GENES, KARMA & WILL

You know you're grown up when friends around you start sprouting big bellies and thinking of baby names and back gardens.. but more than the highly incredulous thought that people my age are actually ready to give birth and all that follows, i was intrigued by the cross-pollination happening among races, genes and what was the karma & personal will involved with this next step in evolution. Lets start with the genes first- a good parsee from Bombay (who's genes had travelled by boat from Persia to Gujarat and then settled whole-heartedly in Bombay) marries Russian trance artist from Moscow who loves Tamil Nadu and says "shouchalaya" and "shubh ratri". So dhansak meets vodka, caviar meet Duke's raspberry lemonade (which you can only find at parsee weddings and Britania). On the other hand, there is the tiny Roman Catholic Goan who marries giant Swiss boy from the Alpes, who i think is more scared of the size of the baby growing in her than anything else. Sorpotel-fondue anyone? It might seem a little OCD-ish of me to only think of food combinations but i feel this is the true significance of genetic interaction, kind of like when you move to a cosmopolitan city and can eat mexican one day and lebanese the next, only thing the city is your own DNA. The other other implications could also be coconut meets snow, natural born swimmers meet natural born snow-boarders and voila- evolution, super heroes, indigo children ready for 2012!!!
Take my own gene pool for examples, nowhere as exotic as these new babies in the oven, but mixed enough for that generation. Both my grandparents had "love marriages", shocking enough at the time when caste, horoscopes, family affiliations and unfortunately dowry=  arranged marriage. In the highly charged setting of the freedom movement (it almost sounds like 1942- a love story, in fact i think that is the year they met) my Maharashtrian (liberal, articulate) grandfather falls in love with my Punjabi grandmother from Lahore (undivided India), they meet through their freedom fighter fathers, get married and produce a new generation of punju-ghatis, who love vada pau and rajma chawal (punjabi or not, my grandmother was also unfortunately a brahmin and a pure vegetarian, denying us homemade butter chicken, a fact that I rue till this day). The other side of grand-parents were even more risque, they challenged the great Indian caste system and thank God for that, as this was the great moment that sea-food was introduced to our grass eating family. In spite of the fact that her mother-in-law would make her cook in a separate kitchen (that a brahmin woman in those days ever agreed to letting her son marry a fish-eating CKP was in itself a wonder), my maternal grandmother, with her genes carrying her across the seas of doubt, changed our future genes forever.
Then there is the little case of Karma. Like all mystic indian words it can be understood and interpreted in many ways. Shit carried over from your past life/ actions in the present/ no, not just actions but even words and thoughts / a barter system that can be balanced by chanting nam myo ho renge kyo / as you sow, so shall you reap/ an arbitrary system that you simply accept/ meta-physical answers for the eternal "why me" question.. whatever. The fact is, whether you are an atheist or a non-beliver in re-incarnation etc, you are at a particular place, at a particular moment, meeting a particular person for a particular reason. Whether it was meant to be or not depends on your choices, which introduces finally a feeling of control in this cosmic circus, that there is something that YOU CAN CHOOSE. My friends were supposed to meet the future father's of their babies. Their karma led these people leading such different lives in such different places to come together and create a new life.
And finally Will. The act of choosing, forging ahead, letting go and yet going ahead without too many thoughts of consequences. When you forget about the language barriers, the difference in upbringing, the   "where will we live" questions and just flow into an ancient knowledge that this is where you are meant to be and that your genes, karma & will are the three pillars that support you, you can finally be open to the exciting parts- maybe sorpotel-fondue will actually taste awesome!