The Great Outdoors

I’m not, I confess, a Real Man. My idea of the outdoors is a lawn in Chandigarh where you can smoke a fine cigar at leisure and tell the mundu to hurry back with another whiskey, and none of that chhota peg rubbish, thank you.

Some years ago, on a visit to Kashmir, I gave fishing a go, egged on by (a) a woman, who else, and (b) a sadistic fuck of a tour guide. It ended, as I knew before it began, i.e. sadly. I caught no fish. To add insult to injury, a some filthy peasant arrived at the banks of the Lidder just as I was leaving, casually tossed a stick of dynamite inside, and looked pityingly at my Rs. 23,000 worth of fishing gear as dozens of fine trout floated to the top. I had him flogged, but it was a pyrrhic victory: the woman promptly ran off with the peasant, and the tour guide with my money.

Ah, well, such is life. You can understand, I am sure, why it was with some trepidation that I finally allowed myself to be talked into having a go at deer hunting, Jesustan style. It is, at one level, much the same as at home. You lift up your weapon, peer through your sights, wish that what you were looking at was your wife, and blow the hapless animal away. It is indeed uplifting. Until recently, however, this shahi pursuit involved braving the cold, fighting off insects, and generally rolling around in the mud (as distinct from rolling in the hay, an altogether different sport involving wenches) – none of which gentleman-travelers such as myself are wont to do.

Now, a fine fellow named John Lockwood from Texas has put an end to all this nonsense. Lockwood has peppered various forests with Remington hunting rifles mounted on automated tripods, connected to cameras which are in turn controlled by computers. All you have to do is pay Lockwood the price of a down-market lunch, log on to his website, watch the deer traipse delicately through the sleepy woods, take aim, and then control-click. For a fee, Lockwood will deliver the remains to you, smoked and salted. Alternately, you can have your prey mounted, and then brag about your hunting skills to the idle rich of Greater Kailash II; none of the lalas will be any the wiser.

All of this is a great improvement on our ways at home. Hunting in Hindustan is a complicated business; only Real Men should attempt it:

First, you have to bribe the forest guards at Corbett National Park.

Then, you have to wait until they bribe their boss, who is usually some self-important twit who masks the fact that he is wetting himself at the thought of the CBI and Menaka Gandhi pulling out his toenails by being difficult.

Then, you head out into the bushes and wait endlessly for some suitably clueless and slow-moving beast to show up. More often than not, your wait is indeed endless because mobs of morons, having got to Corbett first, have decimated the wildlife.

Then, you have to load the dead animal into the back of your jeep and drive off before the cops arrive, asking for more loot (Some chaps choose to fly off in helicopters instead, but that costs even more than escaping the tender caresses of the thanedaar).

Then, you have to get rid of the dead animal at some uninhabited spot, mainly because Hindustani wives have a wholly unreasonable attitude to roasting bloody carcasses in the kitchen (I suspect it reminds them of the fate of so many of their sisters; you know, the nylon sari and kerosene thing).

Hunting in Jesustan is lot easier and a lot more fun, but also a lot more dangerous. Again, only Real Men should attempt it:

First, you get a gun. A high-velocity rifle, which only the more demented kinds of Faujis get to use in Hindustan, can be bought off the shelf for a couple of hundred dollars. However, some states have regulations barring the sale of lethal weapons to teenagers, self-confessed psychopaths, and, how does one put this delicately, the generally non compos mentis – in other words, four-fifths of the gun-owning population. If you fall into any of these categories, however, you can usually score a perfectly serviceable Uzi or M-16 in any of the more sordid parts of Washington DC, New York or Los Angeles; just ask at any street corner, but remember to put it in single-shot mode before you let fly.

Then you get a hunting permit, US$ 12 or just $7.50 for juvenile delinquents and the senile.

Then you buy humungous amounts of beer.

Then you get rat-arsed and let loose at the deer or at other deer-hunters, as takes your fancy. In general, it is easier to let loose at other hunters, since they wear bright-yellow vests and tend to sit still. A fellow named Chai Soua Vang did a fine job of this in December, when he knocked of six kaddoos who he seemed to believe were intruding on his particular patch of the forest.

Poor Vang was promptly dispatched to the clink. The to-do his actions provoked led me to believe this sort of merry boys-will-be-boys stuff was considered, even by Jesustani standards, unusual. I’ve discovered it isn’t. In 1998, for example, eleven kids aged between 9 and 17 were shot dead whilst hunting. Nobody seems to have bothered keeping count of the adults, but it seems that two brats did bump off two daddy-dears. One particularly fun bit of sport involved the hunting down of four school children and their pregnant teacher by a pack of punks with nothing better to do. “I heard a young kid scream. I thought he got a deer,” a witness to one killing told the Philadelphia Inquirer, “But he kept screaming.”

Fear not, though: Jesustani authorities tend to take a lenient view of this sort of thing. Soon after the punks-with-guns incident, Michael Bragman, a prominent legislator from New York, moved legislation seeking to lower the legal hunting age. I’ve puzzled over this wonderful laissez-faire in the matter of the murder of innocents, something over which even Hindustanis these days tend to get all hot and sweaty about. Could ‘accidental’ hunting deaths in fact be a socially-sanctioned form of murder, like the nylon sari and kerosene thing? “I’m taking my beloved and the brats deer hunting”, you would tell your best yaar, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, of course we can stay out whoring all night on Friday, that sort of thing? In any case, Lockwood’s endeavors are going to open up huge new opportunities for software types from Bangalore, who can come and testify that it wasn’t Vang’s fault: the computer did it, honest gov.