Thappad… A housewife story!

Thappad – not a film review

I had deliberately not watched this movie for some time because I knew even from the trailer that it is a thought provoking movie.

What most who watched the film did not understand is that the movie was not about the slap at all!
(Got the bait now!!)

The slap was only the turning point or the indication or a wake up call for the wife to re assess her life. The mundane life she was living putting her desires and ambitions away for her husband and making his goals her own, his mother was her mother now, his dreams her own, his party her own and even his favourite colour became her own!

All these happened so gradually that she was in too deep. It was a person walking in a sleep or working in slumber and doing things mechanically. This sleep required a wake up call, which in this case was the slap but believe me it could have been anything. If some one feels that the slap is trivial then he or she will be surprised to know that it can be a simple act or word said by the spouse which can trigger this realisation that you also have a life and identity!

The things and people in the movie are actually not that far fetched but still I think they have shown the husband too oblivious to reality! May be he is still in Kabir Singh mode! Maybe he thinks that the world revolves around him! It took a thappad to make him also realise at least in the end that he is not the centre of the universe!

The thappad shook the wife but it made her realise that no one in that house actually cares about her feeling and no one appreciates what she does in that house. She gives them time to acknowledge that. The look she gives to another wife, the mother of her husband, her mother in law was like a daughter experting her mother to empathise with her. Why she did not scold her son? Why she did not just grab him by his ears and tell him to say sorry immediately!?
Why she did not even ask her how she was?
Those were the eyes which were decieved and heart broken and the saddest ones in the house.

The two days she also took to get a hold of her life, if she was the maid with no one to depend on or no self confidence then she would have just stayed. If she was the lawyer, she could have started with domestic abuse law suit. But she was a wife who had just woken up from a house wife coma and she needed to evaluate her options. Sh went to her father’s place and when she got the support from her father she made her resolve littile more strong. Add to the fact that there is another man in the house who treats his housewife with respect which she deserves.

Even after she moves out she still gives her husband ample chance to at least try to understand why she left him. He did not understand that he did not slap her face but her self confidence and he did not apologize for it. And apology is not saying sorry but it means that he or she understands that what he or she did was wrong and they will try with utmost sincerity to never repeat it again! It is pathetic that this whole range of commitment which is involved in apology has been reduced to this small word which people utter without meaning it…

A scene in which his boss tells him that what he did was wrong and it is so cool when he asks, “would you have slapped me or your senior?”
It takes efforts by everyone around him and her separation to finally realise that what he did was wrong and by the time it was too late anyway.

He did not now that love is like a string and once broken it cannot be fixed, if you try to fix it then there will be knots…

Of course the above is only a point of view of the movie, in real life it may not lead to divorce or else the amount of traumatic perforation I see in my practice will be the number of divorce. That before lockdown was at least one to two per week! Apparently men show masculinity mainly to women younger to them and think that it is their right!

Marriage is an institution which is easy enough to create but very difficult to maintain. A happy marriage is most difficult to maintain. It does not matter whether it was arranged or love marriage. Like how the lawyer says in the movie, marriage is just a legal agreement between two parties. The court or the society does not take into account the emotional component which is actually the most important. It does take lots of compromises from either party to make it work. Sometimes may be the compromises are just not enough and you may reach a breaking point or maybe a Thappad will do it for you!

And don’t worry, I have great respect for the institution of marriage, so maybe being optimistic about the movie in that as the husband says in the end, he will try to be better and maybe that happened later and they did give the marriage another go! Round two without the thappad of course! Being the eternal optimist that I am, I can always hope right!

In a famous novel by John Grisham, the accused is a black who killed the guy who raped his daughter. In the closing note the lawyer tells to the jury, “all I need all of you to do is you close your eyes and imagine that the accused is White! Now make your decision!”

In the same way I also urge you to do this, “close your eyes and imagine that the person who slapped is the wife and the one who recieved the slap was the husband!

Do you still think it was just a slap!?”