The ambience is serene. An isle of tranquility – serendipity: Peering through the heavy morning mist blanketing the tree tops, I stand watching this small somnolent quaint real-life Malgudi rouse itself. Next door, beyond a moss lined half broken wall I hear the metallic squeak squeak of an ungreased pulley being wheeled. Standing half stooped, a withered old lady with frail forearms is cranking the rope that draws water from a derelict well. She pants, wheezes and huffs as the metal pot rises up the narrow abyss, filled with precious water. Laborious and energy sapping, she draws pot after pot, emptying each one into a small circular earthen hand-built dam around the bases of about half a dozen young banana trees. Her patient and painstaking effort is a lesson of sorts for the likes of me, always muttering and moaning over life and lot:

 A lone bent with age old woman, who rises with the sun just to make sure her tender saplings which may yield a few fruits at some far off future day, stay fecund: a standing example of determination, dedication and discipline, rare in parts of the world most of us come from, the concrete jungles of metros. Watering done, she surveys her ‘wards’ with her cataract-clouded eyes, smoothing a ruffled or curled up leaf here and patting down a loosened clod of clay there.

 A few hours later, the sun is bright and the sky is cobalt again – the fog has dissipated – a few state transport buses zoom past the only thoroughfare that links this back of beyond dwelling to the outside world. Children, little bonny girls traipse and skip past my window, with freshly scrubbed faces, thickly oiled braids – each crowned with a bunch of marigold or a string of jasmine. In un-ironed uniforms and rubber slippers: The future of India, the generation that will one day walk the moon or orbit Mars or design patent a new chip for Intel. Running behind this giggling bunch, despite desperate remonstrations of one of the kids, is a home bred mongrel – it insists on following her to school.

 In half an hour I will hear a gong, the school assembly bell – whence, the rural landscape, reverberate and echo to choral flood of strains of the National Anthem – rising to a crescendo as the singers sign off with Jaye hey, jaye, jaye, jaye hey….I’ve seen and observed this rural India ritual for a week now. No change, no alteration, no difference, like precision clockwork – life ticks-tocks on here.

 Just as I step back from my window, I hear a thud – a pregnant cow which was ambling by, pauses, spots the succulent emerald green leaves of freshly watered three-foot high banana saplings, to decide this is just the breakfast an expectant mamma moo needs. With deft ease it hops and heaves itself over the low broken wall of my neighbor with  thud to savor the young banana plants of the old granma, who not a few hours ago I had watched cooing and canoodling her 'infants'.

 'Shoo', I yelled, to no effect – 'Hey, hey, shoo, scat !!' Mrs.Cow couldn’t care less – her long bovine tongue swishes with ease around each long leaf: Chomp, chomp, chew, chomp. I was livid. Three out the five saplings were clean finished up to their bases – before I alerted Chetan, a teenage boy who was seconded by Ravi & Lakshmi, to assist me in maintaining this set up on an ad hoc basis. Quickly sizing the situation, Chetan leapt over the wall, picked up a stout stick lying on the ground and ran menacingly towards the ‘intruder’, making weird shriek-growls and scary guttural sounds – banging the stick with deafening din on the zinc sheet roof of the old lady for added sound effect. The theatrics and drama produced no palpable effect on the bovine specimen’s appetite or purpose, it continued to yank out the remaining leaves from the last of the plants.

 The din and racket saw the old woman, who quite agitated and raging by the goings on, shook her frail fist, muttering some very 'parliamentary' cuss words as she charged, stumbling towards the Chetan vs.Cow battle zone.

 Now, instead of herself joining Chetan in chasing off the ravenous ruminant, she waved her crooked index finger at boy’s nose, letting off a tandem of 'socially acceptable' swear words. Chetan beat a hasty retreat as she grabbed the stick from his hand and swished it like a fencer’s epee. He hied back to the safe retreat of our house, rattled and red faced.

 After regaining his breath, he told me the old lady was quite worked-up. 'How can you beat a cow eh? And a ‘basri’(carrying) at that, eh? Are you heartless or made of stone? Don’t you drink her milk? Does it come straight from heaven? It is my plants she ate, not yours……she needs to produce milk for her baby, not yours ……..now vamoose'. And vanish he did, in a trice.

 This event took place last weekend at Agumbe - a small wet sleepy hamlet atop none hairpin bends on the crest of the western ghats in Karnataka. The area has a historic and abiding tryst with Jainism and its (to a fault) adherence to the tenets of 'ahimsa'. All creatures have right to exist. Man is merely one among those creatures.

 Wisely has it been said, ‘when in Rome do what Romans do’.