THE TRIBE OF SAMUEL
He may seem like a maverick — he has a Facebook page in the name of Nihilanand and can’t be persuaded to be shot without his fake beard — but Raphael Samuel has been busy over the past month, joining forces with child-free and anti-natalist evangelists in Delhi and Bengaluru. The idea is to build a grassroots movement so that the Indian family can try this new option.
“Anti-natalism is a philosophy that promotes being child-free as it believes human life is full of suffering,” says Samuel, a 27-year-old businessman from Mumbai, sitting in the office of his mother Kavita Karnad Samuel, a lawyer, whom he plans to sue for ₹1 for giving birth to him without his consent. Samuel is, incidentally, a grand-nephew of the playwright and actor Girish Karnad.
Pratima Naik of Bengaluru heads a 500member group of such child-free evangelists. “We are staring at an ecological disaster,” she says. Her group is active on Facebook as ‘Childfree India’ but has recently started offline meetings across cities. The first national meeting was held in Benga- luru last month. Samuel is in charge of the social media campaigns.
The group also wants to work with associations like aanganwadis that are part of the public healthcare system as they deal with contraceptive counselling and supply. “When women come to do a tubal ligation, aanganwadi workers often advise them to have a second child if the first child is a daughter,” Samuel says.
Two stats pushed him to act. “A recent study says one fewer child per family can stop an average of 58.6 tonnes of CO2equivalent emissions per year,” Samuel says. And, according to UNICEF, India had the highest share among eight countries estimated to account for 50% of all births on January 1, 2019. “If we don’t stop making babies now, when will we do it?”
The rest of the ‘tribe’ of Samuel include a Mumbai-based photographer Varsha and her husband Vivek Mam, an engineer; Alok Kumar, a computer basics teacher in Delhi and his wife Shweta, and activist Anugraha KS of Bengaluru.
Kumar airs his thoughts on child-freeism and other unconventional ideas about self-image through a series of Youtube videos called Varjit Satya (Forbidden Truths) under the persona of Alok Mystic. His wife