Answering the question - What will my legacy be?

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”.