One of the many joys of watching Piku is its wholesome and refreshing take on parenting. It shows how a child, brought up in a liberal environment, can learn to make independent choices and stand up for themselves.
The movie is about an architect, Piku (played by Dipika Padukone), her father Bhashkor (played by Amitabh Bachchan), and the owner of a taxi service in Delhi, Rana (played by Irrfan Khan).
Their journey to Kolkata and the events leading up to it reveal a lot about these characters and one of those things is Bashkor’s feminist ideas.
He doesn’t think that a woman needs a man to call her life “complete” and constantly urges his daughter to marry only with “purpose” or not marry at all.
He might seem irrational and aggressive in places but writer Juhi Chaturvedi does a good job of portraying that he comes from a good place. Plus, like most characters, he has his flaws but his intentions are pure.
With that, let’s look at 5 dialogues from the movie that are things all daughters should hear from their parents.
First up, a daughter should definitely be told by her parent that a casual relationship is not a sin, and if her partner respects her and she respects them, it is no one’s place to judge what the two are doing.
A lot more daughters should see their parents standing up for each other. This is something mothers do all the time, but fathers…not so much. A woman should witness her father fighting for the rights of her mother as a woman. Not because she can’t do it herself, but because gender equality is something everyone should fight for.
Women also need to be told, from a young age, that marriage is not worth it if it comes at the cost of their identity.
Or at the cost of being labeled “nice” in a conventional, regressive sense.
Ultimately, it’s not the marriage that is the problem, it’s the structure within which the institution operates. More often than not, women are assigned certain roles when they marry and they are expected to fulfil them without flinching once. That should be questioned again and again until there is no need to question it.
Earlier, there has been fair criticism of movies for placing men in charge of propagating feminist ideas. Piku is different from those because the woman here doesn’t need saving. She is very strong and counters her father every step of the way. She tells things to him without mincing her words.
It’s one of the rare Hindi films which is able to raise concerns about gender roles without going astray and while managing several other layers of sentimentality.
A favorite for a reason.