We guys of the gen next club are frequently told that India is a-changing and pretty fast too. But when movies like Baghban open to raving audiences, we gotta ask, ’’Oh yeah!’’. Baghban’s approach to the problems of the aged in India is so completely one-sided that any parent approving of the movie would instantly incur the wrath of his protege. It’s true that many people are, of late, ill-treating their parents. Such people seem to have forgotten what their relationship with their parents is supposed to be. And Baghban captures this accurately in its opening scenes. But later on, Big B is shown to be making mountains out of molehills and the director seems to be tacitly approving of Big B’s demeanour. For instance, why is it so important that the father must read the newspaper first even when his son is no longer a toddler but a successful exec at an MNC. And why is Big B’s character not shown up to be egoistic when he refuses to accept that his son is now doing more challenging and demanding work than he did in his working days? Don’t we all know how wonderfully proactive our government servants are? What pressure is Big B referring to? The aged parents are shown to be completely naive and forever seeking a moral high ground that surpasses Mount Everest, and the director doesn’t seem to find anything wrong with that! Surely, Mr.B.R.Chopra, there’s something as the other side to a story, but that is missing right through the movie. We get two extremes of parent-son relationship - Aman Verma’s character and Salman Khan’s. But most of us fall in between the two. The basic message of the movie seems to be that if you’re not like Salman’s character in any single respect, you are a bad son to your dad. But life isn’t all roses or all thorns, we get both of them all the time and Hindi cinema needs to celebrate the paradox of it all, not take us back to Grimm’s fairy tale-like narratives.