The wow bhow
October 2014
By Satish Purohit
Buffy’s Doggy Revelations, Celia and Tarun Cherian, Creator’s Child Publications, INR 300, 156 pages
May be, they should have rules that forbid excessively emotional Pisceans with a pronounced fondness for romantic poetry from reviewing books. I have great capacity for beliefs that stretch credulity, which is not a healthy trait in a reviewer. This is particularly true with books like the one being reviewed. When I used to be a journalist they told us that a dog biting man is not news; it is only news when a man bites a dog.
At LP, I was told that carrying news on men biting dogs would not do. Doing this would strengthen such tendencies in men prone to biting dogs. Either something Freudian like a wet nurse who had handled the man too roughly as a baby had probably brought about such aggression, or it could be a past-life karmic debt where the biter had once been the ‘bitee’. Whatever the man’s story, we would only do stories on men and dogs who had no inclination whatsoever to bite each other, and both parties were actually great friends.
The book being reviewed is perfect by that measure.
It is about a dog talking to a girl, a man and to god/s and spirit guides. Buffy, the mystic woof, has elaborate (and deep) messages to share on life, living, spirituality, smelling anuses and healing. And no, this is not a work of fiction.
The one word that comes to mind as I read the book is ‘amateur’. Amateur because the book is foolishly brave in its sharing of insights into a dog’s inner life that few would believe: dogs travel astrally, they have a dog God, they decode the state of mind of a creature by smelling its poop, remember past lives, and understand reincarnation. The book is also amateur in its use of multiple fonts, underlining, and italicising of lines for emphasis on every page. This makes the reading somewhat tedious.
In conclusion: A wise book, a warm book, a book rich in surprises that inspire awe, deepen faith in the unseen, and often, stretch credulity.