Paws, people and the price of intolerance
A whisper post. And within days, our lively campus fell silent. The familiar sight of Bagha stretching lazily, some cats purring under friendly pats and the soft meows that blended into our daily routine, all vanished. A debate about hygiene spiraled into something deeper: How fragile our sense of coexistence has become. How immaturely we handle simple real life scenarios.
On 23rd October, a single post on a Facebook group sparked heated debates between those who did not want the cats around and those who defended their right to stay, offering solutions to hygiene and safety concerns. However an unsettling change swept the campus. Hameem Sharar Juveen (Senior, MNS) told, “On 27th October, when I went to refill the cat food-bowls near the entrance, none of the 10-12 cats I saw everyday showed up. I went looking for Bagha but he was nowhere to be found.”
Students soon realized the once lively garden, filled with playful kittens, had fallen silent, with untouched bowls of food. Zarin Tasnim Raisa (Senior, CSE), who has been caring for the cats along with a group of friends shared, “We recognized one of the missing kittens from a post and managed to track down 5 campus cats near the Badda U-loop, Rampura bridge and DIT road but one was already dead in the Badda U-loop. All of the rescued cats are now in different foster cares.”
But beneath the tragedy there is a difficult truth: Maturity. The whole fiasco unfolded not because of the cats but because people were not adult enough to deal with differences. This shows our collective inability to tolerate things that don’t align with our personal comfort zones. Students expressed their disappointment on social media. As Mariea Amzad Sawda (Senior, SoL) shared “The cats were a part of our daily lives and we cared deeply for them. What hurt most was the abruptness. If we were informed priorly, we would have found them proper homes.”
The loss of furry companions should not just make us sad; it should awaken us to think. If a campus cannot nurture coexistence within its own walls, how can a nation do it on a larger scale? Today, our unchecked intolerance made a few innocent cats disappear. Tomorrow it could be far greater: societal harmony, someone’s peace or even someone’s life. Because when empathy fades, it’s not just animals or people who suffer, it’s the very soul of our community that begins to disappear.
