By now they are stale, peacock jokes have become the past already. And yet, here I am writing about peacocks. 

The peacock, as you all know, is a much respected member of the bird fraternity. A few days back it found itself the butt of jokes everywhere, online and off. It had done nothing different from what it had been doing all its life. Still there it was, people were laughing their heads off at its expense. In fact if I had been a peacock myself I would have been mighty miffed at this treatment meted.

It all began when the former Rajasthan high court judge said that peacocks are celibate birds and do not have sex. If your jaw dropped, hitch it back up quickly. There is more where this has come from. The question naturally arises from the above, then from where do the little thingamabobs come? By thingamabobs I refer to the cute pea-chicks. No sex, no chicks. You savvy?

The judge apparently had the answer to that at his finger tip. Peacocks shed tears, the peahens gulp those tears down and duly pop out pea-chicks. Geddit? It’s simple as that. Of what use your and my education that did not impart this ‘wisdom’? Time to drown ourselves in a tumbler full of water. Ahh, the shame.

The reason I started off with peacocks is that the whole fiasco brought to mind something I heard (and wrote about too, at the tail end of a rather loooong post and hence was probably missed by too many) a decade or so back. In the light of these new developments (the tears of the peacock), I am forced to re-examine past evidence, at which I admit I had laughed without restraint at the time.  Now though I wonder: Was I wrong all along? If tears can, why not sheets, and spotless white ones at that. If you find that cryptic, here is the relevant excerpt to put your misery to an end aka make things clear.

“I read in a fellow blogger’s page that he had heard the details from a minor politician giving a speech in his hometown. The man was raving and ranting against this new found fad for sex education in schools, says the blogger. Did we have any such education during our times, the man thundered. And when we, that is my wife and I, wanted children, he continued, we spread a white sheet on the ground, knelt and (oh no, it’s NOT what you think) prayed and lo and behold, we had our children.” [From It is not easy…]

 

It appears white sheets are to humans what tears are to peacocks. Both make the females pregnant. Come to think of it, we humans have it easier than peacocks!

©Shail Mohan 2017