Rational Thoughts: Unlimited

Mumbai: At an airy, spacious flat overlooking a verdant green patch in Versova, a three-week-old baby boy sleeps in his little cot. His mother, Aditi Shedde, glowing with newly acquired motherhood, is on her toes; she flits in and out of the room, asking the ayah to change the infant’s nappy and cover him in a sanitised towel.

The baby is kept at arms’ length when the flat’s expensive marble floor is mopped and sofas dusted several times a day.

So what’s so different about this new-born, who’s being cossetted in his prosperous home? Well, he has no religion. His Hindu Maharashtrian mother and Gujarati Muslim father have decided to leave the choice to him when he grows up. By itself, that may not be overly unusual; there are very many people who give similar choices to their children.

Where Aditi and her husband, Aalif Surti, differ is that they chose to battle an unremitting bureaucracy from the very start and refused to fill in the column titled ‘Religion’ in their child’s most basic document, the birth certificate.

It wasn’t a spur-of-themoment decision. “A few months into my pregnancy, we had decided that we would not give our child any religious identity,’’ says Aditi. “We are not against religion, but who are we to choose a religion on our

baby’s behalf ? We will expose him to the values of different faiths and cultures, and when he grows up he will be free to follow any faith — or none if he wishes.’’

Of course, getting the birth certificate wasn’t easy. The first hurdle cropped up at the hospital itself — the authorities were alarmed when the young parents said they would leave the religion column blank in the documents. Every hospital has to intimate the BMC about new births within 15 days, on the basis of which the BMC issues birth certificates.

“You will have to talk to the officer in the BMC,’’ a hospital staff member told the couple. “Since Aditi speaks fluent Marathi, I asked her to patao the municipality,’’ says Aalif, creative director with a film production and distribution company.

Next, Aditi was at the K-ward (Andheri) office of the BMC, bracing for the battle ahead.

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