Stepmoms and other fairytales

What would Bollywood be without villains and fairy tales without step mothers? Society needs a flagellation post to lock up the bevy of beauties, separate the happy couples, and shower nastiness on good little children. If good must triumph over evil, then evil must be suitably built up and cloaked to boot, preferably with beauty, brains, and a good deal of hidden hissing. But then, the divorce rate went up worldwide, and children all over needed moms, step or otherwise. Hollywood, often leading by example, decided to drop the fairytales. With the anti-hero came the anti-villain, and Julia Roberts floated Involved Stepmoms Inc in the late nineties.
The ministry of plotting and planning faced a temporary shut down till Voldemort made an appearance, and reinforced the fact that foster and family, just do not go together. That, like it or not, the stories we tell and that ultimately sell, in order to be touching and true are drawn from real life. And for every woman who nurtured her step children as her own, and for every husband who bade them treat her like their own mother, there were an equal number who slipped between cup and the lip. Born into families where it is not just plots that are built of machinations, but the lives of real little boys and girls, cowering in fear and hoping for a fairy god mother come rescue them. The deal with Dhruta, unlike most little children caught in the plots adults weave for them in place of emotional blankets, is that a fairy god father did make an appearance, and saved the day.
Could the culprit be closer home? The image of mother to a child is, thanks to folklore, social conditioning, psychology and mass media, the ultimate pinnacle of a social relationship. The mother is supreme, and while that pressures a woman to be the perfect ideal of shaping and moulding the child—a load for the feminist brigade to lighten—it also plays both ways; the wicked woman starring ‘Mom’ in neon lights, but who wilts childhood is inconceivable to most.
While a neighbourhood will with much hesitation interfere when a husband whacks his wife, Harry Potter under the staircase with little nutritive food, and no magic to save him, must of course have a darn good reason—mother knows best—to be there. Woe betide the society that begins to question its mothers. The downfall of Indian culture, dear vultures, lies not in the breaking down of the stereotypes that build from myth to legend, but in the identification of the one ideal, the anti-thesis of the Hindu pantheon, that fits all. And thus if Yashoda is revered more than Devaki, it is because the role was identified not by the woman to the man, but to the child. Mothering, holy books and folklore had it, was in karma and dharma, never in god-given inherited social roles.
If it shocks your socks off that women may not make the perfect mothers, look to courts worldwide that have begun to listen to the father’s side, though in miniscule fashion, in custody battles. While women’s groups may take umbrage with the notion of child psychologically needing the mother, and point out very correctly that in this particular case, it was in fact the father to be blamed (shameful cad I might add) for permitting his own flesh and blood to be rendered from him, fact is, society fails in its bid to civilise itself when it has failed to provide the child, any child, with a nurturing atmosphere, irrespective of ‘whose side’ the law is on. It is the role of parent as nourisher, defender, provider that is on trial here, and the law is and must be on the side of the winner, irrespective of gender.
Even as Blair publicly debates how much spanking is too much, and in the US watchdogs prowl for children left alone at home with no supervision, what is key is that civilised societies hold society at large responsible for abuse to a child. The law must be built to protect the weakest of the weak, and there is no more vulnerable element than the child of man. Medical practitioners, teachers, neighbours and extended family are to be held equally culpable of crimes against children, irrespective of whom the perpetrator is. The judicial system, religion, morality, social mores, and economic stability are all magnified failures of Ozymandius’ empire, when children whether on streets or in seemingly secure homes grapple with their tiny ill-formed wills battle everything from physical to emotional abuse. And until you hear the voices of the children singing in the dome, this land will remain a wasteland.