Chennai: Today’s children may not understand when elders speak about how a milkman on a cycle would deliver cow’s pure milk in a steel vessel to their houses everyday without fail.
With Maatu Pongal being celebrated today, where cows are decorated and worshiped, News Today throws light on a man who is on a mission to preserve and love cows.
At LIC Nagar, Fourth Street, Madipakkam, a plot of land is home to 12 cows, four calves, pigeons, ducks, a cock and hens.
P Prabhu, a resident of Balakrishna Nagar, Velacheri has been running the farm for one-and-a-half years. He runs it along with his friend Gopalakrishnan.
When this reporter met him, he was on his two-wheeler with two big steel vessels, distributing milk in glass bottles around the locality.
Prabhu calls it ‘Integrated farming’. The farm does not have a name and it is located right in the middle of rows and rows of houses. So doesn’t the presence of cows bother the neighbours?
“It does not, in fact they are very supportive as they get pure milk. We keep the premises clean,” Prabhu said.
When Prabhu had a child who is now four, he was appalled at the quality of milk being sold in packets. “I wondered what liquid it was. It did not taste like milk,” he says and for his child he purchased a cow from Gujarat. That is when others began asking for the same.
An engineering graduate who was well placed as a product manager in a private firm, he gave up his job, started buying cows and began the farm.
The cows arrived one after the other, most of them from Gujarat and some from Ongole in Andhra Pradesh. Now 40 families in the neighbourhood get milk from the cows.
He takes care of them with love and is involved in the milking and distribution process hands-on.
He shares stories of some of them- ‘Gundu’, ‘Rudhramma devi’ and of course, there is one ‘Bahubali’.
“Bahubali kicked our staff, Somasundaram, when he arrived on the farm and ran like a crazy one around here. We had a hard time bringing him under control him,” he recalls.
This is the second Pongal with the cows, “We treat them like Gods. They are washed and a Pongal feast is prepared for them. We have a pooja for them and they are beautifully decorated,” he says.
“I am satisfied and happy with what I am doing,’ he concludes, adding that he is in the process of getting two acers of land in Karaikudi to expand the work.