With good looks being the passport to success even in kindergartens, young men and women cannot be blamed for wanting to have cute babies. Ours is a skin-deep age.
Thanks to this new fad, which has puzzled even marriage counsellors, astro charts and family prestige have been thrown out of the window. Instead, the genetic kundali is in, for its the genes which mostly determine your looks.
And as usual, the youth cite lives of celebrities to prove their point. Abhishek Bachchan, they say, is as tall as his father Big B, and Saif Ali Khan and Soha have borrowed the looks of their mother Sharmila Tagore, and Lourdes is as beautiful as Madonna. So, they vouch, it is common sense that children will look good if both mother and father look good. Don’t be taken aback if the girl you are going to marry holds forth on chromosomes and heredity when you meet her the next time. What she means is that she likes your dimples and wants your kids to have them too.
“If your spouse is beautiful or handsome, your children will be attractive too,” says the astro-psychologist and pre-marriage counsellor, S.V. Nagnath. “This is the latest funda.” Though the truth is more complicated (we will get to that in a minute), their preference cannot be easily dismissed, say scientists. “Every person carries genes with characteristics called dominant and recessive,” says the senior geneticist, Dr M.N. Khaja. “Dominant characteristics such as dimples, full hair head, tallness, curly hair, and normal vision overtake recessive characters. So the dominant features of the father and mother are usually passed on to children,” he adds.
“Almost two-thirds of youngsters, who visit us for pre-marital counselling, do not hide their wish of having fair complexioned and good-looking babies,” says Mr Nagnath. “Even in arranged matches, boys and girls now insist that the would-be spouse should have strong physique and good facial features.” Thanks to this trend, there are new taboos. Even if the astro-charts match, young women shy away from marrying bald men. “Certain body features like baldness, dark complexion and short-sightedness are to genetics what Manglik dosham is to astro-charts,” quips C.V. Subbaiah, a marriage counsellor. Even family prestige has taken a back seat. “More than half of my clients give preference to beauty and looks, rather than money and family background,” he says.
But can you have ‘designer babies’ that look cute by marrying a cute guy? Things are not that simple. Hark back to celebs again. Abhishek does not look much like Jaya Bachchan and superstar Rajnikanth’s daughters resemble his wife more than him.
Heredity is a complicated phenomenon and scientists are still puzzling out the process involved in the mix and match of chromosomes during conception. For instance, a child may inherit the physical features of his grandparents or even older generations. Sometimes, the father may be fair-skinned but the baby may inherit the dark skin of the grandpa. So you never know, even in this age of science. In the United States, some mothers-to-be sometimes opt for a test known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis in which embryos are generated in a test tube and the DNA is analysed before being implanted in the uterus. This helps them avoid embryos that indicate proneness to certain ailments such as Huntington’s disease.
But there is no process as yet to find out if your son is going to be as tall as his father. Most likely he will be. But don’t bet on it.
So this is not the end of the road for those youth who are dark, short-sighted or have a bald pate. Like Manglik dosham can be overcome through special poojas and rituals, genetic defects too can be overcome by choosing a spouse with contrasting characteristics.
“If a girl, for instance, has night blindness, she can avoid her children having the same problem by marrying a boy with normal vision,” says Dr Khaja. “Night blindness is a recessive character while normal vision is dominant.” Similarly, curly hair, dark hair, dimples, broad lips and normal hearing are dominant features while blonde hair, thin lips and congenital deafness are recessive. You can pick and choose carefully but do keep your fingers crossed.