November 14, 2011

(In the context of Children’s Day on November 14 - Nehru’s birthday - a cerebral treatment of the subject)              
                                                
 
An unhappy gentleman, resolving to wed nothing short of perfection, keeps his heart and hands till both get so old and withered that no tolerable woman will accept them. – Nathaniel Hawthorne, US poet (1804-1864).
 
Mohan Rao (not his real name) had great pedigree and even greater inheritance. But, both these came minus wisdom and humility. Nowhere was this more reflected than in the quest for a suitable bride for Mohan. His parents and relatives lined up many prospective matches. But none would come anywhere close to the Himalayan standards Mohan set for his would-be bride. The process went on so long that Mohan’s parents died and he was left to fend for himself in his middle age. Finally, with persuasion from his concerned relatives, Mohan had to climb down from his ivory tower and give up his lofty conditions about good pedigree, great wealth and high education and just opt for beauty and youth. So, he finally married a beautiful young girl from a poor family.
 
Mohan could not reconcile himself to the situation of marrying a poor girl with no social status. To drown his frustration, Mohan took to heavy drinking and gambling. Within six years of marriage he produced four children. Life changed for the worse after the birth of the fourth child which was dark and ugly. He went into a permanent sulk and the bottle became his mainstay till he was totally bedridden with advanced cirrhosis of the liver. All this while his wife and children meant nothing for him.
 
When he realised that the time had come for his tryst with Yama, he called his wife to his bedside and said: “My time has come to go.  I have been assailed by doubts that your fourth child may not have been fathered by me. Now that I am dying, there is no question of your being punished for double crossing me. But, if you tell me the truth I will be going to the crematorium in peace.”
 
The wife, still young, was overcome by the gravity of the impending departure of her husband and she could not hold back the truth. She said: “Thank you for offering me the amnesty. I would like to confess that the fourth child is yours; but the earlier three are not yours.” The shock was too much for Mohan who breathed his last in a hurry.
 
Mohan’s death solved a potential problem. If he had recovered by any chance and lived, the first three kids would have been “unwanted” because somebody else had sired them and the last would have been “unwanted” because it was dark and ugly.
 
If one dismisses this scenario as apocyriphal, there are “unwanted” kids on many counts. In April 2000, the Supreme Court ruled that a woman who begets a child even after sterilisation in a government hospital is entitled to claim from the state and the doctor for bringing up the “unwanted” child. Santra, a labourer, had seven children when she underwent a sterilisation operation at a Haryana government hospital. She sued the state for Rs.200,000 when she gave birth to a baby girl despite the surgery; but the court awarded her merely 54,000. Even so, the state government challenged the order and also defended the doctor. The Supreme Court confirmed the award.
 
Apart from “unwanted” kids being born through failed sterilisation operations, such kids are also born because of failed birth control devices and carelessness of the couples wanting to have no children.
 
There are other kids which become “unwanted” to the parents. These include mentally and physically retarded and even healthy children who may be ugly and dark. There are also step-children in the context of the second marriage
 
In the Supreme Court’s judgement cited earlier, the “unwanted” kid was dealt with in the context of maintenance cost. But, there are aspects beyond money that make the “unwanted” kid a complex issue. It is the kid’s right to expect love and care from parents who brought it into being. It is no fault of the kid if it was born because of some slip-up on the part of its parents or if it came at the tail-end of a profusion of kids – as it some times happens when couples are in desperate quest for a male kid. The same applies to mental or physical disabilities or being rendered a step-child.
 
The trauma of the “unwanted kid” - expressed, demonstrated or otherwise - is the crux of the problem. It is in this context that a British court, in a case akin to the one our Supreme Court handled in Santra’s case, ruled: “The public policy requires that the child should not learn that the court has declared its life to be a mistake”.
 
Such a “mistake” need not always be a disaster. As John Milton says in Paradise Lost:

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
 
This is well illustrated by the life of Steve Jobs, founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc. and charismatic pioneer of the personal computer revolution and much more, who died on October 5, 2011 after valiantly fighting pancreatic cancer, first diagnosed in 2003. He was born on February 24, 1955 to Joanne Simpson and Abdulfatta Jandani, two Wisconsin University graduate students, who gave their un-named son up for adoption. His adoptive parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, were emphatically affirmed by Steve as his “1000%” parents. He discovered about his biological parents only at the age of 27 years. Post his demise, his father confessed his having tried to contact the now famous Steve by email only to be met with a wall of silence. So, here is an “unwanted kid”, despite being a school drop-out, making it big and, ironically, making his biological father “unwanted”!

Jobs, parents and son, have shown the way. So, what can be done to make “unwanted kids”  “wanted”? The issue has many dimensions. Facts, observations and reasons would guide the way to make an “unwanted kid”  “wanted”. Where do we stand on this issue?
 

John B. Monteiro, author and journalist, is editor of his website www.welcometoreason.com (Interactive Cerebral Challenger).