Importance of father’s role

I think since we are with our mother from early childhood and since we have soul-connect with her, progressively our mutual bonding gets stronger; or at least remains the same. A father on the other hand spends less time with kids largely due to his other responsibilities in the world and also tries to inculcate discipline in the kids in order to make them fit into this world and hence often fathers are not so similarly popular. I know that individually people may find some variations from above theory but I think in general this is the trend. But in the few years after my marriage and responsibilities, I can see a silver lining. If mother is like foundation, father is like walls and roof. Both are equally important.

I think our history; art and literature have been a bit unfair towards fathers and not given them their proper due. For example if a novelist has to show good character traits of some person, one would try to show one’s bonding with mother. In general mothers are shown as doing the right thing or keeping the right opinion while fathers are in a way if not demonised at least shown in bad light more often. Situation is similar in movies and other art forms. In world famous epic of Ramayana, though mother Kaikeyi is shown in very bad light, the story also tells about two other mothers in the same house who were very virtuous and pious. On the other hand, father Dashrath is shown as a weak person who directly or indirectly played into the hands of a woman with ulterior motive and caused much pain to his sons. Here also the mathematical proportion is in favour of mothers and against fathers. Similarly in Mahabharata, blind father Dhritirashtra is shown as a weak king who went on to tolerate atrocities to the virtuous young Pandavas; on the other hand her queen is blameless into whatever was being done by their sons.

I see one reason for such discriminatory treatment is since fathers or males in general don’t show much of emotions while literature and script writers want to demonstrate or elaborate emotions in all relationships and hence they don’t count fathers in as much high regard. Or else the reason may be that since males would be making proportionately more of the readership base, by the law of opposites a writer describing mothers as virtuous would be more successful than the one showing fathers as virtuous. For quite some time in their life, sons have this problem of getting compared with their father’s achievements and hence their relationship towards them is often one of competition for many years; mothers on the other hand are non-competing by virtue of nature and hence are more likely to become an embodiment of all that is good. Whatever be the reason, this historical and literary distortion against fathers needs some balancing act.