lionbikash

This is in response to a blog on 25% increase in abortions in the few months after Navratri in India.
Statistics is a very funny thing. So is the tendency of all of us to convert a non-issue to an issue. For a sobering effect let me give one figure: only increase of 1 to 4 is a 25% increase. Hence I don’t think we should jump to the conclusion that a revolutionary or a great moral degrading phenomena is occurring. We may need to find out the figures to come to any conclusion. And as any statistician will tell, practically, the maximum percentage of growth happens only at the initial stages. In that sense we also may conclude that the moral degradation or permissibility or whatever we call it, are still in initial stages and not so alarming.
In the lighter side, I also am not able to figure out where do they do? In the crowded cities how they manage?
This remind me of my old experience of may be of early seventies. On the occasion of Gajan Utsab which falls on the last day of Chaitra month (mid april)I happened to visit one village fare at an Adibasi (tribal) village somewhere in the border of Orissa, Bihar (Now it should be Jharkhand) and West Bengal, in India, the nearest railway station being Dhalbhumgarh on South Eastern Railways.
Since afternoon hundreds of girls and boys were gathering wearing their best of dresses and jewelry (boys with their weaponry of Bows and Arrows, some of them even with their country made guns). At dusk, the girls started dancing forming a ring around a banyan tree accompanied by music of various instruments. The whole place did not have any lighting. Groups of boys were moving around. Some of them carrying even petromax lights. I was a bit surprised as none of them were hanging the lights anywhere to lighten up the area, they were only looking at the girls with the lights. As the night progressed so the crowd. After a couple of hours I noticed that the crowd was getting thinner but could not reason out why or might not have bothered as I was thoroughly enjoying my first encounter with a Adibasi festival and off course I was a kid of may be 17 or 18. By around 10 or 11 p.m. I was fully exhausted with the fatigue of walking some 20 odd kms to reach the place and fell asleep under the tree. Waking up early morning I found that the crowd have vanished. As I was proceeding to my host’s hut on a village road, guess what I encountered with – couples enjoying themselves here and there behind the bushes or any other place they could find.
Later I was told the local custom is something like this: boys and girls meet on this occasion and choose their partners. They stay together for three days during the festival, enjoy themselves and after 3 days, if they continue to like each other, marry and start their married life.
(I always have a longing to go back there again to find out whether the custom prevails till date or not. But I think, I will never go back again to see that the paradise is lost, Rather, I will keep the wish lingering in my mind and cherish the sweet thought.)
I narrated the story for the prudes to remind that the love and physical relationship between Adam and Eve are going on since the advent of humanity and there is nothing immorality in life as long as we don’t dirty it by calling so.