The Promise of Fiction


It’s 2009. You are 12. You don’t feel special. You don’t like the image that stares back at you from the mirror. And if you had a rupee every time you felt like your parents are trying to control you, you would be a crorepati (Definitely a better deal than KBC!).

Then one day, Cartoon Network starts running a new show. Or in a dusty corner of the school library (where you are always forced to read uninteresting stuff), you find a book. Or you go to the movies.

 And just like that, nothing is better.

“What? That doesn’t sound right. Let’s see it again.”

That new show stars an ordinary girl. (So mundane!) Who discovers she has magical powers after she fights off an evil ogre from a magical land while defending a fairy who is from yet another magical land. (Whoa!!). Our star then goes off to a completely separate magical land to study magic, and her overprotective father just lets her. There she meets a handsome prince (Swoon) from another magical school and has an awesome girl gang (Go, girls!). They regularly fight off the evil witches with the help of some magic, some cunning and a lot of love.

“But all that sounds amazing!”

Oh, did I fail to mention that all the girls only wear crop tops, adhere to the 36-24-36 ideal and that everybody seems to have an enormous amount of control over their own lives? And that the boys all have bulging muscles, are embodiments of chivalry and live to fight off monsters for their girlfriends?

“That isn’t that bad.”

The show was a promise of a world so magical, that it has a special place for you, a world ready for your crop tops and pretty skirts and autonomy over your life. A world which promised acceptance, love, no loneliness, and a beautiful body. And the promise of wings. The only things that didn’t seem worth the magical abilities were the theory tests at the school of magic.

What the 12 year old you didn’t know was that this was the false promise of fiction.

It’s 2020 now. You are 23 years old. You are one of the hundreds of students in one of the thousands of colleges on Earth. The crop tops and the pretty skirts are where they belong, in the closets of people who only travel to lavish parties in their luxury cars and the romance is only on others’ Instagram pages. The autonomy that was promised is now crushed under the weight of your own promises and the body you dreamt of, only on the cover pages of magazines.

You have no lightning-shaped scar on your forehead or wings on your back. And your letter to Hogwarts didn’t arrive again this year!

The promise of real-life hits hard.

And still, you will sigh and wonder on the 1st of September, “Looks like this year again, the Hogwarts Express will leave without me.”


Comments

Post a Comment