I love Bollywood and there was a time I could watch
pretty much anything. I don't remember ever walking out of a film and I've gone
for some pretty lousy ones. I sat through one of SRK's absolute pits of a film
(I’m telling myself it’s age-related maturity which makes me
admit this even while the heart feels a twinge of guilt at stabbing SRK in the
back). Anyway, all I remember of the said film is that he exaggerated his worst
mannerisms and wore a jacket without a shirt ugh!!! But then he IS SRK and I
WAS young ....... and I am so digressing, but you do get the picture, right?
When the kids came along I discovered to my utter
surprise that I'd turned into a Bollywood prude. I found I had this unexplained
desire to keep them away from all things filmi for ever and ever. I
never did have a fascination for toddlers mouthing film dialogues or aping the
Dabangg dance.
I quailed at the thought of H and N watching crassly
choreographed item numbers to even more crass lyrics, painfully long drawn out
'come-hither' looks and counter looks, the even more painful camera shots
lingering on various parts of the female anatomy as much as the gore and
violence. Sometimes they'd come to me with a string of lyrics they'd picked up
from a friend and ask me what it meant and I'd explain the best I could. I got
by pretty well but then those were early days.
The first time N gave me grief for a film, it was Karan Johar’s Student of the Year. She was all of 6 and I was sure it
wasn’t for her while she was equally sure it just was, since ALL her friends
had seen it. To my dismay the society kids took to enacting out portions of it
and I found N staking claim to a certain role without ever having seen the
characters! She knew each of them
through her friends. Still, I consoled myself, it wasn’t the same as actually
seeing the film. Even today the non-animated films the twins have seen can be
counted on their fingers.
However, I have come to realise that trying
to keep them away from Bollywood while living in India is silly not to say
completely impossible. The trick is to filter them and that I hope I can
continue to do for a long time yet. What I remain firm on, is NOT getting
swayed by the ‘All my friends have seen it’ line. I
have friends and cousins who have taken the children along right from the time
when the kids were babies. And I have to admit the children do not seem any
worse (or better!) for it. I put this down to just another parenting quirk the children have to bear with.
I’m learning to let go little by
little. The twins have graduated from KungFu Panda to Chennai Express and we
have begun to watch some really good Bollywood films together but more of that in another post. I still do get the occasional twinge when H and N pick up some bizarre action move or
a weird piece of vocabulary from a film or when I watch N singing Manwa Lage with a look of immense
earnestness and I wonder how much of that emotion she can actually comprehend. I
AM over-thinking this I know. The sane part of me tells me kids hardly
internalise songs and dialogues like adults; but what to do – that’s just how I
feel.
And the prude in me cannot but
celebrate when given a choice the kids recently picked Minions instead of a
popular Bollywood flick. Maybe it was alright after all, alright to hold them
back just that much. Parenting is about individual instinct, right? And then about
hoping and praying fervently that it all turns out right.
What do you think? Is it okay to let
the kids be? Do we end up pushing them towards something by trying to block it
out?