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Yesterday while walking on Kopikar road (the main shopping district of Hubli) I noticed an elephant ambling slowly towards me from a perpendicular street.

Atop the elephant sat its owner, and together they slowly made their way down the busy street, completely unconcerned about the bustling traffic surrounding them.

It's hard to understand just why I felt so overwhelmed by this elephant.  As it walked past me, I shyly reached out to touch the hide of its belly but was immediately whacked away by a powerful swish of its tail.  In that moment of contact however, I felt this kind of insane jolt of something!

Some kind of sudden connection with the power of nature.  I mean, in the states, when do we really every actually have the chance to stand right next to a giant elephant and just kind of view it in perspective to your own tiny size?

Or rather, let's think of the things that we usually touch in our first world lives.  We touch plastic, metals, textiles, rubber, maybe some vegetation (but not often for most people). Depending on your personality, maybe there is some human contact thrown in there, if you have a pet, perhaps you can touch the fur of a dog or a cat.  But I never realized how removed-- how detached-- I was from the sheer power of the natural world until I touched this elephant.  This was literally the largest land animal to walk the planet and it was simply bustling with life.  To think colonies of cells (like those in humans) have been collected together to work to create this elephant is amazing.

There was something sad of course that this grand example of the power of the natural world was being used as a man's livelihood, chained and was walking the streets of a very elephant-inappropriate urban jungle.  But it does bring to attention what is right and wrong with the way that we treat the living things on this planet-- there is something fundamentally off about surrounding living things with non-organic materials.  There is a prison-like quality present.