A lion was lying on the meadow under a mango tree, taking a midday nap. I moved to the next habitat in the zoo, where two young bears were playing together. A boy was looking at the bears, standing on the step of the fence. "Karadiye, karadiye," he called the bears aloud, which can be translated from Malayalam as “Hey bear, hey bear.” I had heard many Malayalees in the zoo, even though the zoo is located in a region where the local language is Kannada. I am also Malayali. I was curious about the call. Do the bears understand the boy was calling them? Some animals can understand words if they are trained to do so. However, there is no chance that the bears are trained. Does he, a seven years old or so, think the bears can understand that he was calling them? Calling someone involves several factors, most of which we are not aware of. You will use a name or/and an exclamation word like hey to attract the person. A person may look at you even if you call another person with the same name. Even if you don’t use the correct name, you may get attention since humans tend to look around when they hear someone call someone else. It shows that it is not just the right name that makes people look at you but the utterance that attracts people to look at you. This behaviour applies to most animals, including bears. The most effective way of attracting a person consists of many factors - correct name, right language, sufficient loudness, etc. The boy may not be thinking or aware of the elements of an effective call. He might have called many animals in the past, and most of them might have looked at him, which might have taught the boy how to get the attention of an animal. There were a man and a woman with the boy. I presumed they were his parents. I was puzzled when I heard them talking in Kannada: How can the child speak Malayalam if the parents are Kannadigas? Suddenly, the boy jumped out of the fence and said something in Kannada. Only then I realised the boy was not Malayali. Later, I learnt that Malayalam and Kannada have the same word for bear.