During one of the crucial scenes in Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl, a daughter wants to give up on her dreams to tread the path that most girls chose back then. A visibly disheartened father says to her, “I want to give you the wings to fly and you are asking me to cut those wings.”
I was watching the movie with my father and couldn’t help but think that every girl deserves a father like hers, and like mine.
I haven’t been active on Twitter lately for self-preservation. Even when I open the app, I skim through the feed with a brisk stroke of my thumb. But a recent top trending hashtag on Twitter hit too close to home and I felt compelled to dig further.
A tweet from Dhanya Rajendran, Journalist and Editor-In-Chief of The News Minute, intrigued me. She mentioned a distasteful trending hashtag and called out Twitter India on allowing such malicious content to trend on their platform.
This prompted me to go and check what this was all about. I discovered that the top trending hashtag was one which called a top Tamil actor ‘the son of a prostitute.’ And I was absolutely clueless about where this came from. Baffled and befuddled, I tried to trace the origin of this hashtag only to discover that this was a result of “fan wars.” Fans of the Tamil film actor Vijay put every ounce of effort to spotlight this trend as a means to seek ‘revenge’ on the other team of fans.
I have a child who believes in the magic of magic. She thinks there is actually a treasure at the end of the rainbow and that in some corner of the earth, there must be a fairyland which no one knows about. She is almost 6-year-old now and the pragmatic me used to try to tell her to come out of this imaginary magical world. “There is no magic in reality”, I insisted every so often during my conversations with her. I could see the tad bit of disappointment on her face whenever I said so. A few months back, while we were having lunch, she grumbled about the taste of yoghurt that day and requested me to feed her. I sensed this could just be an excuse for getting fed by me and I happily obliged. The moment she took a spoonful in her mouth, she exclaimed.
“The curd now tastes delicious, Mumma! How did this happen?”
“Well! That’s Mother’s Magic”, I instinctively quipped amused.
“See! I told you magic exists. It is everywhere Mumma.”, she tried to convince me.
If there is anything humans have been reminded of this year more than ever before, it is the fact that nothing is over and above our health. We might rise and progress in multifarious ways, but it is all secondary to our existence. Hence, as a parent, the health of our children is always at the top of our scheme of things. It is imperative for us to be more aware to be able to give our children holistic and the best possible health care. This is precisely why Episode 2 of 9 Months Season 5 by Firstpost is an important watch because it revolves around the theme of vaccination for kids.