Feline Encounters of 2023

2023 New Year’s Eve began with me rushing my little one to the Emergency department after she was scratched by a stray cat at home. Snowy, the culprit, has been a regular at our home in Kozhikode since the pandemic and has been very pally with my girls.

I’ve never been fond of cats. For some reason, I’ve always found them to be cold, self-centered, and heartless. Churchill pretty much summed it up when he said: “Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals”.

Earlier this year, my friend adopted an abandoned kitten in Delhi. After a few weekends at her place with my family and seeing a cat in close quarters (vet visits, pet shops and accessory shopping) I got a better handle on the phenomenon of cats. From skeptical aloofness, I’ve slowly veered towards a grudging acknowledgement of their uniqueness. The philosopher John Gray in “Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life” explains that for cats happiness is a state to which they default. Unlike humans who search for meaning, cats are happy being themselves. They do not for a second doubt if their life is worth living.

Cats are disparaged for their apparent indifference to those that care for them. We give them food and shelter, yet they do not regard us as their owners or their masters, and they give us nothing back except their company. If we treat them with respect, they grow fond of us, but they will not miss us when we are gone. Lacking our support, they soon re-wild. Though they display little concern for the future, they seem set to outlast us.

Feline ethics is a kind of selfless egoism. Cats are egoists in that they care only for themselves and others they love. They are selfless in that they have no image of themselves they seek to preserve and augment. Cats live not by being selfish but by selflessly being themselves.

Little wonder that I never liked them.

The late art historian BN Goswamy’s last work published posthumously was ‘The Indian Cat: Stories, Paintings, Poetry, and Proverbs’. In it, he makes a reference to the concept of Markata  (Monkey) and Marjara (Cat) Nyaya in the context of one’s devotion to the deity:

There are many nyayas-methods or theories-but the two most often cited are markata-nyaya and marjara-nyaya. The former refers to how the young one of a monkey-markata in Sanskrit-approaches God, and the latter to how the young one of a cat-marjara-does. Briefly put, markata-nyaya refers to the behaviour of a baby monkey, who clings tightly to its mother wherever she goes. The mother monkey’s arms are occupied as she leaps from tree to tree; she does not hold on to the baby; but as long as the baby holds firmly to her, it arrives safely’. Whereas ‘marjara-nyaya refers to the behaviour of kittens, who are likely to wander. The mother cat picks them up by the scruff of the neck and carries them wherever she wants them to be. The kitten is passive; she makes no effort but arrives safely by surrendering to the mother’s protective grasp.’ It is up to the devotee, then, to choose: to keep making an effort to cling for succour to his deity, or to leave everything to the deity, trusting him and surrendering to him completely. No recommendation is made, no preference indicated

In Islam, the Prophet’s fondness of cats is recorded in the Hadith. Once, when the Prophet had to leave for his prayers, he found his cat Muezza sleeping on the sleeve of his robe. Instead of disturbing his cat’s nap, he cuts off the sleeve. In Ancient Egypt, thanks to their hunting skills that kept the granaries safe from rodents, cats were worshiped in the form of the Cat Goddess Bastet.

Another phenomenon that I’ve been seeing of late has been the increasing adoption of cats by single women. While this could be selection bias, I’m sure the proliferation and popularity of cat videos online have something that connects the two. Cats account for almost 26 billion views on YouTube. The only compelling evidence that this has something to with the increasing pandemic of loneliness was this panel from Kristen Radtke’s graphic novel ‘Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness‘ (one of my top comics of 2023) summarizing the possessions of a ‘typical’ American single and lonely woman:

While on the topic of comics, another series that I thoroughly enjoyed was the Spanish noir comic series Blacksad. John Blacksad, the titular character is a detective marked by his sense of agility, emotional detachment and sharpness. All the characters in the work are anthropomorphic – in the sense that they are modeled after animals. So no points for guessing that John Blacksad is a cat!

The final fun fact that I leave you with: In the US alone, cats account for the death of close to 3 billion birds annually. Tell this to the next environmentally conscious, vegetarian cat-owner you come across.