How do you spend your weekends? You go for a spa, take all day nap, shop, or just feel indecisive about what to do and the day ends? Let me help you out. If you are in an active mood and want to do something meaningful, grab your old hobby and work on it or just pamper yourself. But, if you want a lazy Sunday and you are bored with scrolling your social network page for hours, why you don’t celebrate your womanhood and nourish your mind with these movies? The characters are bold, free, independent, and most importantly real. I know you have watched most of these movies, but, trust me, these are worth bringing. So, here are our 5 Bollywood movies that celebrate women!
Piku
No matter you are a Bollywood movie fan or not, if you sit for watching Soojit Sircar’s ‘Piku’, you cannot pause it for sure. Besides unparalleled direction, flawless acting of the stars, and easy flow of the movie, Piku has a handful of messages to convey you. Firstly, it is absolutely perfect not to marry at the socially defined appropriate age. Piku’s life is no compromised for her unmarried status. Secondly, being a daughter does not mean you can’t take responsibility of your parents. Whereas in the Indian context, parents of daughters often lament for not having a son since daughters cannot take care of them during their old age, Piku, being an evidently smart, confident, and ambitious woman breaks the stereotype and takes care of her old father until the end. I doubt any other Indian movie has ever celebrated the strength and role of a daughter in this manner.
Thirdly, Piku is bold and open enough to accept her sexual desires and feels no unhealthy inhibition for her non-virginity. Piku is a slice of your and our lives; her struggles with work versus family are as real as ours. She portrays as common and regular a life as any independent working woman, we can identify with her grumpiness and mood swings, we can feel her conflicts and anger. Watching Piku is refreshing since it presents the tug-of-war of day-to-day responsibilities without much drama, yet gives us the flavour of hope at the end.
Parched
If you still believe women in Bollywood only dance in yellow saree and cry, then you have not watched Parched yet. The director successfully portrays how powerful and strong femininity can be. Parched talks about a number of contemporary social evils of India starting from dowry problem, child marriage, marital rape, lack of scope for education for girl children to domestic violence. But beyond everything, it celebrates the beauty of womanhood. The most effective thing about the movie is, it deals with some real issues of India that Indian women are dealing with. Being in a developing country, we, women are still fighting for as basic a right as education. The movie reveals that the rights are not meant to be permitted or allowed by the men but are supposed to be earned through struggle and courage. Three main characters of the movie Rani, Lajjo, and Bijli fight with individual patriarchs of their lives but they are connected to each other and form a support system. Their friendship is something to be cherished throughout the movie. Parched is a movie which will make you strongly feel why we need to be united against patriarchy and from which level our fight should start.
Queen
Queen is a simple story of a simple girl like us. She is not extraordinarily high achieving, rich, or model-like beautiful. She is a girl of a traditional middle-class Indian family who is dumped by her fiancé and then her life was changed. Queen gives us quite a number of lessons such as heart breaks are OK and one can get over it. Secondly, sometimes traveling in a place where you can enjoy your anonymity, meeting new people help you to understand life in a much broader way. A solo trip for a girl is necessary to fathom her ‘self’. Queen also tells us how beautiful it feels when one is free from the cage of lamentation for a dysfunctional relationship. After watching Queen, you are going to feel more liberated and free to make choices of your life because life is bigger than how we assess it.
English Vinglish
Besides being financially independent wives of the Indian family often are deprived of respect and value that the man of the family gets. The reasons can be many. Shashi, the protagonist of the movie ‘English Vinglish’, is beautiful, a great cook, and also manages her business and family with great balance. But in the apparently happy and perfect home, she feels humiliated and undermined every day since she does not speak English. The movie questions our meaningless lust towards English as a language at the same time also reveals our shallowness of judging people on the basis of their language. Shashi in the movie does remind us our mothers’, colleagues’, or our own struggle and vulnerability with poor English or dressing. Shashi wins the game since she puts her courage and efforts to fight against the day-to-day misery she faces. Watching ‘English Vinglish’ is a must since it gifts us with a feeling of indomitable potential within us that will win all the odds.
Arth
1982 film ‘Arth’ is another milestone work you must experience. It tells us a story of Pooja, who has been searching for her identity and the meaning of life. Like most of us, Pooja dreamt of owning a house, but, she had it at the cost of losing her husband’s love who had an extramarital affair with a film star. Pooja’s insecurities and vulnerabilities are real but at the end, she finds her own identity which is not attached to any relation, she finds a life for herself and does not go back to any relationship.
These movies are royal ways of celebrating womanhood as well as your weekend. I hope you are going to celebrate your weekend with these and thank me later.
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