Leave no child behind
We’ll be completing our first year of marriage in a month or so and as is the norm, we keep hearing the four most boring words that an Indian couple is supposed to hear whenever an elderly person is met out of courtesy: “Good news kab hai?” I don’t blame those who expect babies from us because some things are concrete is life. Society is one of them. Without children, there is no tomorrow to look forward. Everything that is in order is apparently so for the sake of the generation that succeeds us. We are doing for our successors, right? Wrong. Not really. We are doing it for ourselves under the disguise of progress. Our grandkids won’t want to live in a shitty world where the water is harsh, the air is grey and the soil has polythene embedded in it. But then, we need to have an excuse to continue our scam. Without a delusion of future, we’d be completely lost in the food chain. All species thrive on the merits of procreation. Those who failed this test are either extinct or are on the endangered list. Pandas are an exception, of course.
Coming back to humans, i genuinely believe that it’s time to stop reproducing. We’d done more than enough damage to this planet. I mean, there’s nothing left to achieve or prove. We aren’t scared of anything. A blue whale might be a 100 feet long but it doesn’t intimidate our ocean liners. We’ve overcome everything our ancestors set out to defeat in the course of our evolution. Except our ego. Over the thousands of years we dedicated to uplifting ourselves, we displayed our narrow interests again and again. We broke the laws of nature so many times that we’ve reached the point of no return. No amount of sewing can stitch up the cracks or the holes around us. We created them. We’re continuing to create them. It’s a process which can only be curtailed by a drop in our numbers. We are at 7.5 billion right now and thanks to gods of medical advancement, this figure is bound to climb north. To put this number into perspective, about 10,000 years ago, lions were the second most widespread land mammal after humans. By 1901, there were barely 200,000 lions left in the world. Today, there are more statues of lions than lions themselves (less than 25,000). We, on the other hand, continue to be the most abundant land mammal on the planet.
To cut a long story short, everything boils down to pure economics. More people means more demand. More demand means more supply. More supply means more exploitation of resources.
It’s 2017 and going by the access we’ve got to information today, if we can’t see what’s happening, then we deserve the overpopulated mess we are stepping into. So, going back to the original rant, it’s high time we stopped multiplying like cockroaches. Maybe we should move on and let Earth breathe easy for a change. Remember what happened at Chernobyl? The environment knows how to repair itself provided we stay the fuck away. Furthermore, nobody is going to miss us or our monuments. That’s for sure. All the flora and fauna are going to rejoice when we leave. The birds will be shitting on our memorials/monuments as usual.
The bad news is we are so hooked to our daily dose of mundanity that we don’t have the mental strength to learn from our mistakes. The good news is you can always adopt an orphan and give her a chance to make you a better person.
