Hello everyone, it is I, your Feisty Indian Aunty who just watched yet another Hindi movie on Netflix. This one was called Tribhanga: Tedhi Medhi Crazy and it stars one of my favourite Indian actors, Kajol. Tribhanga (a tri-bent dance pose) revolves around women, in particular, three generations of mother-daughter relationships within one family.
Anuradha (Kajol) is an Odissi dancer who has a very strained relationship with her incredibly famous writer mother, Nayantara (Tanvi Asmi). Anu herself is a single mother to Masha (Mithali Palkar), a housewife who craves nothing more than the normal life she was deprived of as a child. These three women, their wants, needs, desires, and aspirations make up the backbone of this movie.
Tribhanga: Tedhi Medhi Crazy begins with Nayantara having a stroke. An event that brings all three women together and forces them to confront and deal with their differences.
Oh, the things we do to our children. Subconsciously passing on trauma, and resentment, and hostility. Forgetting how easily they pick up on our every mood. Not realizing the lasting scars they can leave. Thus causing the kind of hurt that runs so deep that they are completely oblivious to being hurt at all.
This is the essence of Tribhanga. The movie deals beautifully with these sorts of parent-child relationships, and how children from broken families grow to adulthood forming love-hate feelings and behaviours which cannot be expressed or discussed openly. Bottling up our emotions? That is, after all, the Asian curse. Alas, there are no therapists here.
In Tribhanga, we see how these toxic relationships can then manifest in horrible ways, hatred towards parents, sibling rivalry due to favouritism, and an inability to form meaningful and lasting connections. This movie teaches us that unless children grow up and become aware enough to learn from the mistakes made by their parents, they are doomed to follow the same path.
There are so many great takeaways here. There are important lessons that could be learnt when we are dealing with family. Tribhanga deftly navigates every emotion from love and hate, to resentment and realisation, before finally finding closure with forgiveness. It does so with great insight and humour. It manages to find empathy in every character, giving us a well rounded and holistic take on real women, the roles the have to play as mothers and wives, with all their flaws, mistakes, strengths and weaknesses.
A family is constantly evolving. Every member grows and changes in different ways. We don’t have to drift apart. Our relationships aren’t doomed for failure. All we have to do is be aware of how we can deal with our emotions and feelings for each other as we grow up. That way we won’t grow apart.
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