Parenting skills, a skill learnt?

Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway (2023)
Director: Ashima Chibber

I remember another case involving a Malaysian couple working in Sweden on a diplomatic passport in 2014. They were charged with child abuse when they smacked their children with a bamboo stick (probably rotan) for not reciting the Quran. The parents were imprisoned for instituting corporal punishment on their children, something unheard of in that society. Even though a Malay proverb surmises that 'one should live by the law of the land' (di mana bumi dipijak, di situ langit dijunjung), this obviously, does not apply to Malaysians in a foreign land, furthermore when it involves propagating religion to the generation next. There was a barrage of condemnation by netizens upon the country that decided to persecute their guests. A columnist in Malaysia even called Sweden's long remand period "a travesty of universal justice". The parents, upon return, after completion of their incarceration, received a hero's welcome.

So the question is, what is good parenting, one which spares the rod or uses it judiciously? The one in which the elder sibling also takes cognisance of household responsibilities and caring for her younger ones or the one where parents bear all responsibility for nurturing kids? Even within similar environments, siblings turn out differently, so how can there be one mould that fits all kinds of formulas? Who decides what good parenting is?

Many Eastern parents believe in the old adage of 'spare the rod and spoil the child' and 'action speaks louder than words' to steer children into submission to traverse the moth-bitten path they and their parents had taken. All the talking and reasoning are only in civil situations. Behind closed doors, words and utensils would fly. 

Since 1979, many developed nations, led by Sweden, have banned spanking and all corporal punishment. The Scandinavian way of parenting would encompass spending as much time outdoors, dividing parental duties, accepting gender neutrality, having liberal views on nudity parents and no spanking. Spanking is confined only to the bedroom to the loved ones in the most passionate ways!

This Bollywood film puts Norway under scrutiny for its seemingly inhumane and invasive child protection policies. They went as far as to compare it to state-sponsored child abduction. In 2011, in the town of Stavanger, an oil-rich region of Norway, an Indian immigrant(expatriate) worked in the petroleum industry. As Norway's Child Protection service, Bernevernet investigated the family when the first child was thought to exhibit features of autism, the workers discovered that the parents were incompetent by Norwegian standards and subsequently recommended that the children needed to be placed under foster care till adulthood. The reasons mentioned were objections against their parenting habits, which are considered typical in Indian culture. Feeding by hand was construed as forced feeding; sleeping on the same bed was unhealthy; yelling at children was abuse, and parents arguing was a no-no.

'Mrs Chattarji vs Norway' is the recreation of Sagarika Chakraborty's and Anurup Bhattacharya's experiences, which created a mild hiccup in bilateral relations between countries. The top brass of the Indian leaders had to intervene to find an amicable solution. It seems that not everything is hunky dory in the land with the best indices for the happiest nation on Earth.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Is it because of Nature or nurture?

Badhaai Do (Congratulations Due, Hindi; 2022)
Netflix

Learnt a new word today, a lavender marriage. 

Sure, the law has accepted the third gender and various sexual orientations. But, mind you, it is not universal and definitely not freely tolerated by many conservative communities. 

To conform to societal expectations and pressures, many members of the LGBTQIA+ community get themselves involved in 'sham marriages'. Couples undergo lavender marriages to appease the family and conceal their socially stigmatised sexual orientations. This is not something new. Rock Hudson, Barbara Stanwyck, Tyrone Power and many more in Hollywood had made arrangements to save their careers. Lately, in Communist China, it has been revealed that gay men hook up with lesbian women through social media to show their 'wife' during the new year visits to prevent nagging from the family members. Same-sex unions are illegal in China. 

Slowly, we can see that OTT (Over-the-top) platforms are trying to override the prevailing societal norms as determined by the local cultures. Some may argue that these OTTs, being international in their outlook, may only have one goal - to push their boundary, provoke, start a conversation, and perhaps create a single narrative, a New World Order for everyone. They do all these while laughing all the way to the bank. These OTTs, media services that transmit directly to viewers, bypass traditional gatekeepers who keep a tab on what the public can consume. Rightly or wrongly, via this film, I get the vibe that they are trying to make LGBTQIA+ mainstream. 

The next burning question that needs to be answered is whether this LGBT tendency is ingrained in Nature or artificially created? Do we all have an inborn sexual attraction that gets suppressed due to social mores - as the woke generation implies, gender is fluid? Or is it because of society's openness and expressive nature that we can tell our wants and dislikes? 

Is the contamination of drinking water from our river polluted with hormones from contraceptives pills, making men more effeminate? Are plastic wastes and toxic hydrocarbon effluent screwing up our internals? Or is it just Nature's way to curb population explosion before the re-set button is ignited.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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We don't choose our family!

Shoplifters (2018)
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda

What is the meaning of being a parent? Is it merely a process of transferring genetic material or a legal process determined by a piece of certificate and the State? We all know that being a parent is beyond all these. There is love, cuddling, touching, nurturing and many more. But then we also see abuses and unconducive environments set by parents for the growing minds.

The low-key movie tells us in a very unusual way what it is to be family. A family, in their definition, does not involve Nature but rather tend to imply that it involves appropriate nurturing techniques that prepare children to adulthood and make their lives on Earth worth living. It does not conform to what we expect a typical family to be.

The film starts with a slightly older man with a young preteen boy pilfering something from a convenience store. Then we see that they live in a bare thread cramped living quarters with a mother figure, a grandmother figure and another young adult lady. A young girl is seen wandering outside in the cold, hungry. The 'family' take her to feed her and keep her warm. They see signs of physical abuse on her. Trying to return her to her home the next day, they overhear her parents yelling at each other on top of their voices. They decide to keep and care for the girl.

A family that shoplifts together stay together!

The father loses his construction job after injuring his ankle. The mother is retrenched from her job at the laundry. The household runs on the grandmother's pension money, and the family filled the rest of their needs via shoplifting. They justify their crime with their own moral codes. The family unit can be seen to be very intimate and happy.

Everything caved in when the boy got caught shoplifting, and police moved in. Only then, the whole truth comes to the fore. None of the kids is the couple's, and there is a secret of alleged murder and concealment of a dead body.

In a world where children are abused and neglected, does it mean anything to sire a child? There must be more criteria to be met for qualifying to be a parent. But then, we must also be aware that we cannot use our yardstick to gauge whether a parent meets the criteria of good parents. Everyone has their way of instilling discipline and imparting knowledge to their young.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Nature vs. Nurture

You can only motivate someone so much. After that, it is left to nature or genes as one may call it. The more you push him to the brim, the higher the chances are that he may just flip. Everyone has his own capability to achieve his place in space and time at his own pace or bar of achievement. We cannot set our target and expect everybody else to follow. And just because the other person does not reach our expectation, it does not mean that he is a failure. At his own leisurely pace and his perhaps longer duration, he may actually attain enviable dizzying heights. The ability to explore and try out one's varied, sometimes eccentric ideas, not following blindly to preset norm is the cornerstone of innovation that started the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century which categorically ended the greatness of the feudalistic empires of the world to be replaced by republics and people's rule of law by consensus. Let it be....