Four God and country

Rajnath, Bajrang, Atal Lal and Niranjan: these are the names that a friend has chosen for his three sons and a daughter. Not that he has these little fellas clinging to his six-foot frame. Far from it, he is not even married, and as far I know, is not the kind who sows wild oats. It's only his way of preparing for national duty. I still don't know whom of the four he will send to the borders to fight the enemy, whom he will consecrate for spiritual duties and whom he will retain at home to keep with the socialism-era call of "hum do, hamare do". He does not argue much about this neat arrangement of four kids for filial, religious and national duties.

He does admit that producing four kids might actually be the government's secret weapon to boost the country's economy. After all in college, he had sat through lectures on how John Maynard Keynes had argued that declining populations affected the economy, that his General Theory of 1937 felt that in an era of declining population, "demand tends to be below what is expected and a state of over-supply is less easily corrected", and that a "change-over from an increasing to a declining population may be very disastrous". So for him, that little exertion in the bedroom would now constitute national duty. He even says rather wittily that he will ensure a bit of four-play in the interest of God and country.

Some miserable fellows in the Health and Family Welfare Ministry, however, are about to lose their jobs. Having worked hard through the decades to bring down the population growth in the erroneous belief that an unchecked increase would hamper development, they are suddenly the new villains, ranked even below those who had abandoned their faiths to embrace new gods in the newly constituted Four Degrees Below Touchability Index, or Foursex. "You have caused the economy to shrink," they were ticked off at a recent meeting. "Today, our women are producing just 2.7 children in their lifetime all because of you. At this rate our population will die out and the country will be overrun," was the dire prognostication at the said meeting. They were not told who would overrun the country, but were hit with the abysmal children-producing rates of Germany (1.4), Russia (1.41) and the UK (1.6) as proof that fertility rates had to be high to produce grand GDP growth figures. The clincher was Japan: "With their women giving birth to just 1.35 kids, can their economy survive the wildest efforts of Shinzo Abe?" they asked.

The chastened ministry officials, as a first step, have redrawn the logo of what was once called "family planning". It has changed from a red triangle to a saffron rectangle, "the four sides to better represent our new objective of getting each family to have four issues". They contemplated borrowing the ready-made slogan of "ab ki baar, bacche chaar", but relented when told this easy way out would be considered as political expediency.

One clever bureaucrat in the health ministry told me he would cash in on the new sentiments by writing a book. "I don't want to wait till after retirement to launch my book, I consider myself a trend bucker," he explained. "So your book is on the birth - pun intended - of a new India?" I asked. "No," he smiled brightly. "Such books are for libraries and review pages. I want to sell as many copies of my book." Instead, he said, he would write a book on baby names. "People have forgotten our traditional names. Imagine they opt for German names over Sanskrit names. No, there has to be a ghar wapsi for our nomenclatures too." His passion was contagious. So I quickly moved away lest I caught the virus.

Free Run is a fortnightly look at alternate realities joel.rai@bsmail.in