'Modern' Indian society

This is an edited version of my post. It initially had two parts, one of which I feel I am not ready to put up as yet. Apologies for removing that portion, when I am good and ready I will put it back up, hopefully this real life incident would have a better ending by then.

On a night out with a bunch of old time friends, I met this pal who had gotten married seven or eight months earlier. Over a glass of beer, this friend of mine started telling me that his parents do not wish for him to travel outside the city for the next two weeks. When I enquired about this, he smiled shyly and said that his parents felt that according to his wife's biological clock, this time period was the best to conceive a child. I was severly shocked since this wasn't an uneducated person speaking nor were his parents uneducated for that matter, they were a highly educated upper middle class family. The very thought that an entire family was timing the body clock of a poor girl was horrifying, not to mention the couple's sex life. When I mentioned this to him, he said, that his parents were right in what they are doing since there is immense societal pressure for them to have a grand child. Where is this moronic society, which pressurizes people to have children and grandchildren? If I am considered a part of this society, where do I hand in my resignation?

Roughly a month later when I met this dude again, he told me that they are doing a lot of tests on his wife to see if there were any problems. Oh God! I pity that poor girl is all I could think. I intially thought that this was an act of a rather stupid family but when I took up this up for discussion I found to my chagrin that a lot of people agreed that its better to have a child immediately since this would silence a lot of mouths. The ones who waited for a few years expressed the pressures of being questioned continously in every social event. In an over crowded country with a million orphaned children who need a loving home, how can the society be so fixated about producing more and more children? Why isn't adoption promoted the way it should be? And most importantly whatever happened to things like ‘choice’ and 'privacy'?

We take great pride in our economic and technological progress over the decades; we drive better vehicles and have all the modern amenities possible. But we still hold on to our age old practices that are both blind as well as cruel. Have we really progressed? When would we ever learn?