It's all about loving your parents

When we first watched Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, we did not get the logic of the movie's tagline: "It's all about loving your parents." While we thought this was a good moral, we hadn't become acquainted enough with Indian culture to understand how it applied to this movie. We thought the movie was more about parents making life difficult for no good reason than about them being lovable. While I now know more about Indian culture and can understand how in that context the tagline makes sense for that movie, I have also come to think of that tagline as a kind of tagline for all Indian movies. After all, there's hardly an Indian movie I watch where I don't finish it thinking to myself, "Wow, thank Heaven for my parents! I love my parents a lot!" Movie characters usually love their parents a lot, but theirs don't deserve it nearly as much as mine do.

Dad hands down beats every movie dad I've ever seen. The other night I watched a movie called Chhalia, and the dad in that movie refused to recognize the girl as his daughter because she'd been stranded in Pakistan for five years and who knows what might have happened to her there. He also refused to let his wife recognize her. It reminded me strongly of when I watched Seven Brides for Seven Brothers with my family as a little girl. In that movie some girls get kidnapped by some brothers, and the brothers stop the girls' pursuing family members by causing an avalanche that cuts off the mountain pass, so that the families have to wait for several months before they can go rescue them. I remember Dad saying after we watched that movie that if it had been his daughter captured, he wouldn't have gone home because an avalanche had blocked the path--he would have not stopped until he'd found a way around it somehow. (The dad in Parugu also has this mentality of stopping at nothing to get his daughter back, but he's quite violent about it, and his daughter would not have eloped in the first place if he hadn't been so unapproachable. So Dad's still way more awesome.) In fact, the only movie dads I can think of who come close to Dad's awesomeness are the ones in Vivah, and Dad's still better because he has a better sense of humor.

The contrast isn't quite so great between Mom and the movie moms--movie moms tend to be pretty ideal--but I still think Mom is no less than any of them. She can cook with the best of them. She makes sacrifices for us, although she takes care of herself too doesn't overdo it like some of the martyr mothers, who invariably end up wearing themselves out so much that they become a burden. She avoided a lot of filmi problems by not marrying a rascal. She loves her family just as much as any movie mom, and she's achieved all these tasks with seven children rather than the typical filmi two or three.

Thanks, Mom and Dad! I love you guys!