The travails of being a dog (or a bitch)

The dog is supposed to be man's best friend, on account of its being wafaadaar (loyal). Your dog will never bite you, unless you do or abet in something really horrid to it, like make it listen to Himesh Reshammiya sing. It guards your house - yes, even the chihuahua has shown remarkable pugnacity when cornered. Certain species can sniff for bombs when trained to do so. They roll over, play dead, and even help the elderly and the disabled cross the road.

Most dog owners feed their canines the best dogfood money can buy. We feed them Pedigree and other leading brands. In India, in addition to a bowl of milk, we feed them roti, and boneless chicken to go with it. We give them those chew-sticks to savor while we concern ourselves with more important things.

Dogs, like human beings, have also featured in many popular works of fiction and of course, the real world. Pointofvyuh, a puppy, currently holds the record for the most googled dog name in a calendar month. Tin Tin had Snowy to accompany him on his sojourns across the seas. Toto from The Wizard Of Oz, Laika of the Sputnik 1 fame, Milo from The Mask, and of course Tiger, which is what every dog in Bollywood has to put up with, are others that immediately spring to mind.

Certain people in the English rap industry have been so influenced by this remarkable species, that they imbibe it in their name, albeit with slight variations. Just ask Snoop Dogg and Nate Dogg.

After all that, why do we desecrate the dog? Saying "kutte!" ((you) dog!), or simply "kutte! kaminey! mai tera khoon pee jaaonga! " ((you) dog! (you) wretch! I will drink your blood!) can be particularly rude to or frightening for the person it is directed towards. "You sly dog, you!" is however, an anomaly, as dogs aren't really sly.

In the English language, the female dog, the bitch, is generally agreed upon in intellectual circles as a contemptuous curse. Bitch is quite a versatile word, in that it is also a verb; to bitch means to talk ill of someone, generally behind his/her back.

Since its inception, it has taken many new forms, and continues to evolve still. The (exceedingly) informal greeting "Yo bitch, what up?" does not in any way mean to belittle the person to whom it is said. Another noteworthy facet of this word is that it has transcended limits imposed by gender, as in, the person to whom it was said may or may not be a woman, as might be inferred by mistake, although, "Yo dawg, what up?" almost always is directed to a guy. In "He's my bitch!", the 'he' is supposed by the speaker to be a servile minion.

Certain enthusiastic linguists have extended the way it is spelt to "beech" and more popularly, "biatch". For example, the seemingly abstruse "It's raining like a biatch! Let's go inside!" acts as a superlative and merely serves to inform the listener that it is raining quite heavily, and that they should go inside.

Lost in all of this lies the unanswered question - What makes the dog species so vulnerable to outbursts of both love and contempt?