The movie Dear Zindagi brings out the resentments stored by us against our parents. Alia Bhatt plays Kaira, a commitment phobic, anguished young girl. She is a successful cinematographer with a line of guys chasing her but happiness eludes her. It takes the unconventional psychologist Jehangir Khan to unlock her resentment against her parents for creating differences between her and her younger sibling. Her parents were facing monetary issues and had valid reasons for keeping Kaira with her grandparents while looking after Kaira’s kid brother. But children see the world in black and white, and to little Kaira, she was rejected by the two people she loved the most. Once she lets go of these hurts, her life takes a turn for the better.

We expect wonders from our parents but to our dismay, they fail to meet our insanely high expectations. This results in a heavy load of resentment which we sometimes carry to our dying day. Carrying this burden is an exercise in futility. Parents and their kids have a different perspective and it is only by working towards understanding these differences that we can hope to bridge the generational abyss.

The first truth we must accept is that parents are but human beings with feet of clay and so they are not infallible. They may play favourites. They may push us too hard to be super-achievers. They may be too ambitious and fall into the category of absentee parents.  They may be simple, humble, unsophisticated people and we are ashamed of them. But generally speaking their intentions are good for they love their kids and we must accept their imperfections just as we accept ours.

Singer Cat Stevens expresses the disconnect between the generations due to controls exercised by parents when he belts out, “From the moment I could talk, I was ordered to listen, now…”  Mothers and fathers do have to lay down rules for the safety of their children. A toddler has no concept of danger and so the mother has to lay down certain rules for his own safety such as: “Sunil, don’t go near the fire. You will get burnt.” Or “Maya, don’t talk to strangers and don’t accept sweets from them.”

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People everywhere dream of freedom. Children might think of freedom as a license to do whatever they want to do and there wouldn’t be any restrictions on them. Teenagers might think of freedom as being able to go to college all by themselves, carrying and showing off their expensive mobile phones and a license of skipping lectures.

I believe that freedom has both good and bad effects. It can either make a person or break a person. It can make a person independent but it can also make a person get influenced by wrong company. Freedom to me is to be able to make decisions and choices independently, to be able to breathe freely. As a girl, freedom is the most important thing in my life to live confidently. By this I mean, being allowed to choose the career that I want to pursue. By doing so I’ll be able to give my best to my work.

To me freedom is getting an opportunity to know who I really am and discovering my strengths and weaknesses. By this would help me to be strong and face the world without any fears because then I’ll know myself in and out.

To me freedom is living the way I want to, wearing clothes that I like, eating what I relish, speaking to whomsoever I want to or going to wherever my mind wanders to. This freedom would allow me to be stress free and enjoy each and every second that I live in this world.

Freedom to me is much more than its literal sense. It is rights that are unconditional and issued to every citizen. To me freedom is to let lower class people actually live their lives without getting insulted and abused. It is to let every child in our country to study so that this world can be transformed into a better place to breathe in and throw away child labour and things like these from our society.

Freedom is the basis of reason. To be able to question everything before blindly accepting my fate. To question what is right and what is wrong without being afraid of any threats. Freedom to me is the only way for a caged bird to achieve happiness, for pet animals to wander about in free space. Freedom is to let them be alone without injuring or killing them resulting in ecological imbalance and loss of natural beauty.

To me freedom is to be able to connect with our responsibilities. By taking charge of things, we get to experience immense happiness and satisfaction. It gives us a chance to know how much of a work load we can handle at a time and how well we are able to manage.

But does freedom really exist? Our country has lost the freedom as time has gone by. To some freedom is still nothing but a dream. We say that we attained freedom a long time ago but are we making effective use of it? All this forces me to think about various people that suffer and the world that continues to neglect them. I can only hope for the best and let time be the one to give freedom to everyone.

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