Canis lupus over-familiaris, I suspect

One of the pleasures of my life in Mumbai is the thirty minutes or so that I spend every day walking to and from work, a rare privilege in a city defined by epic commutes and traffic jams. It’s a chance for half an hour’s daily pondering of the world around me, and lately I’ve been doing my mental meanderings on a number of important questions:

Does that sev puri seller’s technique of washing pots and pans in a muddy puddle really get them clean?
If I keep looking around like an owl on E, or like Chris Evans in his toothbrush days, will I get across the Nasty Junction in one piece?
Shouldn’t you be at school?
Would you mind awfully just using the klaxon a little less frequently?
And most of all, why do all the dogs look the same?



The thing that’s always impressed me most about the dog world is its variety: from the tiniest little terrier to the most massive mutt, they’ve got a diversity that would impress an Arts Council assessor. And the posh dogs in Mumbai are no different, the dogs who are walked on leads by people’s underemployed drivers range from the tiddly to the terrifying. But out on the street where there are dogs all over the place, they’re all a middling sort of size, a middling brownish colour, a middling sort of vague demeanour. All of them. No diversity at all. All other boxes go unticked.

I wonder if there might some brutal fascist dog regime that controls the streets, and has created a master race of mediocrity by exterminating all the bigger, smaller, darker and lighter dogs? There’s a great crap movie to be made, though come to think of it the generic Mumbai dog look is not too different from the evil Cardinal Richelieu in D’artagnan and the Muskehounds, so the precedent has already been set.

But I fear the truth is more prosaic and something to do with evolution. As Woody Guthrie wrote in She Came Along To Me, “All creeds and kinds and colors of us are blending / Till I suppose ten million years from now / We'll all be just alike”. The difference with dogs is they start procreating when they’re a lot younger than we humans, so the process has happened more quickly. Or, as my more concise friend puts it, “it’s cos they all shag each other innit”. Well, quite.