No Popcon please

As the billionth baby was given a billion headlines some years ago, my mind immediately raced back to 1962 – “Hindi-Cheeni Bhai Bhai.”  No, this has nothing to do with Sino-Indian relations, or the Panch Sheel agreement.  But this is the impression one gets on reading the newspapers that we have finally hit the one-billion population mark.  After all, if not in anything else, the camaraderie between Indians and Chinese is all too evident on the population front.

Again, no other country in the world can boast of such a status.  For, popcon is not what the two nations seem to have heard of.  Popcon, for those-as-yet unenlightened souls, stands for Population Control.  One does not know of China, but in India our people seem to have it all thoroughly muddled between ‘birth’ and ‘berth’ control. Hence, the mind-boggling scenes from railway berths to Cabinet berths.

The arrival of the billionth baby had the media in a tizzy.  The media had got all its facts muddled up – from the time of the baby’s birth to whether it (the baby) already had a brother or sister.  It was left to the hapless readers to separate the grain from the chaff, for these days, the media has more chaff to offer than grain.

Coming back to the billionth baby, the photographs of it had all sorts of (un)concerned people expressing their ‘uncalled for’ happiness on the arrival of the star baby.  From the photographs, one gets the impression that these unconcerned people were even happier than the parents of the baby.

But these days, be it the common man, (by the way, who or what constitutes a common man, or the V.I.P for that matter, no one seems to be sure of).    All the smiles are ‘of the camera, for the camera and the ‘by the camera.’

 Of course, it is said that a nation is what people make themselves out to be.  As far as controlling the population is concerned, the malady percolates down from the leadership to the masses.  If the common man treats population control as a private matter and not a national one, our na(o)tional leaders too have been opposing tooth and nail, any plans of making mandatory the two-child norm for contesting elections to the legislatures and Parliament.

Meanwhile, as far as the population is concerned, one can safely say that if not in other things, at least on this front we have ensured that the Indians flag keeps flying high ….”Jhanda ooncha rahe humara”!!!!