My life was turned upside down by a Bengal tiger. In December 2000, my friend Danny and I took a gap year after school to travel the world. The University of Edinburgh had made me a firm offer to study veterinary science the following year. Life was sorted, or so I imagined.
We travelled to Burma just after Christmas that year. A month later, we parted ways. I travelled to Malaysia. My funds soon started drying up but fortunately I found a temporary job in Negara zoo, 15 miles from Kuala Lumpur.
The job role was advertised as ‘Zoo Assistant’. No one told me it was a euphemism for ‘Zoo Gopher’. There were some decent perks though: free accommodation in the wardens’ quarters and access to subsidised meals in the staff canteen. My working day was spent amongst exotic animals. The welcoming Malay people, delightfully fresh cuisine and warm tropical weather were enough reasons for me to prolong my stay.
The animals lived in enclosures that simulated their natural habitat. Several CCTV cameras monitored their behaviour and the zoo’s vet attended to any who looked unwell. Somewhere along the way, my job role changed. Gradually, I stopped running errands and found myself accompanying the vet wherever she went. My colleagues called me Adik or younger brother.
The months that followed were spent learning about the ailments and quirks of animals. I felt privileged. A university course couldn’t have given me such practical experience.
“Adik, today we will check Sara’s eyes,” the vet would typically announce when I reported for work. Sara was the hippopotamus. Ali, the macaque; Abdul and Noor, the elephants; Fatima, the orangutan: we were like a big and diverse family.
“Puteri is pregnant”, the vet told me one morning.
Puteri was the much-loved Bengal tigress.
“I’m not looking forward to it Adik. She’s miscarried twice.”
I checked on the tigress several times during the day and spent my free time researching the care of newly born tiger cubs. My life at the zoo was blissful contentment.
There was, however, a thorn in my side: the gun-toting security guard, Umar. I knew he was trouble from the moment I saw him. His beady eyes set close together like the headlights of an old Jeep, heralded my undoing.
Umar, followed me everywhere. When the vet and I entered an enclosure, he cocked his rifle and stood ready. He didn’t share my sense of camaraderie with the animals and saw them as wild creatures who would devour him given an opportunity. He treated them with disdain, referring to them as binatang or beasts.
“Look Umar,” I tried reasoning with him. “Wild animals don’t attack unless provoked.”
“No, no, Adik. Binatangs dangerous. Western peoples much stupid,” he admonished me in his limited English.
Pointing to his right temple, he made tight circles with his index finger. In his estimation, I was both stupid and crazy!
One of Umar’s favourite stories was that of the lion who asked a cat to teach him everything he knew. Apparently, the cat complied but didn’t teach him how to climb trees. Thinking that he had learned everything, the lion, true to his mean nature, decided to kill the cat and gave chase. The cat climbed the nearest tree and saved himself.
“Never trust a Binatang,” he underlined the moral of his story, wagging his rifle under my nose, breathing raw onions on my face.
May 13, 2001: my nineteenth birthday. I woke early to check on the heavily pregnant Puteri. In the dim light of dawn, I saw her lying motionless under a tree. I ran in to her enclosure. Curled up next to her lifeless body was her new-born cub not yet strong enough to stand or open its eyes. It was a ball of yellow-orange and black fur, tiniest of paws and tail, candyfloss tongue.
The muezzin’s call from a faraway mosque sounded like an elegy to mark the passing of dear Puteri. The early morning chorus of tropical birds welcomed the new-born. It was as if life and death were squaring up to each other in that brief twilight moment. The cub whimpered, tremulously seeking its dead mother’s teats.
“You take charge of the cub, Adik,” said the vet, struggling to hide her tears.
I named him Rory. I was his surrogate mother, bottle feeding him milk fortified with vitamins, playing with him and sometimes even sneaking him up to my room. He grew rapidly and within weeks was bounding about like a playful kitten.
Rory’s enclosure was nearly an acre and the flora of the rainforest made it appear even larger. Teak and ebony trees canopied the skies. The scent of wild orchids wafted through the air and evanescent rainbows danced in the mid-morning light as the swift stream splashed against boulders. Bottle green frogs with bloodshot eyes croaked.
Five years passed. The England I left behind was a fading memory. I had lost my place at the University. But I didn’t care. Rory had grown into a fully mature animal almost six feet long, not including the tail. His roar reverberated in the vast open spaces of the zoo, stopping both visitors and staff in their tracks. But he was a gentle, beautiful giant with his velvet coat and marble eyes. I spent most of my leisure time with him, swimming in the stream, tumbling in the tall grass and mock-fighting. In the summer, Rory liked to doze on a flat granite rock by the stream, near the bamboo bush.
Umar hadn’t changed. After twenty years of employment in the zoo, he hadn’t developed any empathy for its animals. His rifle always cocked and ready, he constantly tapped the trigger with his index finger. We hardly spoke to each other, but he never let me out of his sight, shadowing me as if he were my personal bodyguard.
21 June, 2006, 6 PM: I was at the far end of the enclosure under the mango tree. Rory was dozing on his favourite rock just outside the cave at the opposite end. His shining coat of tan and black merged with the yellow trunks of the bamboo trees as the light of the late afternoon sun cast its long shadows. Stretched languidly on that rock, his belly heaving gently with every breath, he was a poster for serenity.
My memory of what happened next plays out in slow motion, as if my brain struggles to cope with the speed of the event.
Rory abruptly stood up from his rock and looked in my direction as if he was puzzled by something he saw. Every sinew on his body was taut. His long tail went straight and rigid. His powerful fore-paws were tensed and arched slightly forward. With whiskers twitching slightly and eyes narrowed down to a slit, he looked straight at me. He was a statue. Umar, with the keenness of a hunter about to claim his first trophy, watched him intensely. His rifle was pointed directly at Rory through the gap in the steel fence.
Rory leapt off the rock, charged forward, and when he was a few feet away, lunged in my direction. I had never seen him move so quickly. I stood paralysed, my arms across my face, and my body twisted in fear. A single gunshot. A thousand surprised birds took flight. Rory, suspended mid-air for a microsecond, fell in a heap at my feet. Twitching three or four times, he became still.
Umar ran in and dragged me out of the enclosure. On the way out, he emptied his rifle into the inert body on the ground. A mixture of emotions drove my tears as a chasm opened within. An overwhelming sense of loss – friendship, trust, innocence – engulfed me. Rory’s betrayal broke me and I wailed like a child.
Overnight, Umar became a national hero and was awarded the JPP medal, Malaysia’s highest honour for bravery in civilian life. The image of Rory’s lifeless body was splashed across every newspaper in the country. TV channels broadcast the CCTV footage in a sequence of grainy black and white images. Rory leaping in the air towards me; I, cowering in the corner with my arms shielding my face; Umar pulling the trigger, and Rory’s lifeless body. The sequence played continuously, in a tortuous loop.
I took the next flight home. The experience of having been proven naive and stupid, just as Umar had characterised me, left a festering wound on my personality. I became suspicious of people’s motives and my acerbic cynicism cost me the few friends that I had. Moving from job to job, finding comfort in drink, I was a walking wreck.
One evening, my phone rang. People rarely called me. Although it was an unknown number, I answered the call.
“Hello mate. It’s Danny. Remember me? Danny McPherson?”
His voice smashed through the floodgate of memories that I had locked away and hoped to forget in time. I had to stop and lean against a lamppost. The demons of my past were out once again, ready to torment me.
Wondering how he had managed to trace me, I struggled to sound pleased.
“Hello Danny! It’s so nice to hear from you. Been so long.”
We agreed to meet at the weekend in Edinburgh, where he ran a successful multimedia business. He had watched the Rory incident on YouTube.
“Oh boy! Weren’t you lucky! The gunshot really got two birds, didn’t it?” Danny said.
I didn’t understand him and looked at him in confusion.
“What two birds?”
“You mean you didn’t know?” It was Danny’s turn to be puzzled.
He played the CCTV footage on a giant screen. He paused at the point when Umar shoots Rory and stepped through the video, frame by frame. A flurry of birds takes to the air. He zoomed in just around my legs. A cobra, mostly hidden by the grass, and inches away from me, quickly lowers its hood and disappears in to the bushes.

Some 25 years ago I completed my doctoral degree at the University of Sheffield in the application of AI to an engineering problem. AI was an esoteric subject back then, but I have nevertheless been fascinated by its potential. These days, I am deliriously excited by the things it can do and I use it almost every day. In all my excitement, I forgot a crucial fact: CGPT makes up things. The industry jargon for this is ‘hallucination’ – though I don’t understand why they just can’t say the output was plain BS. I was fully aware of this ‘hallucination’ habit. I had experienced it a couple of times before, but to my peril hadn’t learnt the lesson.

A couple of days ago, I wrote a potential newspaper article on the Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis). Just before sending it off, I felt it needed a good quote. My go-to tools are CGPT and DeepSeek. The conversation with CGPT follows:

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Me: Please give me poems by some famous poets about the Northern Lights.

CGPT: “The Aurora Borealis” by H.W. Longfellow beautifully captures the majesty of the Northern Lights:

“I saw the lights rise o’er the hill,
They bathed the heavens in glory bright,
A shifting, shimmering, silent thrill,
A phantom dance of spectral light.”

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Just the thing I needed. I quickly quoted Longfellow in my article, adding the line “A phantom dance of spectral light,” somewhere in the first paragraph.

I sent it off promptly to the editor and sat back feeling quite contented. My passion for literary work luckily saved my bacon. Curious about the poem, I went back to CGPT.

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Me: Aurora Borealis by H.W. Longfellow – give me the full poem please

CGPT: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did not write a poem specifically titled Aurora Borealis, but he did mention the Northern Lights in his poem “The Discoverer of the North Cape” (from Tales of a Wayside Inn).

Me: OMG! Why did you give me wrong info?

CGPT: You’re absolutely right to call that out—I should have double-checked before stating that Wordsworth wrote a poem titled The Aurora Borealis. That was a mistake, and I appreciate your patience. I’ll make sure to be more careful in verifying sources before sharing information. If you’d like, I can find a verified classic poem on the northern lights. Let me know how you’d like to proceed!

Me: I would like to proceed by giving you a boot up your fxxxxxg axxe.

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I withdrew the article immediately and deleted the fake Longfellow quote. I tried the same request on my phone where I have the CGPT app. It did exactly the same thing. Then I tried DeepSeek and it gave me some other fake poetry.

In those simpler days, when we spent long hours in the lab on AI experiments, the outputs were binary – either right or wrong. Sometimes, we also associated a probability with each output. The word hallucination was only associated with acid or magic mushrooms and such! Never with a lying computer programme.

EPILOGUE: After publishing the above in the morning, I passed it through CGPT this evening and asked it to proofread it. It suggested around 5 changes, some of which I implemented to improve flow. Best of all it pointed out that I had used ‘contended’ instead of ‘contented’. So this time, it was really useful. The lesson is that one must be convinced about what CGPT is saying and not accept general information without questioning. Finally, I said, “Thanks for your help,” and it responded,
“You’re welcome! Let me know if you need any more edits-or if CGPT pulls another fast one on you.”

Walking your cat? Read on …

Disclaimer: ‘the UK’ is the correct usage but TOI changed it to ‘UK’. The blurb was inserted by the editorial team. I detest the word ‘fugly’, which is coarse and vulgar.

The lady at the opticians had a curious accent. It was not something I recognised. I had to know.
“Is that a New Zealand accent?” I asked her.
“No. I am from somewhere much further away.”
“Australia?”
“No no. Much much further away.”
“South Africa?”
“Now you are getting closer. Not South Africa though. But nearby.”
“Is it Botswana?” I was clutching at straws.
“No. I’ll give you a clue. My country looks like a teapot. Google it.”
So I discovered she is from Zimbabwe, and its map does resemble a teapot, if you can imagine a teapot without a handle.

So, I learned something new. As they say, the last thing you learn is how to stop breathing. This irresistible desire to learn, this incorrigible curiosity, keeps us going, I guess. In my case it also costs money.

I have been avoiding FB posts that entice me to spend money on new ideas. Only with partial success, I will admit. Just the other day, I purchased a device for sealing plastic bags. What a wonderful thing it is! Only the size of a stapler, it seals plastic bags and makes them completely airtight. A wonderful device, I thought and promptly purchased it. I went about sealing every open bag of food in the house. Cereals, savouries, nuts, biscuits … anything I found open, I sealed – until my wife started complaining.

“What’s wrong with clips or clothes pegs? Why don’t you just use those ziplock bags?”

And then I realised, I hadn’t thought it through. Well, the video on FB by MustHaveIdeas didn’t discuss these possibilities. They just showed me an iPhone that was sealed in a bag and dropped into the fish tank. That was enough for me.

I also purchased this clothes dryer that is a regular concertina type dryer but with electric heating. It dries clothes in half the time and consumes only 0.3kwh which is about 10p an hour. Instead of drying overnight, clothes dry in 4 to 5 hours. It’s even got a cover to conserve the heat. Great. The one question I didn’t ask myself was – what is the hurry? It is not as if we are running out of clothes!

Then there is the telescope that sits in our conservatory. It was received as a present from our son on the occasion of my wife’s big birthday. I am in charge of everything technical in the house and so I put it together, read the manual and lugged it to the open field nearby to look at the moon and planets like Mars, Venus, Saturn and others. Excellent. Mars was a little blob before. Through the telescope it is a bigger blob. Yes, the moon has many craters and Saturn has a faint ring. But so what? I can see much clearer images on Youtube and I don’t have to lug the heavy tripod with the heavier telescope and assemble everything, align and focus in the middle of the freezing night, in a desolate field. If I want to be really astronomical, I could even use an app on my phone and see all the planets above and below the horizon. If there were no clouds, I could actually see some of them with the naked eye. The telescope now sits forlorn in my conservatory occupying valuable space.

I have now decided not to be tempted by anything new. I have unfollowed MustHaveIdeas. Meanwhile, the magic whisk, the sealer, the dryer and a variety of other brilliantly useful things sit without use. They have become collector’s items – they collect dust.

Horrible homophones causing me embarrassing moments …

In 2022, I accompanied my wife to an orthopaedic surgeon in Bangalore who specialises in knee replacement. He came across as a nice guy, very approachable. So, when he finished advising my wife, I asked if I could get his medical opinion on something that was causing me some concern. (In India, you can sometimes generate these ‘buy one get two’ deals.)

“Sure,” he said giving me his full attention.

“I get some knee pain too but only after a long cycling trip or some heavy exercise.”

“That’s sweet pain. Don’t worry about it,” he reassured me.

I’m full of sweet pain now having visited the gym a few times in the New Year. Every muscle is on fire and I feel as if a road roller has run me over. Hopefully, the body will repair itself soon because frankly there is no difference between real pain and sweet pain. Are you listening doctor?

I have avoided sweets since January 1. This variety of sweet pain is almost unbearable. I’m like a junky deprived of my daily fix. I look at my wife and drool like a hungry Labrador when I see her eating those plum puddings.

If any of you meet me this month and I’m not my usual self, you know why. I’m suffering from a double dose of sweet pain.

Happy New Year to all my friends and family. Let us hope 2025 will prove both Nostradamus and Baba Vanga wrong. They have prophesied apocalypse this year. On that cheerful note let me tell you about my New Year resolutions – sorry solutions.

Every year, I make New Year resolutions and every year I break them after a few months, sometimes weeks. The main problem is that it becomes an all or nothing endeavour. I will not eat chocolates, I will not consume alcohol, I will go to the gym 7 days a week, I will write a minimum of 500 words daily, and so on. In short, my resolutions are designed to fail and they invariably do. I know I shouldn’t be eating sweets because I have diabetes. Someone said to me the other day, ‘You will go blind if you eat so many sweets.’ The riposte that popped up in my head was, ‘Sweets would still taste delightful.’

But seriously, I need to get rid of that sweet tooth. The quality of my sleep is better if I don’t consume any alcohol. I am overweight and the case for sweating it out in the gym is very strong. I wish to improve my writing – so, as many writers tell me, I must write something every day, even if it’s crap. My resolutions, as you can see, are well intended. However, they simply don’t work.

The pattern is the same every year. I am resolute in achieving my goals. Weeks pass. Counter arguments to defeat my resolutions gradually line up like some superior army against an already weak and demoralised enemy. The eastern concept that everything is an illusion (ergo nothing matters) join forces with its unlikely bed fellows – the existentialist tenets of the west – freedom of choice and individual responsibility. The first casualty is usually the anti-sweet pledge. I pop one measly chocolate bar into my mouth and the rest of the resolutions come tumbling down like a house of cards. Excessive drinking becomes a routine (in my case one or two glasses of wine a day), I forget the way to the gym and the realisation that writing without being inspired is not something I am able to do! I am back to square one.

A wise friend of mine from Sheffield told me one year that his only New Year resolution was to drink more red wine. He did not say he intended to reduce his white wine consumption proportionately. I had just assumed that to be a given. Only last evening, did I realise that I could have been wrong all these years. His was a New Year solution not a resolution. I have, therefore, decided to decapitate the word, remove the ‘re’ from resolution. Like the mythical Phoenix, the solution has emerged from the ashes of broken self-promises: no New Year resolutions this year, just less of everything.

In life, one never forgets certain events. These serendipities form indelible impressions on the psyche. They leave a yearning, a desperate wish to repeat the experience, to relive the sudden elation of a moment long past. More often than not, it remains a yearning, futile hope rather than purposeful aspiration.

The first time I saw Istanbul was by a lucky accident. I had just begun my career as a marine engineer. It was 1980 and I was one of the two fifth engineers on a general cargo ship. A fifth engineer spends his time either sleeping or working in the engine room.

In the summer months, the engine room is an oven, the temperatures often exceeding 55 C or more near the engines and boilers. The cacophony of multiple running machinery is an aural assault on the hapless engine room crew. Faint smells of leaking exhaust gases and burning diesel adds to the misery.

While at sea, an engineer doesn’t usually have much locational awareness. I knew our destination but that was about it. My ship was on its way to the Black Sea port of Ilyichevsk in the then Soviet Union. I knew that we were in the strait of Bosphorus and would be passing under the bridge connecting the continents of Europe and Asia. Sadly, I was in the engine room at the time, under the waterline.

Had I not popped out on deck that evening for some respite from the heat and noise, would I have fallen in love with Istanbul the way I did? Was it just for me that the sun was setting on the city, bathing its splendid mosques in golden orange, silhouetting the squawking seagulls against slender minarets? Did I not momentarily forget the heat and din when the cool sea breeze on my sweaty overalls comforted me in its delicate embrace? For a few ephemeral but precious moments, I stood frozen on the deck of the moving ship, absorbing the magnificent vista gliding past me. I became a part of Istanbul and Istanbul became a part of me.

And so, after more than four decades, I was fortunate to experience nearly identical emotions as the ferry plying between the two continents approached Eminönü, its final stop. The sunset, gulls, minarets – were all there as if the intervening years were illusory and nothing had changed. I was glad that despite the years, I hadn’t lost the capacity to be astounded and love-struck.

NB: apologies to those who read the earlier version. I have shortened it to remove all the unnecessary details. I had violated the Chekov’s gun principle (if you introduce a gun into the story it must go off before the story ends).

The Republic monument in Taksim square, Istanbul – the epicentre of political protests – is now cordoned off by the POLICE. India Gate in Delhi is closed for business too. History is being rewritten in Turkey. Nothing new there. Those miserable Moghuls are being gradually purged from our history too; what are they doing in our Hindu Rashtra anyway? Kemal Ataturk is not the favourite anymore. Mahatma Gandhi, don’t worry, you are not alone. School curriculum has been altered to refelect the new history of the Turkish Republic. NCERT തഥൈവ! Jai Sreeram. Name of the country changed from Turkish Republic to Turkiye. India? Welcome to Bharath. Contempt in some quarters towards women not properly covered. Bharathi naree don’t get caught up in love jehads. Voices automatically lowered when Erdogan is mentioned. In Bharath, the M word may be freely used, but only in unctuous eulogies. Fearless Turkish journalists are rotting in jail. Bharathi journalists have been tamed, others can go to jail. Antinational bastards. Serves them right. Why did they commit unlawful acts like criticising the government? Didn’t they know about UA(P)A?
Where am I? Turkiye? Bharath? I feel so homesick!