If you do not know this – maybe northern part of the country it’s largely, almost gone totally. In south it’s still little alive in the villages, but there also it’s wiped out quite a bit. If you do not know this, from preconception to conception to various stages of pregnancy, and delivering, and as long as the mother is feeding the child, there’s an entire established process in this country – as to how a woman should eat, what should she do, what kind of people she should interact with, what kind of forms she should look at, what kind of forms she should not look at, what kind of sounds she should hear, what kind of sounds she should not hear – all this was very much there.
But, we must also understand, life has changed. Today women are going to work. They have to get into that horrible bus, where they’re pushed around. It doesn’t matter she’s pregnant. And all kinds of things – all kinds of fumes, all kinds of sounds, all kinds of noises, all kinds of abuse – every kind of thing is happening to her. In some way, we’re doing that to the child also. There is no job in the country, or in the world, where you can take off for one and a half years and get back to the job, to fulfil this.
We are not taking the business of manufacturing the next generation of people with sufficient care
For various reasons, we are not taking the business of manufacturing the next generation of people with sufficient care. We are not paying enough attention to it. For which we will pay a price. Over a period of time we will pay an immense price for that. But, we’re definitely not taking enough care about it in the entire world, not just in this country. Because, we have got all kinds of social situations which does not allow that space for a woman to dedicate that kind of time and attention.
See, being pregnant is not just about reproduction. We’re literally manufacturing the next generation of people, isn’t it? Is it not important, of all the products that you produce on this planet, is it not most important that we produce wonderful human beings for the future generation? Is it not the most important? But, we have created a social situation, and an economic situation, where there is no such possibility to take care of these things. To whatever extent individual women, or individual families can take care of it, they can take care of it. But for the larger society, it is out of question because things have changed. You can’t turn it back just like that.
