The Pooch & Newton’s First Law of Motion

This blog is named The Producer & The Pooch because it involves a person who is a producer (aka me) and a pooch that I share my life with (aka Oreo). Wow. That was some next level decoding of the title now, wasn’t it?

This blog was the outcome of some serious boredom during the pandemic lockdown and some genuine misunderstanding of reality where I thought I would publish this and overnight become seriously famous with a million views. (I can feel some scoffs. But hey, I’m still alive and you still don’t know what happens in the future.) 

Now that I have given you all the information you never asked for, let me tell you about the pooch.

  

Meet my co-blogger and housemate. Oreo.

I’ll give you all a minute to go “so cute & so sweet” on him :-p! 

Oreo was a tentative entry into my life. Tentative because while I am a super cool person, I am not the best manager of time. If you don’t have time, you don’t get a dog. Period. Hence tentative. 

Coming to Newton’s first law of motion, it states that a body continues to be in a state of rest or uniform motion until an external force makes it act otherwise. Let's put the two together. Keeping the super cool part of me intact, I continued to be a bad time manager all my life because no force acted otherwise. (Well even if it did, it clearly didn’t do a good job!) Then the pooch came along and suddenly I became the James Bond of time management. 

And that was just the beginning. It seemed like Sir Issac Newton from the other side sent Oreo to prove his law to me specifically and become a pain in the wrong places. 

If you take Newton’s law and convert it for life, it should loosely translate into,

“A person continues to be in a state of believing or doing something until and an external force pushes him or her to act otherwise”. 

Me the human chose the life of film production because I hate fixed routines. It’s just too predictable for my liking. I like mixing it up. Oreo came in and said… Ah well. 

There is a dog butt on my face at 7 AM everyday. I mean that. Everyday. It’s right there. On my face. Turns out when you wake up at 7 AM everyday, you also tend to fall asleep by 11 PM. I mean my mother’s hair greyed and face wrinkled trying to get me into that habit. But all it really took is a dog. Oops. Sorry mom! 

I chose to live alone a while back because I like my space. My house has a place for everything. If it doesn’t have a place, it’s not in my house. Medicines go in the medicine drawer, electricity bills go in the electricity bill folder and that folder goes in the folders drawer and so on and so forth. Oreo said… Sure. 

Now everything goes in anywhere it can otherwise it invariably goes into my new shredding machine named Oreo. 

You see where I am going with this? Because I seriously have no idea. 

Ah well, let's find out. 

When you think of a good dog, what comes to your mind? A dog who doesn’t pee and potty at home, doesn’t destroy your stuff, listens to you & can do cute tricks. Right? Atleast that’s what came to my mind. In all my research to be a super awesome parent to Oreo, I read so much material it’s not funny. History of dogs, evolution from wolves to dogs, what dogs do in their natural habitat, how have they evolved to live with humans and the works. Not because you need to be an expert in the history of dogs to raise one but I just wanted to know what I am dealing with. And oh my god people do a lot of stuff out there! 

So I decided I’m going to be this super dog parent and raise the best damn dog in the world. (Why? God knows!) By the time Oreo was 7 months old, he was impulse trained (that is basically eating manners, you can keep the food and treat in front of the dog but he won’t eat it till you tell him to), could sit, stand, lie down, roll and jump on command, ran 30 minutes in the morning, played football, tag, tug and fetch. 

Now that’s a good dog in the making right? He still had a few things I was working on like jumping on people, taking things that were not his, eating inedible things and a few more. But I was so sure it would take me maybe another month at max to train him out of them. 

While all of this was going on there was one thing that did keep bothering me. What’s the right food for a dog? I have lived and grown up with dogs all my life. I knew what I could and couldn’t feed him, I just didn’t know if it was the best for him or not. I said I am doing so many things, why not consult an expert here too. So one thing led to another and I landed up speaking to a canine nutritionist.

She asked me some very basic questions that I couldn’t really answer in-spite of all my research and studies (and believe me, I am pretty thorough). 

The question was: How many hours does a Labrador in his/her working environment sleep? 

So I went back to the drawing board. Turns out the answer is 16 hours minimum. 

In my making of my super dog, Oreo at 9 months slept for 8 hours. At best 10 hours. 

And then a few more questions: 

Why did my dog eat non-edible things? Because my dog couldn’t think. 

Why could my dog not think? Because he was always excited. 

Why was he always excited? Because I always kept teaching or making him do something and gave treats and other forms of attention.  

Why did I always keep teaching him something? Because while I was growing up I always heard people around me tell me that “his dog is so good, he listens to everything” 

Who are these people who said so? Everyone. Mom, dad, relatives, friends etc. 

What did they really know about dogs? Nothing. 

Ouch. 

Circling back to the drawing board, turned out I was teaching my dog obedience and ridding him off his own intelligence to figure a situation, make a decision and take an action. 

How many dogs in the wild die of eating things they aren't suppose to?

Answer: NONE. 

Why?

Answer: Because animals are intelligent and have a brain that functions and instincts that dictate their actions and save their lives. 

I wanted to puke when I started reading the 25th and the 26th and the 27th google search pages on a dog’s life instead of the first 10. In ‘my’ idea of making my dog thrive and becoming the best dog parent there is, I made my baby dog loose his mind and work with mine. What I had was a dog that couldn’t differentiate edible from non-edible, a dog that couldn’t sleep unless I made him sleep, a dog that couldn’t calm down if I didn’t command him to sit and stay. I almost broke my dog because somehow, somewhere I heard good dogs are dogs that listen and can do things we ask them to. 

Oreo couldn’t sleep for 10 hours let alone 16 even if he wanted to do. Because I didn’t give him the chance to ever do what he wanted or use his brain. I always told him what to do. So now I had to reverse the whole process. Thankfully I got the chance to learn this when he is still very young. So hopefully I’ll now teach him to trust me & himself instead of obey me. I won’t put food out in front of him and count till 30 while he is drooling away before letting him eat and I won’t take away what he picks up because he shares the house with me and doesn’t live here under my mercy.

But take this learning and put it in your own life. Who told you that success means a swanky house, a fancy car and your face on a magazine cover? No answer. You cannot undo this want even if you wanted to. But who exactly told you that this is what success is? No one & everyone.

Sitting on the floor, cross-legged and eating with your hand off your plate on the ground is primitive. Eating on a table with fancy china, knowing how to carve meat and eating with a fork and knife is classy. High-society. 

My father & mother are simple folks from a small town in Assam. But everytime they come to Mumbai to visit me & we go out to eat, they eat with spoons & forks. No matter how much I tell them that its perfectly ok if they use their hands and usually I use my hands anyway, they struggle but still use the spoons, forks & knives. Who told them that was a good thing? 

No one & everyone.  

The British taught us Indian this. Our parents led it on by sending us to fancy schools, our schools pushed forward the idea in developing minds. And we learnt it. Quickly. I mean for god’s sake we have something called “finishing” schools that teach women manners and well-roundedness. Apparently well-roundedness comes from learning a foreign language, horse riding, baking, knitting, communication skills, etiquettes, grooming and then some. In my boarding school we had formal dinners where we had to dress up formally and eat “English” meals with fancy cutlery in 3rd and 4th grades. I am not saying those are bad things to learn. Good on you if you know The British way. But shouldn't you also be taught the Indian way and then get to decide for yourself what's better for you? My boarding school never taught me how to eat with hands. In-fact they didn't allow it. 

India has the “thali” system, the west has “buffets” but every classy event in India is a buffet. Not a thali. They told us this is good and we listened. We lost our intelligence to decide for ourselves.  

Newton’s opposing force came & hit me on my face. 

I was in the state of ‘continuous doing’ from conception till Oreo made me stop & think. But I cannot stop wanting that swanky house and that fancy car. Now who said that's a bad thing?

I can want a swanky house if I want and no one's stopping me from getting one. But the questions here are, is that swanky house 'your' definition of success? Do you want it because 'you' want it or because you were told only successful people live in swanky houses? Those are for you to answer.  

As for me, I didn’t get a chance to define what success means for me. I just know what I have to do next and next and next all the way till I die. I know that if I get that swanky house today, my parents, friends and everyone I know will be proud of me and will tell their kids & loved ones to work hard like I do so that they can own swanky houses like mine as well. Just like I was told, "his dog is so good, he does everything he is told". 

Tomorrow there will be a swanky house and then I'll want a second holiday one. The world set this up for me before I was born and I just agreed. Then I took it one step further and believed it. Then I took it a few more steps further and made my life about getting it. And now I can’t stop wanting it. And there is no end to this. 

But I too figured it out early enough so hopefully I’ll be able to reverse it and use my intelligence instead of my submission to the world’s idea of ‘good’ & ‘great’. Hopefully I’ll be able to define good, great, success & failure for my own self and not go by what the world says it is. 

It’s not going to be easy. But I have a feeling that it’s going to be fulfilling. 

That’s why The Producer & The Pooch. This blog is going to be the story of how a producer & a pooch navigated their way through life using the only thing that’s absolutely our own. Our choices.