruff, dispassionate. And he disliked dogs wholeheartedly. He was not scared of them but he did not like them. At all. But for some inexplicable reason, that crucial day he offered to adopt that dying pup and nurse it back to health. As they say, God does move in mysterious ways.

Once adopted the little dog had to be given a name and what was more apt for he who was found on the Golf Course than “Golfie”. So Golfie was christened ‘Golfie’ and he recovered from that dreaded parvo to bloom into a beautiful Indie under Sandy Boy’s care.

Golfie’s little story with its happy ending makes me think: compassion is the most precious and the most beautiful of all human emotions. I rate it even higher than love, for love has its own agenda that is not always selfless. Compassion on the contrary, is the purest form of altruism and hence, automatically superior. It is the emotion that defines the humanity of Homo sapiens and ensures that, in spite of all the bad around us, the world still goes on.