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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
economic reasons therefore are absent, higher interests of life interfere with child-bearing, while frecing and enriching the emotional life based upon sex-attraction, called love. The sex-impulse in human beings difers from that in animals in that it rises above the biological function of reproduction, and expresses itself in a variety of beautiful forms of emotion.
In the prevailing cultural atmosphere of India, the question of birth-control arises only in the case of the modern cducated middle-class. Therefore, the introduction of the practice will not generally touch the problem of population. Nevertheless, it will certainly enable the middle-class to overcome some of the difficulties they experience under the given socio-political conditions of the country. Unemployment has become a veritable nightmare for the middle-class youth ; none of the palliatives suggested, cven if seriously applice!, will relieve the distress. The hopeless position of the middle-class, in its turn, reflects the economic bankruptcy of the masses. “Prosperity” built on that precarious foundation of mass bankruptcy cannot in any way be shared by the middle-class. The solution of the problem lies in a quickening of the general economic life of the country-industrialisa. tinn on a large scale, not cramped by the limitations of the capitalist mode of production. That means not only formal national freedom, but the creation of a really democratic State.
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