A few days back I was out till
late night with a bunch of friends, looking for chicken roll for two of them. We
finally located a roadside eatery where they began to chomp. The eatery had
three child labourers, none over 14 years old, doing most of the cooking and
serving. I wasn’t eating, so got busy mollycoddling a stray. He was cute and
won’t stop leaping on to me and soiling my t-shirt with his paws.
I moved away a tad bit to keep
the t-shirt clean and got busy chatting with friends. He hung back. In about
another minute or two, I heard loud wailings. I turned to see that his left
hind leg was curled up off the ground and he was limping away to the other side
of the road as fast as a three-legged creature could. Why? Because one of the
child cooks had hit him with a steel rod that was probably kept there just for
that purpose.
I was morally outraged. Why hit
an innocent creature who wasn’t even being intrusive? I ran towards the dog and
saw that, despite the brutal intent of the assault, he’d escaped serious
injuries and would soon be able to walk again. I turned back and unleashed my
moral outrage against the child attacker - “Tumhe
koi maarega faltu mein to kaisa lagega?”, and variants of it.
The guy was unfazed. Completely.
In previous similar experiences, I had seen the guilty at least murmur
justifications. This kid didn’t even bother with that, just kept looking down
at the plate he was garnishing. I got my friends to pay up quickly and soon
left the place in disgust, reacting typically like a morally outraged person
would.
After physically abandoning the
crime scene, the next step for a morally outraged person is to abandon it
mentally, too. I was in the process of
blocking out horrific memories of the wailing dog and the stoic child, when I
was reminded of something the inimitable Manu Joseph said – “If you’re morally
outraged by something, get closer to it.”
Given that going back to the
child and digging calmly into his reasons behind committing the act would most
likely have proved futile, I chose the next best option - trying to figure out
why a human being, a child no less, would do such an inexcusable thing.
The answer, my friend, is blowin’
in the wind. All these evils are a direct consequence of population explosion. We’re
breeding like maggots and there are not enough carcasses to feed on. Why is unprovoked
physical violence an abhorrence for you and I, but not for a teenager who’s had
no education and probably sleeps on a half-empty stomach every night? Well, for
one, you and I need to realise that what we think of as innate is often a byproduct of the environment one grows up in. A child who grows up watching
his alcoholic father grab his sister’s ass and beat up his mom without reason,
is often thrashed by his employer, must steal food and learn to land blows to
survive on a daily basis, can hardly be expected to empathise with an animal. Physical
violence, for this child, is either a way to vent his bitterness or a survival
mechanism.
All those mob lynching incidents
that we hear of these days? Sure, to an extent the spurt could be explained by
the present circumstances, but never underestimate the fury of a group of
people who’re underfed and underpaid. For them, it doesn’t take much of a leap
to go from cobbling street dogs to lynching humans, especially if they’re paid
for it.
That largely explains the
depravity of the deprived. So, if the poor clamped down on producing more like
them, surely the world would be a better place?
Hardly.
As white-collar crimes by Ivy
League graduates, sexual exploitation by the powerful, female foeticide and
infanticide by educated and urban Indians, and money laundering by chartered
accountants suggest, physical violence is perhaps the least destructive form of
depravity that has come to characterize human beings. The educated avoid
physical violence simply because they don’t need it for survival and they have
too much to lose by engaging in wanton violence. They channel their depravity
into ugliness that’s more rewarding and easier to hide. The wealthy and the
uneducated, however, don’t have similar inhibitions about it. Salman Khan and
the Gujjar community are living examples.
In short, it’s pretty clear that
making the poor educated and/or rich, or reducing their numbers, isn’t going to
change anything, except probably making things worse.
To get rid of the problem
permanently, I propose a radical solution – VHEMT. Started in 1991 by American
environmental activist Les Knight, VHEMT stands for Voluntary Human Extinction
Movement. As its motto - “May we live
long and die out” – suggests, VHEMT calls for all humans to stop having kids,
so that the human race is wiped out for good within a generation. There’s no
violence, no suicide involved. We just have to stop making more of us.
Many would argue that adherents
to VHEMT are a bunch of misanthropes. Except for a few like me, that’s not really true. Most of these guys can be perfectly described by Lord Byron’s “I love
not Man the less, but Nature more”. VHEMT guys believe, and rightly so, that a
planet sans humans would mean its biosphere can revive and restore to its
former glory again.
This makes perfect sense for the
climate change radicals as well as for the hedonists who don’t care about the
environment. For the former, not producing another resource-sucking creature
would mean they’re doing their utmost to save the planet. For the latter,
there’s a more subtle reason to adhere to VHEMT. If the entire human race
decided to eschew kids, it would give us a guilt-free passport to the planet’s
loot and plunder for as long as we live - not more than 125 years. So we could
fire up all those coal plants again, shelve the boring EVs once and for all,
and extract oil without worrying about ‘peak oil’. Once we’re gone, the planet
will heal itself in due course. There are other less obvious benefits of VHEMT.
College admissions would become easier. There’ll be more food for humans and
stray dogs. No longer would women drop behind in the workplace due to
pregnancy-induced leaves. Divorce settlements would be much less messy. The
pro-choice vs. pro-life debate would end instantly. Above all, the most vexing
question invented by humankind – what will my legacy be? – would become
redundant.
If we can’t go as far as VHEMT,
let’s begin by celebrating those who’ve already embraced this movement. For
every Father’s Day, let’s have a Not-a-Father’s Day. For every Mother’s Day,
let’s have a Not-a-Mother’s Day. For every Children’s Day, let’s have a
Children-Never-Born’s Day. In place of the bygone “Hum Do Hamare Do”, let’s
make a brand new start with the ambitious “Hum Do Hamare No”.
