Fairy Tales

All of us have grown up on a staple diet of bed-time or rather any-time fairy tales. Be they ‘Snow-white and the seven dwarfs’, or ‘Cinderella’, or ‘Rapunzel’ or Panchatantra and a host of local and vernacular ‘pari-katha’, tales have been told since time immemorial. Every child has lapped it up and has never had enough of it.

Bollywood star Mr. Hrithik Roshan is supposed to have said that fairy tales are the poison of our world since they do not speak of real life where there is no happy ending! If this is not blasphemous, it sure is ridiculous, to say the least.

Can you imagine a childhood without such tales? Such tales help children create a world of their own where they can take plunges in chocolate lakes, slide down the valleys and fight the evil gnomes and smile at the sun and the moon! The flowers speak to them, good spirits bail them out in trouble and flying horses and magic carpets take them to different countries. Is this poison? Ask any child psychologist and you will be told that these tales help children in “liberating the imagination of children”. It helps them grow up to healthy adults whose childhood memories enable them to fight evil and wrongs of the society and are not ‘already-lost’ to the vagaries of the real world. It helps children to triumph over their personal and cultural anxieties and introduces hem to a world that they might not get to see.

Life is not a bed of roses, but to tell them that life is not all that good because all things come to an end is such a sadistic approach to life and that too a budding life at that. Childhood is a time for fun, exploration and vivid imagination. Let the colours bloom and let then look forward to the rainbow, why paint it all black?

I haven’t quite got over the silly remark made by the Bollywood hero, but if fairy tales are a poison since there is no happy ending, how come every movie of his has happy endings? If fairy tales are a poison, it would be good to remind Mr. Roshan, that Krrish (probably his most successful movies amongst the few ones he has) was nothing but fairy tale character.

So children and adults, do not take Mr. Roshan’s verbal diarrhea so seriously. Go on and read more of such tales, after all many a Bollywood movie is based on fairy tales.