As I was standing around a local temple in Dodda Gubbi, Karnataka, supposedly trying to acquaint myself with some local worship practices during the popular Ganesha festival, these two water buffalo wandered down the street towards us. Cows of all sorts enjoy great freedom in India and seem to lead semi autonomous lives of their own safe in the assumption that anyone who tried to disturb them in any way would be brutally massacred by a mob of righteous Hindi citizenry. I was amazed by this show of independence having come from a land where a cow is a brief and tedious transition between a fetus and a steak.