ABOUT THE LIFE, SYSTEM AND TRADITIONS IN PALA

     On the island of Pala, the form of government is constitutional monarchy. The aim of the Pala civilisation is to create a free and happy country which is self-sufficient. We can observe this through the Experimental Station, which was found after a famine to produce everything in the island.

"How on earth were you able to choose?" Will asked. "The right people were intelligent at the right moment," said Ranga. "But it must be admitted—they were also very lucky. In fact Pala as a whole has been extraordinarily lucky. It's had the luck, first of all, never to have been anyone's colony. Rendang has a magnificent harbor. That brought them an Arab invasion in the Middle Ages. We have no harbor, so the Arabs left us alone and we're still Buddhists or Shivaites—that is, when we're not Tantrik agnostics."

     However, as the Ambassador Bahu states in his conversation with Will, he thinks that this was in the past. 

Will: "Are they more irrelevant now than they were when the Reformers first started to work for happiness and freedom?"

The Ambassador nodded. "In those days Pala was still completely off the map. The idea of turning it into an oasis of freedom and happiness made sense. So long as it remains out of touch with the rest of the world, an ideal society can be a viable society."

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     We can go further and get important information about the life in Pala by examining some citations from Nurse Appu's words. These conversations include the education, the sexual life, as well as the life of children:

1)

Nurse: "I know exactly what you're thinking," she said to Will. "You're thinking I'm much too young to do a good job." "I certainly think you're very young." "You people go to a university at eighteen and stay there for four years. We start at sixteen and go on with our education till we're twenty four—half-time study and half-time work. I've been doing biology and at the same time doing this job for two years. So I'm not quite such a fool as I look. Actually I'm a pretty good nurse."

2)

Nurse Appu: "But one kind of love doesn't exclude the other."
Will: "And both are legitimate?"
Nurse Appu: "Naturally."
Will: "So that nobody would have minded if Murugan had been interested in another pajama boy?"
Nurse Appu: "Not if it was a good sort of relationship."

3)

"Three weeks ago," said Ranga, "he and the Rani were at the palace, in Shivapuram. They invited a group of us from the university to come and listen to Murugan's ideas—on oil, on industrialization, on television, on armaments, on the Crusade of the Spirit."

"Did he make any converts?"

Ranga shook his head. "Why would anyone want to exchange something rich and good and endlessly interesting for something bad and thin and boring? We don't feel any need for your speedboats or your television, your wars and revolutions, your revivals, your political slogans, your metaphysical nonsense from Rome and Moscow.

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“Maithuna” philosophy is the yoga of love.
Every children learns it in the school when they are about 15-16 years old. It is some kind of application to prevent having children after sexual relationship without using any other material but just the body. "When you do maithuna, profane love is sacred love."
Married people do maithuna when they do not want children. But the ones who seek for a new way can use also birth control tools, which are everywhere. They're distributed by the government.

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     Children in Pala have a very original right: escaping and leaving their parents!

"Escape," she explained, "is built into the new system. Whenever the parental Home Sweet Home becomes too unbearable, the child is allowed, is actively encouraged—and the whole weight of public opinion is behind the encouragement— to migrate to one of its other homes." "How many homes does a Palanese child have?" "About twenty on the average." "Twenty? My God!"

     Later we can see a comparison between this system in Pala and the system in China:

"It all sounds," said Will, "suspiciously like the propaganda for one of the new Chinese communes."

"Nothing," she assured him, "could be less like a commune than an MAC. An MAC isn't run by the government, it's run by its members. And we're not militaristic. We're not interested in turning out good party members; we're only interested in turning out good human beings. We don't inculcate dogmas. And finally we don't take the children away from their parents; on the contrary, we give the children additional parents and the parents additional children. That means that even in the nursery we enjoy a certain degree of freedom; and our freedom increases as we grow older and can deal with a wider range of experience and take on greater responsibilities. Whereas in China there's no freedom at all. The children are handed over to official baby tamers, whose business it is to turn them into obedient servants of the State.”

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     When we look at the religious life on Pala island, we can say that they mostly use the principles of Bhudism with slight changes, but they do not accept the religion as a whole. They are opposed to Christianity, Islam etc.

     

     In a little book that Dr. Robert MacPhail gave to Will, the main principles of Pala are explained, and they are mostly about being a virtuous and righteous person.

"In religion all words are dirty words. Anybody who gets eloquent about Buddha, or God, or Christ, ought to have his mouth washed out with carbolic soap."

"Give us this day our daily Faith, but deliver us, dear God, from Belief."