Figurative Womb
Mon, 2008-06-30 01:32 — heartcrossings
It’s not very often that I am able to take away a meaningful message from a Bollywood flick so I had to write about it. The movie in question is Laaga Chunari Me Daag.
The story is an old chestnut overdone Bollywood-style. A family of four in a decaying mansion - the mother spinning the years away Arachne-like on the sewing machine, the idle father hoping the next lottery ticket will reverse the tide of his fortune and the two pretty daughter unequipped to seek a better future.
Desperate to help her struggling family, she goes to Bombay to find work and runs into a man who promises her a job in return for spending the night with him. She calls her mother defeated and ready to abandon her quest for employment. She is frightened by the proposition and wants to come home to Benares right away.
The mother’s response to this SOS is tinged by her precarious circumstances, she does not rush to embrace her child and snatch her out of harm’s way. In her daughter’s most desperate hour she is not able to be her mother. The girl begins her new life as an escort. The mother is consumed by guilt even as the family benefits tremendously from the first-born’s lucrative profession.
What I found most compelling about the story was the older daughter’s cry for help, the mother’s response to it and finally the consequences. I think our children cry out for help in big and small ways many times in their lives. When we are attentive, we hear clearly and respond decisively. In doing so we are able to prevent harm being done to them.
Yet there are times, when we are not able to hear quite as well. In hindsight, we blame our inaction on preoccupation, inattention or worse expediency because too much was at stake. The cry subsides into a low whimper and there is a deathly silence. We want to believe that the crisis has blown over - that our lack of intervention helped our child become stronger and more self-reliant. But the truth is, a child turned away from her last refuge of hope will often go down a path of self-destruction even while keeping up pretenses of all being well.
As unlikely as it may seem, this movie made me think about a mother’s life long responsibility towards her children. She must have a figurative womb that they can return to in their darkest hour ; she must always be able to discern their cries for help amid the overpowering noise and chaos of her own life.
We see mothers around us who do everything else right and wonder why their children turned out the way they did - wonder where they went wrong. It is no easy feat to execute flawlessly on such huge responsibilities all one’s life. More likely than not, a mother will make some mistakes and the child’s life will be a testament of its consequences.
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And not all people are cut out to have kids. Can’t take care, can’t bring them up, stay near to the family planning kit.
I’ve often come across these situations while being with the abandoned kids. Sometimes helplessness make the parents turrn a deaf ear. Some of the parents further stay away from their responsibility because seeing their kids make them feel more guilty and leave the kids to fend for themselves. that’s the extreme case? There was this village we went to, where the 5-7-8 year olds were taking care of themselves, their house, their 2 year old sister.
I saw the movie - It was such an awful one, wasn’t it?
well written
Definitely a blog worth ruminating on.
I think it is to be taken for granted that every parent makes mistakes (we are all human, after all). The deepest mistakes are often the ones which are not made by so much by doing/not-doing something, but by being what one is. There is a lot of the parent in the child, and in the movie that you reviewed, there is obviously the mother’s give-up-and-take-the-easy-way-out attitude of disempowerment (or maybe, take-the-lucrative-path attitude) distinctly present in the daughter as well. They are not really different.
A parent is often in a set of conditionings himself/herself, and those get passed on to the child. After all, what human being is original till reaching self-awareness? We all mostly emulate our values from early influences. A parent will often pass on behavioural characteristics, major/minor aberrations in his/her psyche to the child and this leads to a family culture that is passed on, with the behaviour and attitude often becoming stronger and stronger with each generation.
And then suddenly, in one of the subsequent generations, there is a shining manifestation of this culture as a full-bloomed problem. Or a virtue, if the culture has been positive. Or a case of psychosis, if a significant contradiction has been passed on).
I think, the greatest upbringing that a parent can give a child is not so much by providing or by teaching - but by being and integrated example of how to live. Merely teaching/providing for the child is not enough because if there is a difference between the talk and the walk, the child will emulate the hypocrisy, as well. If there is honesty then the child will learn to face his/her own or parent’s natural flaws and address them constructively (instead of pretending otherwise or adopting them, which leads to complexes).
But if the child’s psyche is formed through emulation of a positive parental psyche, the child’s mind will already have critical mass to pull himself/herself out of any problems or situations which life throws at oneself.
In short, the first and last requirement of parenting is to first be a good, deeply honest and resilient human being oneself. Everything else peripheral to this.
- atra
Oedipus Wrecks
> More likely than not, a mother will make some mistakes and the child’s life will be a testament of its consequences.
Which by extension can be attributed to mistakes her mother made and so on, ad-infinitum
. From personal experience I know that there is nothng more devastating for a child than a guilty mother blaming herself for a childs mistake. I mean give credit where its due 
. This blog reminds me of a song title - “All the things you could be by now if Sigmund Freud’s wife was your mother “.
What amazes me though is that you sat through the whole movie.
TOTCS.
Very true
Very true. Parenthood is a such a great responsibility, we ought to qualify for sainthood automatically!
Especially in this day and age, when there is so much emphasis on parenting, it sometimes feels really overwhelming. But children are resilient, and thank God they can change themselves!