I now feel more insignificant than ever. There are 6,999,999,999 more humans like me in this world. More, seeing that it's been a week since the world population reached the seven billion mark. Thousands of squalling infants arriving every day screaming their lungs out, and we rejoice and raise toasts to them. The landmark moment's cropped up in a few conversations at school, and everyone talks about it almost reverently, as if we have achieved new heights as a race.
Seven billion is certainly an impressive figure, and we're suitably impressed. Abdul, who's handy with a calculator, proposed the interesting thought that if you began counting out loud "one watermelon, two watermelon, three watermelon" all the way to seven billion watermelons, taking one second to say each number, well, you couldn't. You'd be dead long before. If your children and grandchildren carried on this very worthwhile legacy, without going to sleep or taking bathroom breaks, they might make it, if they learnt to count from the moment they were born. That is about 220 years of counting. That is, in short, a lot of babies.
However, it isn't the number we're celebrating. Seven billion is a milestone, a mark of humans having well and truly taken over the earth, reigning supreme over all the organisms whose habitats we've destroyed. What seven billion means, though, isn't our supremacy over everything else, but a load of scary implications: a serious strain on our resources. No food, and consequently starvation. Outbreaks of disease as medicine supplies run short. Increasing crime rates. Tougher competition for university places and jobs as this cohort of teenagers makes way for the next. Probably a couple of epidemics that'll wipe out a good proportion of us in nature's millennial spring cleaning, or an asteroid or something that'll send us packing the same way as the dinosaurs. It's going to be one cheery future for little Danica May Camacho, or Nargis Kumar, or Bobby Hastwell, or whoever they're claiming the seven billionth kid is.
To be honest, let alone managing our resources, we humans aren't even that great at expanding our population compared with other biological juggernauts. The seemingly humble bacterium can claim five million trillion trillion individuals to its name - that's five followed by 30 zeroes. While the population grows, there is another equally pressing demographic concern. A preference for the boy child is all too prevalent in developing nations. While gender equality is taken for granted in most developed countries, it's disturbing that in the corporate world, more than nine in 10 chief executives are male. Female foeticide goes unchecked in parts of India and China, which boast the highest populations in the world. Illegal embryo screening makes this all too easy, and the sex ratio is getting more skewed than ever. My mum grew up in an environment where having just one child was seen as the way forward, as the government fought to decrease the fertility rate. While I therefore ended up with no annoying siblings, deep-seated prejudices are hard to uproot.
Relatives and friends of my parents in India - even qualified doctors, lawyers and accountants - have demanded to our faces if we're sure we don't want a "little brother for Lavanya", clucking disapprovingly. I was treated to an incredulous pause from the snip-snip-snip of the scissors at the salon where I get my hair cut when I shook my head to my Indian hairdresser's "do you have any brothers"? Funny, none of them ever asked me whether I have any sisters or not. While it sounds too fantastic to be true in the 21st century, a friend - a girl - has four sisters: her parents conceived again and again in the hope of getting the long-awaited boy, in a bizarre buying of multiple lottery tickets in the hope of the jackpot.
Discrimination isn't as common as it used to be, but it's still present. A century ago, it was the men who would support the ageing parents, which apparently justified their need for a male heir. Now, however, more women are standing up on their own two feet financially. The majority of parents who commit female foeticide are well off, seeing as they can cough up enough dosh for embryo screening. So why, stands the question, in this incredibly informed and enlightened age, are innocent little girls being brutally murdered for that unpardonable crime of being little girls? Give it a few years and there won't be enough women for all the men looking to marry, a problem already manifesting itself in China. At least that'll fix the population problem.
The writer is a 16-year-old student in Dubai
