First of all let me confess, I haven't yet watched this movie "Ki & Ka" but I do have things to say about it. Ki & ka is a movie (what I feel) that spins over a clever and easily marketable topic that can be communicated in a single sentence. It's about battle of sexes. I don't have any personal issue with such battles until they harm and misguide people about the idea of living a happy life. This movie is showing the gender role reversal where an ambitious woman who wants to climb the ladder of success is married with a progressive male partner who is happy to stay at the bottom. He cooks, cleans and plays the perfect house husband while she toils away. I guess this movie features a conversational humor and gives a wrong impression about working wives. I feel sad about this rambling story, which is stretched to more than 120 minutes without adequately exploring the issues it stokes (my sister told me the whole plot and the story).
My husband is doing work from home since last many months and I am going office, as usual. My mother in-law stays with us for looking after our son and I am so thankful to my husband that he is always there at home to help his mother in doing so. Working from home is not an easy thing for him. Our son now understands that Papa is inside the other room, working on his laptop and talking to someone over phone. All these things are sufficient to attract our 17- month old boy and he tries his best to get Papa outside, everyday. He knocks the door of the room, he cries at times to his loudest limit and on top of everything his sweet voice calling "Papa" is enough to melt my husband's heart for leaving his work. Still he's trying excellently to balance things. In fact, he is adorable in his part that he, more or less has taken charge of a mother who attends his son on very moment when he needs his parents.
However, people don't admire his commendable efforts. After this very movie got releases and my husband went office for a meeting, his team-mates said that he reminded them movie Ki & ka. I don't know how people are seeing similarities between this money-making idea movie and our real life situations. To my deepest thinking, I could understand that as in movie Kareena Kapoor works whereas her husband Arjun Kapoor is a stay at home husband, I go out for work and my husband stays home “and work”. But is this the likeness between the theme of the movie and how we, husband-wife, are helping each other?
We have decided to go like this because we feel this is the best way to live a happy life. In movie the character kabir stays home because he doesn’t want to be an “MBA robot”. But my husband “stays home and work” also. And I am not at all that much ambitious that I can’t acknowledge my partner’s efforts. I find him the best man who has no identity crises with his wife going office whereas he stays home. I see him as an outstanding employee who works till mid night to complete his office work. And I feel he is the best father in this world who has no issue in changing diapers of his son and even attending client calls taking his son in his lap.
So, to all those people who commented on my husband referring this movie, “Perhaps you all couldn’t understand what a husband is doing for his wife, a father is doing for his son and a family person is doing for his family. All you are seeing is a man staying at home (he is working also, you already know) and his wife going office. So please stop judging and commenting us. For the movie which you have enjoyed, I want to show a blunt reality behind it. Ki & Ka is about that washing machine commercial that suggests that domestic dynamics will change for good if men start washing the clothes. The binaries along which both the characters are plotted leave no room for negotiation. Thecharacter kia hates to do domestic work and can you tell which today’s women doesn’t? Thecharacter kabir doesn’t want to be a corporate drone and tell me which man wants to be one? At no point these two frames merge, and by sticking the characters in His and Hers corners, the movie misses an opportunity to examine the taboo that society forces on men and women. The taboo that laughs at a man if he stays at home, people who try break the bond between husband-wife and narrow mindedness that limits the roles of life partners. So please stop appreciating the ideas that can bring turmoil in relationships. Not all family disputes end at happy note like our new generation movies, some of them get sad endings and in real life sad ending can’t get fixed easily."
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