Romantic comedy featuring Uttam Kumar and Suchitra Sen, was set almost entirely in a messbari.
MEET THE YOUNG ANTI-NATALISTS BUILDING A CASE FOR A CHILD-FREE INDIA
Shweta vlogs as Inspirational Shweta. Some amount of gimmickry, they say, is needed to “propagate extreme ideas”.
“The logic for bringing in a child cannot be that my father did this, so I must. If you really want a child, just adopt one,” says Kumar. “My videos are seeds, they will sprout if they must. I’m under no illusion that seeing these, everyone will turn antinatalists, I’m just expressing myself.”
Samuel’s consent clause, he says, is important, but more so for women. “Samuel has stated that his consent should have been taken before his mother gave birth to him, but that’s just a ploy to focus attention on the idea of consent. Why should a woman be told that a child alone will give ‘meaning’ to her life or make her family ‘complete’?” he says.
Could it be that the child-free movement demonstrates the crisis and churn in the traditional Indian family as the basic unit of social existence? “The support for a child-less marriage in India will be limited,” says sociologist Ravi Kumar of
South Asian University. “But there is no denying that the economic precariousness this generation faces is making them critique age-old ideas and subvert the very foundation of the family itself.”
Varsha could indeed be a representative of the new Indian ‘family’ woman. She says her child-free state keeps her life spontaneous. Her husband Vivek agrees: “We can go off on a holiday whenever we want to; I can indulge my hobbies and so can she... My mother is, I think, a closet anti-natalist herself but perhaps few people in her generation could openly say so.”
The campaign for a child-free India is about taking the stigma away from exercising choice, by talking about it openly. Including the idea of using babies as a band-aid for an unstable marriage. A techie named Ashwin, who would only give one name, says many couples in India “ignore their personal histories, otherwise they would realise that good parenting would be impossible for them”.
The child-free advocacy group has been most active in Bengaluru. Anugraha gave up his anti-natalist views for a while because his wife wanted a child. But his marriage eventually broke up and his daughter Preeti is now an active participant in her father’s original project.
Is it a lonely existence, to have decided at 17 that she won’t marry or have babies? “I’m not an attention-seeker,” Preeti says. “It’s not compulsory to have friends.”
Samuel says he hasn’t lost any. His mother is with him “fully”, except in the case he is planning to file against her. She feels anti-natalism is a concept whose time has come. His grandmother, too, likes his views. She just doesn’t like his beard.