Weekend at the zoo
Over the weekend, my wife and I decided to take my 2 1/2 year old daughter Netra on an “educational” trip to the Zoo. These insane urges occur in parents on and off and are usually thankfully ignored. But in some rare cases, these are actually put into action.
The morning weather which was very nice IMMEDIATELY turned very hot, the moment we called the “call taxi”. Never the one to “take the back-step after I have taken the front-step”, I decided to push ahead and do the trip anyway.
All along the way, we tried to explain to her in animated ways that she would get to see Lions and Tigers and Elephants. She has seen them in picture books and already knows how they “shout” and so it only seemed logical that she would be damn excited to actually see those animals shouting.
It turns out that the zoo is in Vandalur which is, well, very far away and when we reached there, it seemed as though Vandalur was the hottest place in India. It was also so crowded that I suspect that every single person from Chennai was in Vandalur (along with several of their visiting relatives).
To be fair, the zoo has a lot of animals and birds. There are even several species of Cockatoos. This was a great educational experience for ME. Here I was 34 years into my life and havent even heard of a bird called Cockatoos and in a matter of minutes I get introduced to 3 species of Cocktoos (The Great, The Lesser and I forgot the third). This was a major culture-shock (though I must say I dealt with it well).
The zoo authorities have the animals in really HUGE enclosures and these animals I must say are not the exhibisionist kind. They just lie around in a corner quite unmindful of the major proportion of Chennai population who had come there just to SEE them. The crocodiles were particularly bad. They just LIE there doing nothing, mouths open, as though they had been drinking and playing cards for several nights. Watching crocodiles cant be the most exciting hobby in life. And tortoises seem so dumb that many of them routinely starve to death when food is just a few foot away. (I hope I dont get irate mails from animal lovers - Im just trying to explain how I tried to educate my daughter. OK???)
As far as Netra, she was more interested in watching the other children and trying to shake their hands than on finding out how lions shout. We would routinely go near a huge enclosure which had a tiger and point to something near Andhra border and say, “Netra!!! Look at that. A TIGER” and she would repond with a “Grrr”.
I got a fair idea of the amount of educating she had got when I pointed to a far far away bison and asked her, “Netra, do you see the bison”??? and she replied with a straight face (shes too young for sacrasm), “Yes.. on top of the tree”.
We intend to take her again to the zoo when she attains a more appropriate age, like 15 when kids would rather be shot than seen going out with their parents.