Sex has many uses.
It was a landmark for me when I stayed at Janakpuri in New Delhi in the late
nineties. Anyone who sought directions to my house would be told: “When you
come from Hari Nagar, cross the Jail Road and drive straight. When you find SEX
on the left side, take a turn to the right. You are in B3B where I stay.”
SEX was written in
red neon light in at least 1500 point so that it was visible from a long
distance. It was the clinic of a Sexologist whom I never had an occasion to get
acquainted with, though I stayed in his neighborhood for several years. I often
wondered why he advertised SEX when he should have advertised his services.
Perhaps he was following the Hippocratic oath!
I remembered SEX
when I read a report that the Ayush Ministry has issued a booklet to advise
pregnant women on how to conduct themselves once they are in the family way.
The ministry wants them to have healthy children who will do the nation proud.
We know how such healthy boys climbed up an old structure at Ayodhya in 1992
and brought it down in a few hours to the eternal glory of “India, that
is Bharat” while a healthy woman chanted, “Ek dhakka aur do…”
When I started my
career as a journalist in 1973, my beat included Health and Family Planning
Ministry. The minister in charge was Dr Karan Singh. I have attended several of
his Press conferences where he briefed the nation on the progress to rid India
of small pox.
I still remember
the little chat I had with the minister the day he announced that small pox
that killed millions of people, including my grandfather, has been eradicated
once and for all. The samosa he offered tasted better. Those days the ministry
had such mundane concerns as fighting polio and proving the Malthusian theory
wrong.
Today Narendra
Modi’s Ayush Ministry takes upon itself such noble causes as creating a nation
of healthy people. Hitler, too, had visualized a nation that was free of all
disabled people, Communists and Christians and consisted of only blue-eyed
Aryans, tall and handsome, brilliant like the doctors of death who sent the
unwanted, the handicapped and the Jews to the gas chambers at Dachau and Auschwitz.
Here the idea was
just to advise women what they should do during their pregnancy. First and
foremost, they should avoid lust.
Dictionary defines
lust as “sexual appetite, desire for physical union, biological urge” etc. Now
how would a woman become pregnant without lust in the first place? I am sure
married men and women would agree with me that their babies were the result of
an accidental collision between the man’s sperm and the woman’s egg over which
they had little control.
In other words,
“lust” is the pre-requisite for pregnancy. Like all creations of God, human
beings have sex for pleasure, not for baby-making which is a by-product. In
fact, without lust, life is not possible. I do not know whether there is anyone
who has sex only to make babies. In that case, they should stop having sex when
the requisite number of children are born to them. Then, Lalu Yadav and Rabri
Devi would not have produced nine children. True, I know the pleasures of
living in such a large family because, to use Indian English, my in-laws had as
many children as Bihar’s first couple.
The Ayush Ministry
guidelines caution pregnant women against having sex during pregnancy. At a
time when the Europeans and the Americans knew only the Missionary Position,
our treatise on sex called
Kama Sutra, authored by Maharishi
Vatsyayana Mallanaga, described 254 positions, some of them specifically
recommended for pregnant women.
It is strange that
the Modi government which takes extraordinary pride in things ancient wants
pregnant women to forget the immense possibilities that the Maharishi opened up
through his Sanskrit text that still dazzles foreigners.
We have people like
Ambani living in a 24-storied house where millions of litres of water are used
every month to water the plants on the balconies and to fill up the swimming
pools. However, for a vast majority of the people who live in huts and
tenements, the only form of enjoyment is the sex they have. I wonder why the
ministry wants to deprive them of even this enjoyment in the name of having
smart and healthy children.
The ministry wants
pregnant women to take rest, read about great personalities and have only noble
thoughts. A few years ago I met a home worker who was younger than my
daughter-in-law. She would have wondered why we gave so much care to our DiL
when she said that she delivered all her babies at home, cut the umbilical cord
herself and was back to work in a couple of days after the delivery. I wondered
what use were the guidelines to this lady who worked so that she could feed her
children and support her good-for-nothing husband who found only entertainment
in her.
If the ministry had
said that pregnant women should abjure beef I could have understood it because
we live at a time when High Court judges are more interested in telling the
world how reverential the cow was and not in reducing the number of cases pending
before them.
The guidelines have
gone one step ahead and wants pregnant women not to eat non-vegetarian food at
all. I know how Atal Bihari Vajpayee used to go to Himachal Pradesh to eat
trout, a very tasty river water fish. Ask those who served him at Kumarakom in
Kerala where he stayed for a few days while he was Prime Minister and they will
tell you how much he relished Karimeen Pollichathu. His aides had difficulty in
restraining him from eating chicken and mutton kebabs beyond the quantity allowed.
I have eaten
several times with a Sangh Parivar “ideologue”, one of the few who writes good
English among such ideologues, who always ordered beef dishes while I chose
humbler chicken preparations. When they can have their Hindutva and their meat
dishes together, why should the poor pregnant women be deprived of animal
protein?
In every culture,
pregnant women are given better food. It is only in India where women —
pregnant, married or unmarried — are allowed to eat only the leftover food
after all the men in the family have eaten.
In this regard, I
do not forget the resolution the present Gujarat Chief Minister has made to
make Gujarat the first vegetarian state in the country. Of course, he can
afford to eat dry fruits like cashew nuts, walnuts and other nuts which are
good substitutes for beef, chicken and mutton, and drink gallons of milk but
what about the poor Gujarati for whom even fried
dhokla is
a delicacy they cannot afford.
I am not a
nutritionist or scientist but I know that animal protein is also necessary for
good health. We all know about the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt. It is not on
Upma and Iddli that he runs and wins the Gold medal in Olympics but on solid
meat. We all know the plight Baba Ramdev, the so-called ultimate in Yoga, had when
he sat on a hunger strike for a few days at Ramlila Maidan. In contrast was the
Northeastern Irom Sharmila who braved years of self-inflicted deprivation for a
cause she considered dear.
The ministry has
asked pregnant women to read about great personalities or think about them. I
wonder how many Indian women can read, let alone have access to reading
material. And who are the great personalities that they should read about?
Should they read about Bharata in whose name India is known?
Should they
read
Abhijnanasakuntalam written by Kalidasa, where the
maiden Shakuntala ignored Durvasa's demands to be welcomed as a guest because
she was daydreaming about her lover Dushyanta? The Rishi cursed her that her
lover would forget her. Should they read about Sita Devi, who was sent to the
forest in a state of pregnancy just because some silly men gossiped about her
and the gossip reached the palace?
Or, should they
read about Brahmarshi Vishvamitra, who composed the Gayatri Mantra, to practice
self-restraint? He was the wisest of the wise who understood the full meaning
of the Mantra, unlike me who knows only how to recite it. He could not restrain
himself when the beautiful Menaka appeared before him and unleashed the weapon
of charm. How can they control their lust after reading about him?
Or, should they
read about the great modern-day personalities like Modi and Amit Shah. If they
read about them, they will invariably read about how pregnant Muslim women were
treated by the warriors of Hindutva during the Gujarat riots.
They will also read
about Amit Shah’s arrest and stay in a jail for his alleged involvement in a
fake encounter case? I am sure the ministry would not like pregnant women to
agonize over the virtual widowhood a wife suffers when her husband is an
all-powerful leader who has no time for her.
Of course, the
ministry wants pregnant women to hang good pictures in their bedroom. Which are
those good pictures? Can’t the ministry give the famous government calendar in
which every picture is that of Modi? One of the most pleasing calendar pictures
is that of Shakuntala, who is hurt, and uses it as a pretext to see her lover
once more. Ravi Varma’s picture is not the one for the pregnant lady to keep in
her bedroom because it will remind them about the ordeal she underwent because
of a quick-tempered person’s curse.
The ministry should
publish ideal pictures and distribute them through the government institutions
like the ICDS centres, instead of just publishing advisories. Let me admit, I
was not surprised by the guidelines because, a few weeks earlier, at a workshop
organised by the Arogya Bharati, the RSS’ medical wing, in Kolkata, it was
claimed that it possesses a method to produce fair, tall, and ‘customised’
babies.
This ridiculous
method involves undergoing three months of purification (sex only when the
planets align in an auspicious manner), followed by no sex until the baby is
conceived, supplemented by a strict Ayurvedic diet to purify eggs and sperm. It
is an article of faith for Modi and Company.
After all, it was
not long ago that Modi said in Mumbai while addressing scientists, “We all read
about Karna in the Mahabharata. If we think a little more, we realise that the
Mahabharata says Karna was not born from his mother’s womb. This means that genetic
science was present at that time. That is why Karna could be born outside his
mother’s womb.”
They believe that
we had better aviation technology at that time than now. For instance,
airplanes can move only in one direction. It cannot fly backward or sideward,
whereas the Pushpak Viman mentioned in the Ramayana could fly in any direction
and it did not need long runways to take off or land.
Today we have the
technology to connect people. India has emerged as a formidable space power.
All it needs is to send a genius like Amit Shah to the Moon to prove to the
world that we are no less than the Americans, the French, the Russians
and the Chinese when it comes to space technology.
We can find out
which is the most appropriate time for making babies by using satellites to
determine when the stars align themselves in a particular formation. We can
declare those days as national holidays when couples can be encouraged to
copulate. It will have many advantages. The children born as a result of
conditioned copulation would be healthier and brighter. We can reduce further
the spending on health, which is only less than 2 per cent of the GDP.
The money can be
used to print pictures women should watch during pregnancy. The Sangh Parivar
can be asked to prepare booklets containing stories of great personalities from
the Krita Yuga or Satya Yuga to Kali Yuga to be distributed free of cost to
pregnant women. Baba Ramdev’s outfit, Patanjali, can be given the whole
responsibility of providing pregnant women honey, Patanjali noodles and
biscuits to wean them away from meat-eating.
The cost of all
this is peanuts, as the population so created will ask the government to rid
the nation of all the remaining Congressis, Communists and meat-eaters.
What else can be
expected from leaders who see Mahatma Gandhi about whom Albert Einstein had
famously said, “Generations to come, it may well be, will scarce believe that
such a man as this one ever in flesh and blood walked upon this Earth” as just
a shrewd Bania?
With due apologies
to Tagore lovers, let me paraphrase one of his poems, more in sorrow than in
anger:
Where the mind is
with fear and the head is held low
Where knowledge is
controlled by the Republic
Where the country
has been broken up into fragments
By narrow communal
walls
Where words come
out from the depth of falsehood
Where tireless
striving stretches its arms towards deception
Where the clear
stream of reason has lost its way
Into the dreary
desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is
led forward by propaganda
Into ever-narrowing
thought and action
In that hell of
falsehood, my Father, let my country sleep.
The writer, a
senior journalist, can be reached at
ajphilip@gmail.com
(Published on 19th June 2017, Volume XXIX, Issue 25)
