Where are our tales of strength and inspiration?

Having some spare time on my hands, I decided to watch some Urdu dramas on Youtube. We are known in the subcontinent for our true-to-life drama serials and have some best sellers like Humsafar to be proud of.

But having watched a dozen of latest dramas have left me wide-eyed and frustrated. Who are the characters that are being depicted? where do the likes of lives depicted are being orchestrated? who in real life talks or behaves the way the characters do in these dramas?

Fiction is supposed to portray a glimpse of reality. It can be suggested or shown to be askewed, it can take on the flight of imagination, all such techniques are acceptable and in fact appreciated. But when fiction is used to present a real life story or something close to it then it demands believable situations and most of all believable characters. This is the test of fiction. To make it unmatchable the writer must convince its audience of the authenticity of its characters and situations or else fall flat on its face.

I have watched several dramas so far, and none have left a mark on me. I feel they somehow lack the concept of believability. More so, the presentation of female characters is certainly far from life, dead, and totally frustrating. Most female characters are weak, always finding strength in a male figure, be it the father, lover, or husband. If these fail to appear then brother and sister-in-law are shown to be the pillar. This scaffolding of female characters is very biased and is against the spirit of many women who despite odds stand on their own feet and are able to support themselves whether they have a strong patriarchal support system or not. Our dramas are not showing whats normal or rather common in our society. It is showing women to be weaker that they are and that is doing injustice to them in the most lethal sense.

Most drama stories portray women 'dying' for the love and attention of a man, who neither deserves this kind of importance nor is charming enough to make the feelings of infatuation/love seem credible. Time and again, women are shown as flat and one dimensional whose only purpose in life is to get a man and after getting him keep him amused till kingdom come. I can name several such serials in which the reason de tre of women is men. In Urdu TV drama serial Sharat we see two supposedly sensible women. educated, liberal agree on being the wife of one man!!! I mean on which planet do women actually force their husbands to marry their best friend nay  not only be happy at the turn of events but actually does shopping for the wedding (kill me.) And how come a woman whose traveled (Momal in the same drama) has an enviable position of marketing director in a company agrees to be the second wife of her best friends husband. Alright, you may say that this was merely to make way of marrying again her divorced husband, but the way its done, it turns my stomach. 

Where have our muses gone? Where are the strong women of yesteryear's gone and in their place left these vacuous insipid women who not only fail to inspire, but are revolting and far from life. Women such as in 'Dar si Jati hai Sila' are victims and cannot defend themselves, they are akin to shadows and for 15 good hours gesticulate and tremble on my screen and shed endless tears. What and where are these women? Granted that our society has some darker corners where women are abused and mistreated but at the same time they are some inspirational women who break these shackles and become their own person. Why is it that the mother figure on dramas always giving in to their husbands on one hand like the wife of Rungreza who can barely utter a few unintelligible words or be vicious like the young Huma in Ghumrah? 

Stories of a people portray their ethos. Stories are important because they tell about life and teach important lessons. In Morocco, I am told that it is believed that every individual has a personal story meaning they have one story which is out there to teach them a lesson or provide inspiration. And the purpose of every person is to search for this story. What a beautiful thought, how magnificent, how true because we all learn from stories, we see ourselves mirrored back to ourselves in these stories. If this has a grain of truth in it where are our stories of inspiration lost? where are the people and circumstances that are to make us think and stand gone? For all I see around are stories of defeat.