Kishore Singh: Waiting for Rana Pratap

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My father-in-law has a theory: that if bloodlines are kept pure, then one in every eighth (or perhaps eighteenth, he forgets which) generation Rajput family should have a possible Rana Pratap-like hero being born into it.

How does he know? He'd read it somewhere, in his childhood, long ago, and it had stayed in his mind, he said. And he was keen, given that enough time (and generations) had passed, to see whether the prediction of the resurrection of Pratap might come true in his lifetime.

(That a Narayana Murthy might be more relevant to a Pratap today, we will not deal with here, for fear of risking the wrath of fellow Rajputs.)

It's possible, of course, that the Pratap clone might already have been born in the family "" my brother-in-law's young son has all the destructive tendencies that should qualify him to play Pratap Jr.

But it's equally true that there are enough members of the family "" on my wife's side, and on mine, I admit "" to have caused grave risk to any possibility of seeing the next coming of the Rajput hero any time soon.

For "" and what could they have been thinking? "" family members have obviously scoured the country looking for spouses with nary a thought about their "pure" bloodline.

For every Rajput spouse in the clan, there's now a Parsi, Punjabi and Bengali, an Assamese and a Keralite. And while fusion races may be perfectly capable of creating their own geniuses, my father-in-law is convinced that it won't do any good for the next coming of Pratap.

Which is why I'm sure he would approve of my first cousin's decision to travel the straight and narrow and do his bit to contribute to any possibility of resurrecting Pratap. "Are you sure you're doing the right thing?"

I asked him, soon after he returned, glowing from the "approval" he'd given (and been given by) his potential bride. "Of course," he said. "But what about your girlfriend?" I asked "" young lads, especially good-looking young lads, must have girlfriends after all! "Oh, that's all right," he said.

"No, what's all right?" I asked, my interest piqued. "Just that I'd told her," he replied, "that's it's okay to go around, but that I wouldn't marry her." "And why would that be?" I wondered. "It's simple," my cousin responded, "because she isn't a Rajput."

"But that's a chauvinistic thing to do," I protested; "surely she couldn't have agreed to such an arrangement?" "Sure," he said, "she had no problems "" or choice."

"He's just pulling your leg," my wife said, "he doesn't have a girlfriend, I'm sure." "Sure he does," said my son. "How do you know?" I asked him. "Because my aunt, who lives close by, told me," he replied smugly. "What's the big deal," my cousin asked, "she's only a girlfriend, not my wife." As I said, my father-in-law might have approved.

But it seems he needn't worry too much on that score. Heaps of cousins are now taking care to fall in love within the community. So, even when matches aren't "arranged", they're at least choreographed to meet the stringent bloodline requirements of my father-in-law.

And a recent example is another cousin who has, most fortuitously, fallen in love with another Rajput. "Really, really love?"

I asked her. "Really, really love," she confirmed. Which being so, maybe, just maybe we'll chance upon Pratap II some time soon. However, my father-in-law has added a worrying factor to his theory.

"Perhaps," he mused the last time I spoke to him, "it will require 28, or maybe even 38 generations, to give birth to another hero like Rana Pratap." It's going to be a long wait....