Dear Agony Akka,
I am a young man from Tenkasi in Tamil Nadu. Previously, you have replied to a successful woman in her 30s who works from home and is avoiding marriage proposals arranged by parents and brother. You must seethe dangers of the advice you have given to a lady whose ovum production and quality must be already declining in her 30s. If she get married now, chances are still there for her to have a baby but you advise against it. This is the archetype of the ‘Last Man’ or ‘Last Woman’ who don’t have kids, are highly successful urbanites, and travel worldwide to have as much merry as possible without having any heir. It’s the end of their lineage. Becoming mother is the greatest thing for a lady. The parents and brother are doing a favour to get her married soon. You can merry endlessly and retire at 40, but that is waste of youth. You should have advised her to get married.
— Extremely galled guy
Dear EGG,
Your mail has burst in my inbox like a chocolate bomb from your neighbouring town of Sivakasi. And with the same amount of noise and smoke. I am coughing away. In fact, I will need a Cofka lozenge to calm down and respond to your surreal fears about the future of mankind.
I am always pleasantly amused that such existential homilies are never expressed by well-meaning men when there is female infanticide in large numbers which, you will agree, takes away the female’s ovum production capacity very early.
In my housing society also, there was one such family. The brother was always doing favours for sister. Insisting she gets married. Censoring her phone calls. Slapping her if she came home late. All for her well-being and ovum count. Then the girl found someone to marry. Her senior in college who loved her. But brother did not like this boy. So he did biggest favour and killed them both. As you can imagine, nobody got a chance to find out quality of the woman’s ovum, but since she was in her 20s, it must have been healthy.
Just like you, I also get puzzled that young women are not getting excited about cooking husband’s favourite dish and cleaning children’s bums. It is so much more fun than earning fat salaries and travelling worldwide. But alas, more and more young women are saying, you have the motherhood, we will have the merry. They are clearly focussed too much on the here and the now than on the heir and the spare.
Then there’s Meera, daughter of the family in Flat 17C. Both parents are working, brother is doing engineering and Meera is doing Computer Science. Naturally, busy family means mother and Meera have to do much cooking. I have often found that Meera is so focussed on making omelettes for family that her own eggs are getting totally bypassed. Will brother finish breakfast and hunt for husband or will he focus on his boiled egg? We don’t know. Suspense is intense.
Now with women getting more interested in increasing salary than decreasing ovum, maybe it’s time for men to become single mothers? Adopting, surrogacy, so many lineage options there are these days.
Meanwhile, what is certainly having merry is India’s population statistics. Last I checked, it was 1.4 billion, roughly 17% of all human beings in the world. You need not feel afraid of Indian race coming to an early end. There might not be much air to breathe but there are certainly plenty of heirs going around.
— AA
agony.akka@gmail.com
