Life in a... Metro (Hindi; 2007)Thomas Sowell, an American economist, surmises that the main reason behind the disparity between the blacks and whites as depicted by the Black Life Matters (BLM) movements is the destruction of the family unit and the libertarian policies of the US governments in the mid-60s. Two-thirds of black children born in America today are out of wedlock. 90% of inmates of correctional facilities in America had grown without a father if that is telling something. Sowell himself uprooted himself from the shackles of poverty, growing up in Harlem without a father, dropping out of school at 16, only to eventually become a prominent academician in Stanford. He recently entered his 10th decade of existence.
The implementation of liberal economic policies in tandem with changing social norms seems to reward the sluggards. He posits that minimum wage actually discourages high achievers. Having social policies favouring single parents actually encouraged single-parent family units. Welfare states just promoted laziness. His research showed that living standards were actually better off for the black during the Jim Crow era despite its discriminatory policies. People just had to pull themselves with their bootstraps.
Their grouse then was how they could pull themselves by their bootstraps when they did not have shoes!
How is all that connected to this story?
One of the characters of this story goes through the life of a lifeless marriage. She has a preteen daughter and a philandering husband but feels rejuvenated all over again as she finds love in a single man. They are about to commit to an amorous relationship only to have the thought of her child, and the sacrosanct institution of marriage jolt the lady back to realisation. Concurrent to this dilemma, the movie also narrates the pressure-cooker living condition of the metropolitan city of Mumbai, love life-wise.
The protagonist's husband is in a supposedly meaningless affair with his worker. As the matters the heart are not straight forward, she soon demands more than just physical love, a commitment. This worker, however, has a secret admirer. The protagonist's sister is devastated that she is still not married at 28, and her recent boyfriend turned out to be gay. Meanwhile, a guy with awkward social skills is getting close to her, but he is also getting married soon. The protagonist's widowed mother, who is living alone in a retirement home, receives a letter from her teenage flame who is returning from the USA after all these years to meet.
Through this winding maze of story, the storyteller tells a tale of love of different kinds and how most our decision on life and love eventually turns out dissatisfying. Perhaps, modern romance is expecting the oxytocin-infused addictive feeling of amorous disposition to be forever and ever. Unfortunately, being chemicals, we develop tolerance to oxytocin or serotonin over time, and we need a more enormous boost in different thrills to attain satiety. That is human nature. Society mores and restrictions were made to ensure that the unwanted effects of this primordial desires do not come back to plague the society.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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