Anyone who has ever visited India will know that cows are everywhere, just wandering the streets, eating cardboard boxes or flowers off stalls - and generally getting in the way and making a nuisance of themselves ...but they are sacred to Hindus, hence the title of this piece.

The beasts look nothing like a European cow - more like an emaciated Biblical ox, with a strange hump on their necks and they usually have long, dangerous horns - which makes squeezing past them on narrow alleyways extremely risky. The horns are also sometimes decorated with tinsel, or painted in garish colours.

It's a cow, Jim, but not as we know it!