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Hello all namaste, to begin with video messaging in not my cup of tea but I’m trying to move ahead with times rather than asking you read my tutorials I thought I would send out a brief video every week, speaking about what’s happening in the bay area that is helpful to my young parents and readers as well and some important upcoming events and also deal with a specific topic that caught my interest in that particular week. Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below about what you think. Let’s make this conversational and please avoid any abusive language and content as this is a family channel, it’s your channel, let’s bring back the traditional form of debate with respect and content and not by abuses and personal attacks and if you like this video please encourage us by pressing the subscribe button like us and choose the bell icon to see more such videos. First I would like to inform you about an upcoming event brought to you by the children discovery museum of San Jose, a virtual Diwali event. India parent magazine has been a proud co-sponsor of this event since its inception several years ago, this year due to covid, the event is going completely virtual. This is not true miss event coming up 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. the Diwali festival of lights is a celebration of Indian culture featuring performances storytelling and craft making. This event is emceed by Kishan and Kavita from the very popular radio day hotties. The program has arts and crafts where kids can learn how to make diyas, storytelling, music and dance performances by well known artists of the bay area and will end with a dance party via zoom. Start your Diwali celebration with this amazing pre Diwali event bring your kids to watch and participate in this free event with your entire family. Actual Diwali falls on November 14^th as you all know, for more information please go to our website indiaparentmagazine.org or .com. they’re both the same .org or .com take you to the same place. Next also if you want to see such more calendar events you can always check our website and if you want to post your own event, if you have any upcoming event just go to our website and post your event along with your pictures and it will be live within 24hours. Having said that next I would like to announce a new video presentation called meet the mahants season one hosted by Sindhu Ravuri who will present a renowned artist of either music or dance in a friendly chat. Again please check our website for the latest video. And again let us know what you think your ideas and comments are very important to us in bettering ourselves and more importantly in informing you about the right topics. We are here for you we will also soon bring you videos on schools and homes two topics that are very close to all our young parents’ hearts. More information about that in my next MOM video, which is an abbreviation to “Meena Over Matters”. Having said that I’ll come to the main topic of today and I think its one of the favorite topics of many of us and that is movies. I watched Mirzapur 2, Arya, Bandish Bandits, Gunjan Saxena and the latest one being the Shabana Azmis, Kaali Khuhi it meaning Blackwell. I’ll quickly say a few lines about what I think about each one of them. Out of all my favourite ones I especially like the Bandish Bandits. Lovely music, stunning visuals and above all actors bring life and credibility to their characters. Many issues are dealt in this one hour long 11-12 episodes such as troubling patriarchy, men’s dominance over women, Indian art and culture that’s slowly been taken over by the superficial western influences and so on, but I felt the director doesn’t push his prejudices on you. Incidents are built on probably on the existing reality and there are no value judgements. The overpowering dominance of males over females is brought to you in a stunning yet simplistic manner that peers your heart at the injustice. There is still a name sake king to the semi-town patronizing the arts but the soul of the movie are the young protagonists who bring forth the values of discipline hard work sacrifices needed for true art. Any art form but the Indian or western can be achieved at its purity only through hard work and dedication and sacrifices. This is the over all message, obvious message and the subtle one is that the Indian art forms enabled in their purity are invaluable. The beauty of Indian traditional music and dance is given a platform in the series and that’s what comes out in a stunning fashion. I truly wish finale competition was between a male and a female and the roles were reversed between the main young protagonists. And another aberrant in it’s in other wise well done series are the unnecessary smoking scenes with the young female singer. It’s obvious that the actress was not comfortable and it was kind of sorry as if the scene is being forced into an otherwise well done script. This is the cigarette lobby showing its might is what I felt. We see more and more woman smoking cigarettes in ott platforms. In reality modern woman don’t do that. They ae very health conscious mind. The cigarette and drug lobby put their money into the scenes and this is a subtle nudge towards smoking. Please I request directors and producers not to indulge in such lobbying and put pressure on young impressionable minds.

Next I come to Mirzapur-2 and I wonder what the heck is this series about? Really what is it about? Another depiction that seemed to be driven by the drug and the gun mafia. The series is just about violent and sickening sickening sex scenes that make you want to throw up. Drug abuse and trigger happy heroes. Recently a congress minister’s son has killed a young woman called Nikita Tomer in Haryana in broad daylight for refusing to be his girlfriend. After apprehension he revealed that he got influenced by one of the characters in Mirzapur-2. Who does the same and gets away with it. In fact in this movie this villain/hero actually kills a pregnant woman just because she marries somebody else. Most of the men in Mirzapur-2 are sex starved, trigger happy drug addicted, drug selling murderers. But they are shown as heroes with some sad background story as justification to their acts, acts of criminality which is actually atrocious. This kind of glorification of monsters in movie after Indian movie must stop. Only Indian movies and series have this tendency, other countries focus on more suitable narrative or show drug peddlers as drug peddlers not heroes. And I hated this series, I simply hated it was unnecessary it was either entertaining, enjoyable, inspirational or soul lifting. Its just dark depiction of actually nothing purposeless. Don’t watch it if you haven’t so far.

Another highly touted series is Sushmita Sains, Arya. This too is about a drug peddling family. Sane was lauded by several reviewers. And the series given complementary reviews and yes I agree that she did perform well. However why drugs are such powerful subjects in almost all Indian web series and why are the perpetrators glorified. In one scene Sushmitha sain’s teenage son has an incident with his teenage girlfriend in the swimming pool. And while indulging in drugs and sex, the girl collapses with overdose and is taken to the hospital. I thought Sushmitha as a mother would explode at her son for such a horrific incident but she actually sits there with him at the pool and discusses his love life. You know with a tongue and shake attitude smiling at him when he describes his drug mouth to mouth passes. This scene infuriated me, I was aghast actually I was very hurt drug taking is so normalized and you can clearly see the power of drug lords over the Mumbai’s Hindi film industry, its blatant. Another irritant factors are how young girls are shown smoking, drug using and encouraging men and young boys into sexual activities. It’s extremely agitating at least to me, that they show women in this derogatory fashion. This is very subtle nudging of the audience into believing, it’s the women that are the cause of destruction. This happened in Mirzapur-2 as well, women happily accepting their murderous, dornish sons, brothers, boyfriends with sympathy and commitment. It sickened me, even a strong character such as Sushmitha’s Arya could not or does not negate her above 75 year old father to stop sexing with seemingly some 20 year old young girl. Mirzapur and Arya are so glorified by the mainstream media in India and strangely Bandish Bandits is underplayed. I find it extremely perplexing and even suspicious as well, audience need to observe how film industry indirectly pushes a drug smoking, a drug smoking culture actually onto our young acceptable generation, and we have to show them that we are not a dumb audience by rejecting these series and movies.

Now let’s come to Gunjan Saxena, this is produced by the great Karan Johar. And to me it’s a great disappointment. This story is built up on false premises undermines and entire air force belief system and all just to suit the sick mind of Karan Johar. In his perverted twisted fashion he turns the movie into a cutesy, one-sided drama revolving around an immature character, who can’t stand up for herself live alone for the country. She plays victim. The real Gunjan Saxena is a petite dark-skinned apparently strong women who beats the odds in the movie however Karan Johar turns her into a tall fair cutesy Janvi Kapoor, unrealistically makes all officers biased and selfish sexist bunch and her army brother an idiot. In his typical glossy ill-informed oblivious blatant fashion he changes the basic stats. He makes it frivolous and above the ground with false depths, an unnecessary scene where Janvi asks her father if it’s ok not to say Bharat mata ki jai, just only because she likes to fly and not to be the sainic. Johar plays into the minds of main stream reviewers who loved that bit in the movie. What’s wrong in saying Bharat mata ki jai? What’s wrong is the violence behind it, not the sentence. Don’t we all say god bless America? It’s not the words but actions behind words that are dangerous. The real Gunjan acknowledged in the court that she was very well respected officer and didn’t face any discrimination. Well that’s Karan Johar for us always playing up to nonsensical illusions. In addition to that I find Pankaj Tripathi who plays Gunjan’s father. His acting skills are little bit monotonous, his movements and slight face wrinkles have become boring and predictable. He need to change his act. As it happens with some movies especially if it’s a Johar’s flick Gunjan Saxena is overrated and critically praised by many of his main stream gaga reviewers but I didn’t find it that great frankly speaking.

Finally I would like to say a few words about the “Kaali Khuhi” a movie about child infanticide. A good idea actually a very good idea main protagonists are the child actress Arriva Arora, Shabana Azmi and Sanjeeta Shaik. Well the idea is a good one. The necessary turns and twists are actually long and unnecessary and pretty boring. I found fault with three issues in this otherwise good intent. One the movie puts the burden of female child, the female child killings on to the women of the village themselves. In a typical patriarchal fashion, the blame goes on to women in obviously male-dominated world. Men are seemingly bystanders or as helpless victims themselves. I found this bizarre. Finally women doing away with the female babies are shown as one-eyed, wrinkled, physically challenged in some way or the other. This is insanely inhuman in the sense of equating a misshapen feature with evil. I mean come on grow up. Crazy symbolism and it made me very angry just as that over hyped director Raja Mouli did in his Bahubali series, making all dark skinned people demons. Third and most importantly assuming only young women can bring equality and act as heroes against injustice is belittling centuries of undaunting fight women have devoted their lives to. If the younger generation is able to talk freely about these issues today it’s because of the sacrifices. Thousands and thousands of women have done for hundreds of years globally. This is the problem with the new liberals to them youth, drugs, beauty, smoking, violence, sex, equals freedom and liberalism in this sense tradition and gender bias are overlooked. Well Shabana Asmi is all right I mean what’s with her conjoined eyebrow, I have no idea. The beautiful and talented Sanjeeta Shaik is wasted. The younger girl did her role good, she’s just pretty good and cute actually. The director with her confused symbolism stretches the movie to a boring level and we quickly loose interest and sympathy toward and otherwise very serious cause. By now you must be wondering this lady has nothing good to say about any movie.

Surprise I do, I watched a fantastic beautiful nice movie called “the Evil eye” it’s an English movie but it’s about an Indian family in English. Excellent movie with a fabulous message that come in the climax. Saritha Chaudhary as the mom is simply astounding, I mean where is she all these years? What happened to her she’s fabulous. Couldn’t believe Bernard White his accent, he was marvellous as a south Indian husband. I mean fantastic fabulous actor. I think his name in the movie is Krishna. Both Sunitha Mani and Umar Masakati were empowering in their roles. The movie is co-produced guess who by the one and only Priyanka Jonas Chopra. It has a mysterious zing to it, in the name of superstition but the end rounds it all up so well. Fabulous movie to watch and you can do so with your entire family. You have the imp stamp on it. Go and enjoy the movie, it’s just a one and half hour movie and its fabulous.

Well that’s all for today and again please don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and like this channel and also don’t forget to let us know what you think about video and in general anything about India parenting magazine, it means a lot to us. See you next week bye.