ask babu varma what animal he likes best as a pet and he wouldnt have an answer all of them i cant choose he would say over the course of his 60 years he has had dogs cats fish birds monkeys squirrels a baby crow a turtle and even a civet cat as pets i consider them all my children everyone says im a universal pappy not just to my two daughters laughs babu who even prefers to be addressed as pappy it all started when he was five years old when his mother got him a puppy he says that is how my love for dogs began when i was medical student i had 17 dogs in my rented house if one of them passed away i would have a breakdown and my classmates would find it hard to console me that was just the beginning and unlike many others pappy continued with his animal love after he got married and had children all of whom shared his love for animals once i came across a baby monkey in my uncles rubber estate the workers had shot his mother dead i took him home and named him raman he was with us for the next 20 years he was so funny he would cover his head with a shawl like humans do and play on his swing but one day one of our guests gave him a joint just for fun poor thing went berserk after smoking it and tore the files of a munsiff who lived next door he was chained for a while afterwards but i couldnt bear to see him that way and freed him says pappy his next pet momo was a civet cat he was let free in the compound but loved to travel with us in car his head poking out of the window one day we found a baby crow in the middle of the road it was night and he seemed injured so we took him with us we named him toto he would come flying down for food every day and go back to his tree one day he didnt come back after having food and we realised that toto had become independent every animal responds to humans according to pappy we had plenty of turtles living in our pond and one of them was very affectionate when we called her name unni she would swim to the surface and wait for us to pick her up she loved to bask in the sun so we installed a table in the middle of the pond we kept her children too and named them sebastian and ariel but we had to be careful about letting guests near the turtles because people have only one reason for it to eat them till we called up the guest and got back the turtle the children would cry pappy leads a retired life now and his sole animal companion is his pet