“Kanjoos Makhichoos,” directed by Vipul Mehta, is a film about a person named Jamna Prasad Pandey, who lives in the city of Lucknow and is famous for being a miser. His family is fed up with his ‘kanjoosi,’ but later on, they get to know that he had been saving up for his parents and wants them to go on a pilgrimage of ‘chaar dhham yatra’ to fulfill his father’s wish. He sends them on the trip, but things go haywire when a cloud burst occurs in one of the places where his parents were supposed to be, and landslides that follows kills a lot of people. The film takes a turn from there. It focuses on how a child feels responsible for his parent’s wishes and desires and how the children take care of their parents when the time comes and do not turn their backs on them. There are some Hindi films that also have a similar theme of loving parents and taking care of them.
Piku (2015)
Piku is directed by Soojit Sircar and deals with the complex story of a father and daughter who go on a road trip from Delhi to Kolkata. The film is about how the daughter takes responsibility for an aging father. In Piku, the father introduces his daughter to her suitors as “financially, emotionally, and sexually independent,” which gives the essence of the film. Packed with powerful performances by Deepika Padukone, Amitabh Bachchan, and Irrfan Khan, the film is all about the equation between the father and daughter and nurtures its complexities. It does not feel like a film but more like a video recording of a regular family, which has an aging parent and a single child taking care of that aging parent.
Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001)
The title starts with ‘It’s all about loving parents.’ The film justifies its quote and focuses on the relationship between children and their parents; complexities, love, care, the story includes everything. The film consists of a star cast including Amitabh Bachchan, Jaya Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol, Hrithik Roshan, Kareena Kapoor Khan, and Rani Mukherji. The story is about an Indian family where relationships and equations change when the adopted son of the house marries someone who belongs to a lower social-economic class and then gets reunited with the entire family after another son puts in the effort to do so. The film is directed by Karan Johar with the theme of parental relationship with children and is one of the highest-grossing Indian films of all time.
Baghban (2003)
Baghban is another family drama in which the story is about children separating from their parents in old age. Instead of taking care of the parents, the four children of the elderly couple, played by Amitabh Bachchan and Hema Malini, separate them when they are old, and they forced to live separately with each of the children, causing them unwelcoming problems. The couple gets reunited when the character played by Amitabh Bachchan writes a successful book about their conditions with the help of their adopted son played by Salman Khan.
Dangal (2016)
“Dangal,” directed by Nitesh Tiwari, tells the story of the father-daughter relationship and their equation with wrestling. In Dangal, the character of Amir Khan has two daughters whom he trains to be wrestlers. All of them belong to a village in Haryana and get outcast due to wrestling, but the father stands his ground and makes him daughters win gold medals for the country in the Common Wealth Games. It is about fulfilling the father’s desire, as the character of Amir Khan, Mahavir Singh Phogat wanted gold medals for the country from his daughters.
Kapoor & Sons (2016)
Kapoor and Sons, a family drama directed by Shakun Batra, deals with the relations of a dysfunctional family, where two estranged brothers, played by Sidharth Malhotra and Fawad Khan, come to the family for a family picture when their ninety-year-old grandfather (played by Rishi Kapoor) suffers a heart attack. When the family gets together, the complexities within the members of the family come out, and hell breaks loose when an accident takes place in the family, killing one of the members. The film has an ensemble cast, including Ratna Pathak Shah, Rajat Kapoor, and Alia Bhatt.
Masoom (1983)
Masoom is another complex drama that deals with the relationship between father and son. The film tells the story of how Devendra Kumar, played by Naseeruddin Shah, finds out that he has an illegitimate child from a previous affair and brings the child home, which his wife finds difficult to accept. It also stars Shabana Azmi as the lead character, along with Tanuja, Supriya Pathak, Urmila Matondkar, and others. It is a very complex film in its nature, as accepting an illegitimate child takes a lot of courage for the woman of the house. The story tries to depict the complexities of each relationship throughout the film.
Badhaai Ho (2018)
“Badhaai Ho” is a film directed by Amit Ravindernath Sharma starring Neena Gupta, Ayushmann Khurrana, Gajraj Rao, Surekha Suri, and Sanya Malhotra. The film tries to deal with a very difficult subject, where the character, played by Neena Gupta, gets pregnant at an inappropriate age and gets outcast by the society because of her pregnancy. The middle-aged couple, Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao, gets pregnant, disappoints their sons as they find it hard to accept the fact that their parents are having a baby. The film deals with the taboo subject of getting pregnant at a ‘socially inappropriate age’ and how their sons learn to accept the new member of the family in the end.