Last week, on the very day a new entertainment channel was being launched, I was trying to feed my baby. I dipped his baby spoon in the baby bowl and shovelled into his mouth a spoonful of the amorphous white goop that babies eat.
He chewed on it for a bit, made a face, and said, “farrago”.
When I didn’t react, he shook his head, and looked at me sadly. As I moved closer to wipe his dripping chin, he ejected the entire contents of his mouth into my face, saying once more, “farrago”.
I had assumed it was baby talk. But, thanks to the great Shashi Tharoor’s tweeted description of a programme on the aforementioned entertainment channel, I realised, belatedly, that my infant son had been trying to tell me not to feed him “a confused mixture” of banana, dosa, potato and Cerelac.
Normal babies start speaking simple words when they are 18-24 months old. This little fellow is all of ten months old. And his first-ever spoken word was not ‘amma’ or ‘appa’ or ‘poda’ but ‘farrago’. A word I didn’t even recognise, despite being a self-proclaimed man of letters. A word no one in our extended family or clan or neighbourhood had ever heard of. So how come his vocabulary is so advanced? You probably know the answer: garbh sanskar .
Frankly, I’m appalled at the recent brouhaha over efforts to revive the ancient Indian tradition of garbh sanskar . Some have even branded it as some sort of racist quackery inspired by Nazi Germany.
But garbh sanskar , as the website of the organisation promoting it states, “is a scientifically proven fact” and “an amazing way of teaching/educating and bonding with unborn baby in womb during pregnancy”. Its objective is to produce uttam santati who would help build a Samarth Bharat .
The benefits of garbh sanska r are well-documented in the Vedas. To mention just a few: Your uttam santati super-baby would cross development milestones such as crawling, speaking, and opening a Facebook account much sooner than ordinary babies.
It would be more creative, less stubborn, and do potty at regular intervals between 9.30 a.m. and 5 p.m. only on weekdays and alternate Saturdays. And, it would fall asleep the minute you want it to. I promise to transfer ₹15 lakh to the savings account of anyone who can point to one thing that’s objectionable in any of this.
The science behind garbh sanskar is quite simple. The ether is full of jobless divine souls who are like venture capitalists (or angels) looking for investment opportunities. If you, as a couple, are planning to engage in conjugal activity with some kind of tangible output in mind, you must convince these investor souls to invest in your combined gene pool.
Trust me, this isn’t as difficult as it sounds. All you need to do is spend three months purifying your sperm (or egg) by eating the right ayurvedic herbs, doing surya namaskar and restricting your carnal engagements to the time prescribed by planetary configurations.
In addition, if you can demonstrate sustainable growth in your good karma at a CAGR of 18%-20% or above, not only would your bursts of coition turn more productive, they would also be more likely to entrap a divine soul, which would, in due course, materialise as a high-performing super-baby.
To my mind, there is only one flaw in the super-babies programme. Take my own case, for instance.
I am counting on my son to pay off my home loan, sponsor my post-retirement world tour, and finance the publication of my controversial autobiography.
Thanks to garbh sanskar , I am certain that he will grow up to be taller, fairer, and, unlike me, intelligent enough to clear IIT-JEE by the age of 13 and become Director (Global Operations) at Goldman Sachs by 21. But there is no guarantee that he won’t quit his job to become a human rights activist, or worse, live in sin with an anti-national.
In other words, the baby customisation process needs fine-tuning. I therefore urge the government of India to scrap the MGNREGA and invest the money saved in modernising India’s ‘super-babies’ programme.
As for the deluded souls who can’t stop criticising garbh sanskar , I’m sure they either don’t have kids or don’t plan to have them or are such terrible parents that their offspring, once they grow up, would waste no time in despatching them to a geriatric home after diddling them out of their gold, property, and biometrics.
