May our Tribe increase!

May our Tribe increase!

This is a tale of two cities. Bonkalot was a happy kingdom where the ruling philosophy was Dharma, Artha, Kama, Moksha. The words shubh laabh were inscribed on every wall and the people were materially as well as sexually happy. They sang Aum Mani Padme Hun: The Jewel is in the Divine Coitus. The birth of every child was an occasion of great celebration because the Bonkalotians believed that God had blessed their people by whispering into the ear of their first chief: May your tribe increase. Since they kept on bonking, their tribe sure enough increased. This caused a problem.

Bonkalot became a very crowded place. There was no place to walk, there were so many people. The Council of Elders met and petitioned King Mahalingam to take drastic action or there would soon be only standing room left in their fair city.

King Mahalingam was a wise man. He said that there was abundant space on Planet Earth and all that needed to be done was to build some more cities for his people. He ordered the construction of a wide road to a green valley 100 km from Bonkalot and encouraged his people to shift there and build another city. This they happily did, and called it Bangalot. In this way, many new cities came up, the names of which, unfortunately, are unprintable here.

The Bonkalotians gave rise to a great civilisation that was rich and happy and where every child was welcomed into the world and well looked after. With greater economic activity, women began to work outside the house and they decided that they must control their own fertility. Inventors came up with many ingenious devices and these were always in great demand. They had fewer children now, but they looked after them better. They believed that their children were their greatest wealth.

Things did not come to such a happy conclusion in neighbouring Humpalot. Here, when faced with the problem of the city overcrowding, the King Tiachu took a drastically different course of action. It must be noted that he had fallen on his head as a child and this had rendered him intellectually as well as sexually dysfunctional. He had never had an orgasm, and he had lost all his marbles. He was thus extremely jealous of the happy humpers of Humpalot and decided that it was all their humping that was creating the problem. He called in his top officials and ordered them to frame measures that would discourage the people from having children. These children are a problem, he said. We must stop children coming into this earth and crowding up the place. There isn’t enough room. How will we feed them?

The officials launched a wide variety of programmes to carry out their King’s wishes. The propaganda ministry soon made every Humpalotian look with disgust at every new-born child. The health ministry spent a large fortune equipping every Humpalotian with birth control techniques. The police were instructed to clear away all sexually stimulating books and art. Cabarets were banned. A great temple built millennia ago to celebrate the joy of the sexual union was pulled down. In this way, Humpalot became a very unhappy place. But it remained crowded. The King had spent all the money in his treasury trying to stop children getting born, and so he had no money left to construct wide roads into the surrounds that would enable the city to decongest. The city was soon bursting at the seams; and it was getting poorer. With mass poverty, their children were born into a miserable life. The civilisation soon collapsed. It lies in ruins now, and Bonkalotian archaeologists are busy trying to reconstruct the great temple celebrating the sexual union.

If we look around at the world around us, there are many countries which followed the wise example of the Bonkalotians under King Mahalingam: Japan, Belgium, Holland and Germany have higher population density than India but suffer no overcrowding. I recently took a morning flight from Geneva to Amsterdam. I looked down at a fantastic spread of population. When we fly Delhi-Bombay we look down only at open spaces.

The truth is that this is a vast country. We need to spread out. Roads, not condoms. And may our tribe increase!

Back to the top