That human blood has groups is known to everybody. What is not known to anybody is whether blood has qualities also. By quality I mean if, for example, the blood of a miser is injected into the body of a philanthropist, would the philanthropist become a miser? Or vice versa?
Before the arrival of metropolitan and cosmopolitan cities, our forefathers used to attach extraordinary importance to “blood” at the time of marriage. Now the issue is discussed at a low key.
A groom with “royal” blood was supposed to be a bad character, good marksman, brave, ace gambler, magnanimous and fond of all good things in life. On the contrary, a groom doing business was supposed to be lacking in flamboyance, rich, but ill-mannered. Some fastidious persons, particularly Muslims, would not give their daughter to a policeman or wine merchant, because his income was supposed to have elements of impurity. And just because of swagger, they would give, without much thought, their daughter to a military person. Love-marriages have felled these barriers. They say, Mrs. Vijaya-Laxmi Pandit wanted to marry Liyaqat Ali Khan. But Bapu, the Father of the Nation came down with a heavy hand to the disastrous proposal. She, in turn, never, in her heart of hearts, accepted the matrimonial alliance of Mrs. Indira Gandhi and Mr. Feroze Gandhi, as the latter belonged to a mercantile community.
I have only once come across an upper caste youth unwilling to accept the blood of a lesser mortal. During a heated discussion at the India International Centre in New Delhi, a boisterous J.N.U. student refused, even in the emergency conditions, to accept the blood of a lower caste member of society. The late Mr. Shyam Lal Sharma, Chief-Sub of the nowdefunct Dinmaan narrated an incident of his life. A friend of his, belonging to the uppermost layer of Brahmins, asked him to leave too early in the evening.
Sharma: Why are you going so soon? You have only just arrived?
Friend: True, But I have to leave as I have to prepare my meals.
Sharma: Meals? Is Bhabi not there?
Friend: She is there. But she happens to belong to a caste inferior to mine!
Would a superior-most caste Brahmin mind benefiting from the services of a wet-mother, belonging to a Shudra? This embarrassing question came to my mind after a 400-word story in a national daily, which, on September 12, informed the nation that now breast milk is available for infants at the Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital in Sion. It is ideal, said the news, for premature and sick babies. The mother-donors milk has been stored in a bank that, on September 10, had 924 litres of mother’s milk. According to the doctors, human milk keeps diabetes, asthma and other allergies at bay.
Can the adults also cure their ailments from the said stuff? My other questions are:
First: Is there a format for developing human milk?
Secondly: Are there uniform standards for quality control?
Finally: Is there a protocol for donor screening?
The information supplied by the hospital is, otherwise exhilarating. The milk is collected, pasteurised at 65 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes and then frozen at minus 20 degrees Celsius. This milk can last six months and is a boon for sick and abandoned babies. The hospital performs around 12,000 deliveries every year and mothers are more than willing to donate breast milk after intensive counselling.
All this is music to the lovers and consumers of quality milk and also tea lovers who feel tired of the traditional buffalo-cow milk, adulterated with DDT, vegetable oils and various flours.
There was an ever-bragging, healthy lady, distantly related to me in Bhopal. After the birth of her fifth child, she informed the uninformed who had come to congratulate her on the safe delivery: After the birth of my fourth child I had enormous milk in my breast – so much so that I would keep a bowlful of my milk for the young ones. The eldest one would boil it. After a while, it had a thick creamy layer. Then he would put crushed bread into the bowl and eat it without sugar!