My Parents Have Started Streaming Shows On Netflix. I Was Worried They Might Think There’s Too Much Sex And Violence But It’s Started A Dialogue
It all started 3 weeks ago, when we were all just shunted into quarantine and just like me, my parents too were running out of things to do to pass time. They tried everything that came to their minds – dividing up the chores of the house among all of us, cleaning behind the most unlikely of places in the house, arranging and rearranging closets till their hands got tired, coming up with new ways to taunt us for staying in bed all day long, taking out our dog for a walk up on the terrace so many times he now refuses to wag his tail and even trying out cooking all those fancy dishes one could possibly whip up with limited ration. So when the time came, and it came very quickly, they jumped onto the only thing that was left to explore, and that was my Netflix account.
Carelessly left open on my laptop one day, while dusting around the house, my mother came across the streaming website with a hundred movies and tv shows at her disposal, and she felt her life had changed. When in reality, little did I know, so had mine. You see, grabbing the opportunity to sit and binge on something interesting with my father, as they picked upon one of the most nangu TV shows of our generation – Sacred games, I feared my house would come to resemble a field of ‘scared games’ pretty soon.
And so, as my parents settled in on watching a TV show that according to them, was about a rising gangster played by the iconic Nawazuddin Siddique, I tried to settle in on the fact that things between my parents and I would now never be the same. Because while the subtext of the show was in fact about gangsters, this was served with a dangerous cocktail of sex, abuses and all things forbidden. Suddenly, the tables had turned, and we wished for parental controls, only this time to put a control on what our parents could stream.
Also Read : No, I Am Not Learning A New Skill, Or Taking An Online Course During This Time. Am I A Waste?
I will admit, every time I would walk in on them watching a scene where Bunty would come up with unique and hilarious abuses or Gaitonde would be spending quality time with Cuckoo, or Damini would be in the middle of a steamy sex session with Milind Soman, I would have a mini panic attack of my own. Things got worse, when after this, they jumped on to Made in Heaven and are now currently watching Four More Shots Please!
You see, it’s not that they are seeing something they aren’t already aware of, but it is that they are now also aware of the fact that we too spend most of our time binging on such shows. And if not that, then recreating it out there. The thought of them probably relating everything in the show to their own children and their way of life, is pretty damn neat and relatable, but also enough to make us break into cold sweat.
And while for the longest time, this fear of them watching all these explicit shows kept me at a safe distance from their room or even topics remotely close to them on dinner table, turns out it wasn’t so bad after all. Much better than I had expected, to be honest. As days passed and my parents continued watching such shows, they didn’t just seem a little more comfortable to certain concepts in the millennial life, but also learnt how to make a joke or two about it, which is a revelation.
They would no longer pull a long face at the mention of a divorce, or cringe when my elder brother accidentally utters a cuss word. They, in fact, now quote characters from the show, have a laugh with all of us and understand more about life in these modern times than we could ever make them come around to. Shows that we thought would put us under the bus, giving away all our white lies, had surprisingly become the very bridge we needed to account for the generation gap, are changing their thinking. And while the sex scenes were still tabooed and fast-forwarded, I am kind of glad, they opened their minds to the rest of it.
Perhaps, this gave us a way to discuss a problem without bringing ourselves into the equation, and keeping it objective, especially when discussing a particular character’s life choices. All things that were earlier off-limits were now being brought into healthy conversations. Guess all’s well that ends well and some good has finally managed to come out of even a situation like this!
