When unfamiliarity breeds conjecture

The crying need for many people to be given crash courses in biology, zoology, ethnology and any other discipline that explains the mysteries of anatomy, procreation and the like, has never been as imperative as now.

If presumably educated and erudite individuals, especially those in positions of power, actually believe that drinking tears of “celibate” peacocks can cause peahens to become pregnant, there is cause for alarm.

Immaculate conception has been accorded a certain measure of religious sanction but procreation itself being a sob story for any creatures on this planet, is too much to swallow, even for peahens, who — as recent studies have shown — are more drawn to peacocks’ legs and dance moves than their ocular emanations.

Indeed, this procreation poppycock by a high court judge just before he retired this week ranks right up alongside the claim by a Haryana khap leader in 2012 that rapes should be blamed on hormonal imbalances caused by the consumption of spicy chowmein.

The Junagarh Agricultural University’s discovery last year of gold (albeit in the form of soluble salts) in the urine of an indigenous breed of cows —which the same judge averred should be made India’s national animal — also teeters dangerously between fanciful conjecture and science. Old reckonings breed new disputes, as the French say.