Movie – Ibadat
Director – Anu Vaidyanathan
Ibadat – The life of a woman praying for her family and sacrificing her needs!
The life of a woman changes after she gets married. While many think that this is a wrong notion, in fact, it’s actually the ultimate truth. After a female ties the knot, many things change in her life. She might be talented and competent enough in her profession, but family responsibilities fall on her shoulders and her dreams take a backseat. This is what the director wants to convey in this remarkable movie – Ibadat. 
Ibadat is about how women strive to balance their marital life along with their profession. Indian women do sacrifice a lot after their marriage – nurturing family and kids is not a child’s play anymore. Balancing family as well as the professional sector is a huge task and many times women fail to meet the demands of their professional life which is why things fall apart. In this movie, we find the characters regretting how they just concentrated their energies on family life and lost their own identity.
The women recalled how they used to perform on stage as singers and how people looked in awe. A few ladies recalled how they used to get recognised randomly in public and fans used to come up to them. Those were the days that they cherished but due to family responsibilities things fell apart and they lost their professional glory.
Marriage and kids should not pose as a hindrance, but it is always expected from women to focus more on family than work. In fact, even the female brigade feels that they need to focus mainly on their family and work can take a backseat – until they find that they are lagging behind their husbands in the professional arena and the worst scenario of all is that all these sacrifices have been taken for granted.
One of the ladies has lost her eyesight and has a son who was playing around. She recollects how her husband used to ignore her and expected her to take care of him regularly. She even recalls that a lady came to her place after her husband’s death and was searching frantically all around her house. She says that she knew what the young woman was searching for – the young female was searching for some papers and was frustrated as she was unable to find any. Being a mother, she says that one day while she was pretending to sleep, her husband was talking over the phone and intended to change his will. She suspected that he would give his entire property to his mistress, which is why she killed him. She justifies her actions as she had to be a good mother and look after her child and his future.
She even recollects that she had used a vase to injure the young lady who was frantically searching all around her house. The older woman didn’t have eyesight but she still possessed the sense of touch and while holding hands, she felt her own ring on the hands of the young female. This pained her to no end and being a dutiful mother, she felt
that now she needed to look into her son’s interest and take care of his future. The mother then decided to take matters into her hands and killed the young mistress.
While the ending is definitely thought-provoking, the one thing that you might ask yourself is – was she right in killing her husband and his mistress? Does marriage really mean compromising and is a woman’s job really so thankless? What made a docile housewife who has lost her eyesight become so volatile? What can be done to uplift women and address such issues of violence that are a result of pent-up anger and frustration? While all these things will leave you questioning the morality and duty of a woman, the main question lies in whether marriage changes the destiny of a female.
This movie is definitely a must-watch if you are intrigued about the life of a woman after marriage!
