It’s always embarrassment time when a father sits his son down to explain the facts of life. You know all about it, don’t you? he asks tentatively, after much hemming and hawing; the son nods and that’s that. The moment passes, duty is done, and it’s back to chess or television or whatever.
I once heard of a son responding to that question with, “Yeah, sure dad, what do you want to know?”
Imagine the shock of that cocky young man were he to be asked the same question today, and responds the same way thinking that nothing had changed. “I cried, your mother drank my tears, and here you are,” says the post-modern father.
This is the current scientific and judicial explanation, I am told, of all reproduction. Those who make their babies any other way are probably breaking some law or the other. Cry, and the world grows with you, laugh and you go to jail.
The technique was discovered by a judge of the Rajasthan High Court who was following the mating habits of peacocks. “They do not have sex,” he declared grandly, rather like George Mikes, the Hungarian writer who once suggested that the British do not have sex; they have hot water bottles instead. Scientists who have discovered universal truths from studying animals – Pavlov, Ross, Lorenz, Tinbergen – have often gone on to win the Nobel prize. The scientific name for the peacock is pova cristatus ; there is no scientific name for a high court judge talking through his wig.
We have not been given a deadline before which all reproduction must follow the new method, but believe me it is on the cards. Perhaps the Aadhaar card or the PAN card, maybe both will be made mandatory to the process, with anyone not possessing one or the other banned from crying or tear-licking.
For it is peacocks today, but who is not to say that it will not be humans tomorrow?
Already authorities tell us what to eat (and especially what not to), what to wear, whom to read, whom to banish across the border, which television channels to watch, which teams to cheer in a cricket match, and now here’s a senior member of the judiciary coming into our bedrooms and telling us there’s a more efficient way, at least for peacocks. Bollywood tear-jerkers will become popular among childless couples.
In the movie The Sleeper , Woody Allen, preserved through cryostasis, wakes up in the future to discover that human beings treat reproduction like a non-contact sport. It’s an out of body experience. “Ah!” he says rubbing his hands together, “the good old days, the good old days.” When our grandchildren read about how we made babies, they might have the same nostalgic reaction.
Remember, said, John Ruskin, the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies. No longer. By showing us how peacocks make more peacocks, they have taught us how humans can make more humans.
Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu
