To the city’s stray dogs the eighth annual Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) from 28-30 November at Hyderabad must be an existential crisis closer to a Greek tragedy where fate has the last laugh rather than a Shakespearean tragedy where there is scope for reconciliation and moving on. Hannibal’s army must have experienced angst similar to that of the dogs after being routed at the Battle of Zama in the hands of the Romans.

The dogs are not alone in this predicament of incredible proportions because they share the streets with the beggars on a kind of broadly agreed upon live and let live policy. A generation ago I recollect Bill Clinton’s visit to Hyderabad when beggars were cleared off the streets. The stray dogs were a numerical minority and not a visible presence as they happen to be now. The beggars have a racial memory in this regard: they have been less than politely dislodged from streets every time a king or personage passed by. Therefore, they are spared of the despair or dread which the dogs that have no such “instinctual” memory are going through. The beggars know for a fact that they are coming back; like victims of an earthquake or a tsunami the dogs are stunned into an eerie silence.  

The reasons why the beggars know better than the dogs are perfectly logical. Class division is something that is scripted in the beggar’s DNA. The dogs are much more egalitarian than people and feel no serious need for a ladder that has to be ascended on a day-to-day basis. The stray dogs enjoy privileges on the street the same way that pet dogs are fawned over by their owners in rich and middle class homes.  Where the beggars and dogs share a common point of view is in the conviction that nothing is going to change in the real world. Ideals and idealists are as futile as dry grass and gray walls. If practical wisdom lies in coming out of a difficult situation without a feeling of bitterness, the beggars have reason to feel superior to the dogs. The beggars are not losing their sleep over Clinton or Trump or any other fancy-sounding name coming to Hyderabad. They know only too well that they have been a part and parcel of street life since the beginnings of society and will continue to do so.

The dogs must be profoundly heart-broken with the new found knowledge of how easily they could be dispensed with. At the end of the day the streets have belonged to them since history. In fact they have earned a generic label to their credit, termed “street dogs.” The phrases “hounded like a dog,” “living a dog’s life,” “treated like a dog” which are normally used in the worlds of men and women seem to apply to the dogs for a change.

I empathize with the utter disappointment of the dogs over the arrival of Ivanka Trump who is the face of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) 2017 in the popular imagination more than any other issue or person. The stray dogs however have become a lobby in recent times. The working poor who return late nights and the children of the same poor for whom the streets are playgrounds have been terrorized by street dogs roaming in packs during late evenings and at nights. Apparently the poor are happy that the roads which Ivanka Trump will traverse are being altered even if at a very cosmetic level. There are jokes floating around where people are asking Ivanka Trump to use their road in the hope that they will be repaired.

The stray dog lobby is evidently living a disaster film except that the illusion of an end of the world scenario has become tangibly real. By no means entirely deprived of native intelligence, the stray dog lobby will stage a comeback. Stray dogs have an advantage over dogs of other breeds. First and foremost, a dog without a breed that it can claim for itself ends up falling into the category of stray dogs. Stray dogs are the nameless many of history ignored by historians and not in the collective memory of any particular group. Their identity comes from precisely not seeking to have one. They are just pure survivors defying any theory of natural selection predicated on the notion that the useful shall thrive. In their uselessness stray dogs prove the point that the universe cannot be reduced to a mere theory of evolution.

If the so-called goal of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) 2017 is Women First, Prosperity for All the “Women” ought to include the wives, mothers and daughters or simply women operating at the level of basic subsistence and the “All” must include the working poor, the beggars, the homeless and issues such as the stray dog menace on the streets of Hyderabad.

* PRAKASH KONA is a writer, teacher, researcher and Professor of English Literature at The English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad, India. He is the author of Conjurer of Nights [poetry: 2012, Waterloo Press, Hove, UK]; Nunc Stans [Creative Non-fiction: 2009, Crossing Chaos enigmatic ink, Ontario, Canada], Pearls of an Unstrung Necklace [Fiction: 2005, Fugue State Press, New York] and Streets that Smell of Dying Roses [Experimental Fiction: 2003, Fugue State Press, New York]. His research interests broadly include Women’s Studies, Film Studies and Third World Politics and Writing.

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