Deepthi's Scribbles

  After reading many rave reviews and listening to umpteen discussions triggered by it, I finally watched the Malayalam film, “The Great Indian Kitchen”. The movie follows a young newly-wed couple as they embark on life together. The focus is on the bride who has to adjust to the different way things are done in her in-law’s home than her own. The primary takeaway of the film is that household chores, particularly cooking and cleaning, is the responsibility of women in Indian families, with no help from the opposite sex. And despite the year being 2021, I sadly have to admit that in most Indian families, this is still the way things are. Director Jeo Baby succeeds in demonstrating the drudgery and monotony of these chores by repeating the same scenes of chopping vegetables, making dosas, serving food, clearing up the table after a meal and cleaning the dishes, almost to the point of boring the viewer. In fact, these repetitive scenes constitute nearly half of the initial minutes of the

“Soulmate” - that mythical creature that Disney movies and rom-coms have conditioned women to spend a lifetime searching for. Fairytales and romantic Hollywood movies are often called “chick flicks”, because their primary purveyors are women. We sigh and swoon when Prince Charming wakes up the Princess from the evil witch’s curse with the “kiss of true love” and dream about our own soulmate, who will one day sweep us off our feet. How are girls supposed to identify their soulmate or “one true love” out of the billions on this planet? Disney princesses have a leg up on us mere mortals when it comes to soulmate identification because when they experience true love’s kiss , they get confirmation (ding ding ding, soulmate alert) by waking up from a curse, sparkles flying from their body, or something else magical happening in true Disney fashion that proves once and for all that Prince Charming is indeed their soulmate. Some rom-com heroines put Disney princesses to shame by recognizing