How Mona Singh in Made in Heaven 2 & Pankaj Tripathi in OMG2 became advocates for sex education in schools

There was a time when parents used to change the television channel if a couple began to kiss on screen. They wanted to protect their children from inappropriate content, or perhaps save themselves from the embarrassment of questions that they were not keen to answer. I guess they also wanted to discourage any curiosity about the hungers and pleasures of the body.

Today, I find parents eagerly looking for resources to educate themselves. They want to be prepared when children approach them with queries about sexuality, dating and relationships. I am not a parent, but I have been a teacher, so I can empathize with how challenging it must be. Parents want their children to be safe, comfortable and thriving but they struggle to keep up with the fast pace at which the world around them is changing. They are mortified of not being good enough as providers, nurturers and role models. They keep trying to do better.

In the last few weeks, I have been moved by the portrayal of two such parents on Indian screens – Bulbul Jauhari (Mona Singh) in Season 2 of the show Made in Heaven on Amazon Prime, and Kanti Sharan Mudgal (Pankaj Tripathi) in the film OMG2 that released in cinema halls. The show is created by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, and written by them along with Alankrita Srivastava. They have also directed some of the episodes; Nitya Mehra and Neeraj Ghaywan have directed the remaining ones. The film is written and directed by Amit Rai.

Bulbul works as an auditor with a wedding planning company in Delhi, and her job is to help cut down costs. Kanti Sharan is a shopkeeper in Ujjain, who sells objects that devotees need to perform religious ceremonies. While their circumstances are not entirely similar, there are overlaps. Bulbul’s son Dhruv (Mihir Ahuja) is suspended from school along with other boys after a girl named Shruti files a complaint about getting molested and being filmed using a cellphone. Kanti Sharan’s son Vivek (Aarush Varma) is rusticated from school after a video of him masturbating in a toilet goes viral because of peers who shoot him without consent.

Dhruv’s friend Chetan (Aditya Raj Arora) is the boy that Shruti has named but Chetan’s friends are also involved. Unlike Chetan’s mother (Namita Lal) who believes that Shruti is lying, Bulbul wants to know the truth. She challenges the parents who allege that Shruti has filed a complaint to get attention. Having lived in an abusive marriage for years, Bulbul had to endure domestic violence until she killed her ex-husband in an act of self-defence. She is afraid that Dhruv might turn out like his father. Her heart goes out to Shruti. If Dhruv is responsible for hurting Shruti, Bulbul wants him to face the consequences. She wants him to understand that sexual assault cannot be justified through character assassination of the girl.

Kanti Sharan is unaware of the bullying that his son had to face in school. He learns about it only after Vivek is admitted to a hospital for overdosing on pills that fight erectile dysfunction. Kanti Sharan feels let down by his son for engaging in what he considers shameful behaviour. He has no clue about Vivek’s distress because they rarely talk. The father speaks, and the son is expected to listen. The father does not hesitate to slap his child to ensure obedience. Such a relationship makes it impossible for the son to confide and seek help. He ends up believing peers who make him feel ashamed about the length of his penis. He tries every avenue to rectify his supposed defect so that he can stand a chance with girls.

Bulbul has a younger son named Gaurav (Krrish Rao). She is worried that Gaurav might be affected by Dhruv’s suspension. It takes her a while to realize that she has not failed as a mother. Gaurav finds the courage to tell her the truth about what Dhruv and his friends have been up to. Thanks to this disclosure, Bulbul is able to convince Dhruv to tell the principal about what really happened to Shruti in school, and how the video was shot and circulated. Bulbul makes Dhruv realize that he should not feel pressurized to fall in line with the boys’ club. She reminds him that he and Shruti used to be friends, so it is his duty to help her.

On the other hand, Kanti Sharan learns to stand up for his own son. He files a defamation suit against his son’s school, and fights the case with all the passion that he can summon. He argues that schools ought to make sex education an integral part of the curriculum so that students can get satisfactory and reliable answers to all of the queries in their young minds. He brings in a medical expert to testify that masturbation is a safe and healthy practice, and that it is not abnormal for people to want to pleasure themselves. Moreover, he suggests that sex education could help boys grow into men who are aware of the needs of their wives, and therefore enter the sphere of intimacy through the eyes of tenderness rather than conquest.

Thanks to what unfolds in Bulbul and Kanti Sharan’s stories, we get to witness how the secrecy and shame that are often associated with conversations around sexuality harm children and teenagers. They feel distant from their parents, and turn to immature peers or untrustworthy adults to satisfy their curiosity. Instead of protecting them, their parents put them in harm’s way. Good intentions, not supported by a reality check, backfire miserably.

While Singh and Tripathi deliver top-notch performances, the credit for making their characters believable in their vulnerability and their determination to fight must also go to the writers and the directors. As we celebrate Bulbul and Kanti Sharan, let us also take a moment to remember Rani Irani (Pooja Bhatt) from Srivastava’s show Bombay Begums that released two years ago. Rani, who is the CEO of a bank tells her daughter Shai (Aadhya Anand), “Look, Shai, I want you to know that you don’t have to do anything to please a man, okay?”

Srivastava wrote the screenplay with Iti Agarwal and Bornila Chatterjee. Like Vivek in OMG2, Shai in Bombay Begums feels that she is undesirable. While Rani is able to tell Shai, “We all love you very much, and we are there for you”, Kanti Sharan shows his love by fighting for his son in court and staking his own career, and Bulbul shows her love by telling Dhruv about the violence that she had to undergo in her marriage so that he does not follow in the footsteps of the man that his father was. These parents come from different socio-economic backgrounds but they have something in common – the desire to see their children make wise choices, lead happy and fulfilling lives, not get into trouble, and not harm others.