Twenty minutes into the latest Pixar film Inside Out , I felt my heart sink. The movie, if you haven’t heard about it, is set inside the head of a little girl and the protagonists of the movie, as it were, are five emotions — Joy, Sadness, Anger, Disgust and Fear. From reading up about the movie, I figured this might be a good, if not necessarily entirely scientific, way for my nine-year-old daughter to understand why she feels what she does.

So one Sunday evening, I shepherded my daughter and her best friend (forever!) to the theatre and we settled in, 3D glasses on our noses, popcorn on our laps to watch the life of a ‘regular’ girl. Except, the girl was too regular. Scene after scene depicted a ‘happy’ family — daddy, mummy and little girl, who are always together — on car rides, skating rinks and movie halls. Daddy and mummy hold hands, tickle her and then each other. They roll their eyes in tandem at the kid’s antics and sit side-by-side and cheer loudly when she’s playing ice hockey. There were Pixar perfect shots of everything you imagine a happy family to be, and here I was with two kids from single-parent homes. As is wont to happen, after the movie, over milkshakes and chicken nuggets, there was a long discussion on whether the movie was good or bad, what each one liked and which part they hated. The kids didn’t bring up the subject of the standard ‘happy = two-parent family’ bit. I don’t know if they have a blind spot to it or if they are in active denial, but I wasn’t sure if it was in anyone’s interest to raise the issue with them, so I kept quiet.

It isn’t that on watching Inside Out I was jolted awake to the reality that popular culture is consistently depicting two-parent families as ‘happy’ ones. That happened over a year ago when, in a completely civil and entirely consensual manner, my husband and I decided it was best we lived separately. We took our daughter into confidence at every step of the way, encouraged her to talk about her anxieties, if any, and ensured that even in the new scenario, she had access to both her parents at all times. She seemed fine. It was while sitting with her and watching some show on a kids’ channel that it first struck me. All advertisements had smiling mummies and daddies. Not one show even remotely suggested that some people may possibly be living in a different kind of a family structure.

Single-parent homes aren’t the only narratives that are missing in plot lines. It’s all kinds of differences. How many children’s books talk of adopted children? How many television shows? How many movies feature characters with disability? In Bollywood, if there is someone with disability, it is an adult who is meant to be laughed at. If they do feature kids at all, they are often merely props to invoke pity. Where are the kids in wheelchairs who are the leaders of their gangs? Where is the story of a prodigious violin player who, incidentally, is autistic? When was the last time we watched a roguish, visually challenged 10-year-old? When was the first time we watched him?

The counter-argument, I am certain, would be that when so much money is riding on a movie or a product that is advertised, no one wants to take a ‘risk’ by presenting a less-than-perfect picture. It is much easier to ride along with the prejudices of the majority. Why risk the wrath of some, the revulsion of others? I haven’t seen the data that marketing managers work with, but the argument, I am told, is that when the tired Indian ‘consumer’ comes home from work, he does not want to trouble his mind with notions of equality, fairness or justice. He perhaps, really, only wants to nurse a drink and watch a fully-formed cute child roll his eyes from one side to the other, while his mum and dad swipe on their iPads and compete on what to buy. Why should Amazon India’s successful ad line ‘aur dikhao’ be interpreted to mean ‘show me a different kind of family or character’ when all it seeks to say is, ‘aur products dikhao’?

Perhaps, as we are now a population that aspires mindless consumerism above everything else, all we really want to see is the ‘normal’. Even if we know, from our own experiences living in the seemingly regular families, that there is no happiness as eternal as the fake happiness we watch. But the real failure is in the assumption that anything that varies from standard cannot be good; that, for example, no family with a special child could be happy.

My own single-parent household is an absolutely wholesome and predominantly happy one. All I’m saying is, it wouldn’t hurt to see some validation of this once in a while in a movie hall or a television screen. But I am not holding my breath.

Veena Venugopal is editor BLink and author of The Mother-in-Law

@veenavenugopal

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