A New Finding in the Field of Demographic Studies


This is a small piece but I decided this particular nugget has to be shared with sacredmediacow. A Biology textbook [Concise Biology Part II, Class IX, I.C.S.E, revised 2008 By Dr H S Vishnoi, published by Selina Publishers, New Delhi] on page 151 lists ‘lack of recreation’ as one of the causes behind the ‘population explosion in India.’ It goes on to elaborate that ‘poor standard of living and poverty provide no recreation other than sex.’ The class 10 student who brought this passage to my attention tells me her Biology teacher seemed to agree with this diagnosis even as the entire class of students giggled. I was reminded of my own Biology teacher in school, an excellent man who nevertheless could not keep a sick smirk from his face while teaching us the reproductive system of rabbits.
Not to over-interpret a simple instance, one nevertheless wonders if such nuggets are placed elsewhere in our text books in the manner of strategic landmines. The interesting thing here is – this is an ‘official’ view which a student in all likelihood will unthinkingly mug up and disgorge with or without conviction in her exam, and ‘unthinkingly’ may be the key word here. Between the ‘unthinking’ author and the ‘unthinking’ student, a soft, doughy and shapeless dogma is thus born and tucked away in the most cushioned part of the subconscious. Clearly, apart from the already extant subconscious, there is also a section of the subconscious steadily replenished with our many unthinking mental habits.
This ‘official’ view of poverty, sex and entertainment of course carries a number of assumptions. First, we have the unfeeling depiction of the poor as the brute! It seems, they ‘breed’, whereas we bear children! Then, poor people lack means of entertainment such as golf and computer games! Entertainment often leads to surges of the libidinous enthusiasm as the puritans from the days of the Elizabethan theatre or the critics of ancient samajas of the Asokan times in India would have us believe. Sex is just another genre, albeit a brutish one, of entertainment like football and cinema! Both sex and entertainment however seem to have a grim aspect – they can inflate populations! And so on and so forth! I expect such demographic frivolity will be found disagreeable even by the more enlightened among the race of rabbits, given the derisive allusion to their selfish genes and their evolutionary strategy in the English phrase – ‘breeding like rabbits’. I am not sure if the most permissive advocates of free sex among us will be enthused by sex as the last refuge of the poor or their only remaining privilege.
On the whole, good news for the media crowd – keep up the show whether it’s cinema, circus, soap, music, stand up comedy, or quiz and distract the hell out of the poverty-ridden audience who should be left with no time and energy for sex. And all this time we entertainers were being hauled up for soaking all our wares in the sex-syrup and corrupting our audiences for nothing! The fact is - we only kept our rabbits from breeding as fast as they would have.

[also available on sacredmediacow]