Swami Chaitanya KeertiRecently it was a marriage season in India and some Bollywood celebrity marriages of heroes and heroines were trying to shake the heaven and earth. The fashion-conscious middle-class women were enjoying talking in details about these marriages for days together. It did become a sort of national issue or obsession. On 14th December, another marriage caught the attention of chatting club of India, because of Shashi Tharoor. He took to Twitter and shared a picture of a wedding invitation card where the names of the couple were written in chemical symbols - Vn+Sa - to represent Vithun and Soorya. He shared the image of the wedding card which was doing the rounds on the internet under the name 'Chemistry Teacher’s Wedding Invitation’. He congratulated the couple in the same chemistry jargon.
"Wishing them all the best for a happy married life! May the chemistry between them always sparkle, the physics feature more light than heat, and the biology result in bountiful offspring....!"
The words "biology result in bountiful offspring" caught my attention and I remembered something uniquely Indian. In the days of the Upanishads, the seers used to bless new couples. And they would say to the girl, 'God should give you ten children, and finally, the ultimate fulfillment of ... and finally, the husband also becomes a child to you—eleven children.
The times of have changed and in the present situation of over-population, we need some new kinds of Rishis, who would use such words as a curse--and not as a blessing. And there should be a wonderful chemistry of love between the couples but without the bountiful crop of children. As for as Offspring is concerned, the Spring is welcome without the Springing of too many children--one child is more than enough. The mother earth cannot feed the Indian growth rate of population.
When the population of India ( in 1970-80 ) was 60-70 crores, Osho used to warn India: I have to criticize religions which are obstructing human progress, in many ways. Right now all the Christian priests, Hindu priests, Mohammedan priests all around the world are doing one thing: teaching poor people against birth control because it is overpopulation that is going to give them numbers. And it is overpopulation that is going to keep half of the earth poor, starving — and the poor and the starving are easily vulnerable to being converted. You just give them education, food, a house to live in and you have brought gifts from God — they will be Christians. Poverty should continue; otherwise who is going to be in the churches, who is going to be converted?”
He adds: "No religion wants to use methods of birth control for the simple reason that that reduces their numbers. Catholics are against it, Mohammedans are against it, Hindus are against it. Everybody is against birth control for the simple reason that it will reduce their numbers -- and numbers are power. The more people follow your church, the more powerful you are. This is part of politics, power politics. They are not concerned about the future of humanity, they are not concerned with the misery of people, they are not concerned with poverty.
In The Dhammapada: The Way of the Buddha Vol 6, Osho concludes: "To give birth to a child now is almost a crime, because the world is already overpopulated. Half of humanity is starving, and by the end of this century, the starvation is going to be so acute, so intolerable, that the earth is going to become a mad planet. Either suicide or murder will be the only possible ways for people to exist, and both are wrong."
The population growing beyond the tolerable limits is going to make this world totally violent--and we are already witnessing it but we are not waking up. It is about time--we wake up now. It is very very urgent.
