For the love of dogs

Shyama, Tripod, Bhairava, Dr Moosa and 12 others rush to me when the gates are opened. These 16 dogs leap all over the place and raise a symphony of barks. My heart skips a beat, and my legs refuse to move, though Chinny Krishna and wife Nanditha are inviting me into their beautiful heritage home, set in a sprawling, tree-lined compound in the heart of the city. Apparently, this boisterous bunch of dogs is just giving me a warm welcome. “It is like how we greet a stranger and voice our ‘hellos’ and ‘how do you dos’. Only, they are much more exuberant and warm than us, and we don’t understand their barks,” Chinny says. Phew!

Likewise, at Aspick Engineering — Chinny’s firm which manufactures special purpose machines for the Departments of Atomic Energy and Space Research as well as for many large corporations in India and abroad — you’ll find over a dozen dogs relaxing in the MD’s cabin and outside, with meals (porridge in bowls) home-delivered to them, or in this case, office-delivered to them. 

A dog is only as good as its owner, Chinny Krishna, industrialist, animal lover and chairman of  Blue Cross of India, says. “It all depends on how they have been treated. If they have been given affection and friendship, they are friendly and give affection; if they have been shouted at and hit, they tend to attack too,” he sums up. Well Chinny’s bunch of dogs must have received a lot of affection and good vibes, seeing that they all settle down after their initial exuberance; they wander away and come back every now and then to rub their noses on my legs. One of them even settles down near my feet.  
Each of these mongrels has a story to tell. Tripod (so named because he has three legs, one leg had to be amputated) for instance, was dragged by the wheels of a motorbike, rescued and put up for adoption at the Blue Cross.

When nobody came forward to adopt her, Chinny simply brought her home. Daisy, the tall Harlequin Great Dane is a show dog bought for Rs 50, 000 and promptly abandoned by her owners when they discovered that she had a crooked gait. “They didn’t even want to wait until I could find a new home for her. What kind of people are we?” Chinny recalls with obvious distaste. Well, all these dogs are now happy at home – at Chinny’s.  
Chinny loves dogs, especially Indian mongrels (which we see roaming in the streets and which many of us love to hate). The Indian mongrel has it all, Chinny vouches. It has the intelligence of a Poodle, the loyalty of a Lassie, the bark of a Shepherd, the heart of a St Bernard, the spots of a Dalmatian, size of a Schnauzer and the speed of a Greyhound. If you want all these attributes in one pet, adopt an Indian mongrel, he recommends.
Obviously, this man loves dogs. But Chinny’s purview extends beyond passion. There is a practical side to it. Through the Animal Birth Control Program pioneered by the Blue Cross of India (which he incidentally co-founded with others in 1964 when he was a teenager), cities like Chennai are now rabies-free.

Going beyond passion
 “When we started ABC in 1966, we were laughed at,” he recalls. But Chinny and his friends persisted and began to spay/neuter all street dogs rescued by the Blue Cross. After treatment, the dogs were vaccinated and released at the same spot they had been picked up from. In 1995, the Chennai corporation finally came around and agreed to try out ABC, but with a rider, that the total cost of the programme was to be met by the Blue Cross. Blue Cross stuck to it and within six months, the results were promising, prompting the city corporation to bring more of the city under the ABC program.  
Chinny has many other successful doggy ideas up his sleeve. He got Blue Cross to link up with the Dr Dog program run by Animals Asia Foundation and now, dogs like Dr Moosa have been easing away the unexpressed strain and pain of many a special child. “Being with dogs is the best therapy in the world. They give such unconditional, open affection,” he says.

Chinny has also tried to talk to Moulvis and others to get them to do away with the sacrificing of goats for Bakr Eid; he has successfully campaigned to stop caging of parrots in the Madurai Meenakshi temple. He developed ‘Compufrog’, an interactive software programme that mimics dissection of animals in schools. Dr Chinny even distributes Compufrog free of cost. Because of Blue Cross’s dogged lobbying, the Indian government finally decided to ban the export of frogs’ legs from India and also ruled in favour of banning dissection at the school level. And it is clearly not a case of preaching sans practice. Chinny is a vegetarian, doesn’t use leather, and had even requested wife-to-be Nanditha to forego silk saris just before their wedding. 

As professor at IIT Madras, Chinny had lived by the dictum, “You can’t teach; you can only facilitate learning.” That’s right, this multifaceted man is a techno-industrialist who obtained his B Tech and M Tech. Degrees in Chemical Engineering from the University of Madras and followed it up with an MS and PhD in Management from the USA. He also happens to be an elected Life Fellow of the Institution of Engineers and the Indian Institution of Chemical Engineers.
 
Chinny rues the fact that as a society, we behave so callously with animals. “Every child has a great affection for dogs and all life in general, until we adults kill it,” Chinny says. The fact only gets reaffirmed when you see that at the Blue Cross center in Velacherry, Chennai, kids like Arpitha Rao and Tarinya Shekar happily clean puppy kennels during their holidays. In fact, most of the non-technical staff at animal care centres like Blue Cross happens to be volunteers who pitch in and help with their money and time — all for their love for animals.
 
When Chinny and others founded Blue Cross, the aim was to make the blue cross concept redundant — to see the emergence of a society where animals didn’t need this kind of a shelter. “Now I’m wiser. I’d just like to see Blue Cross become self-sufficient.”