In praise of Joel’s Mummy

In 2011, when high-achieving mother Amy Chua published her ‘Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother’, my daughter was five years old. At the Jaipur Literature Festival the next year, as Chua spoke of her faith in deferred pleasures and discipline, I felt seen and heard. Her strictness, which is not for the faint-hearted (it included calling her daughter ‘garbage’), made the world sit up and pit the stricter Asian style of parenting against the more liberal Western world parenting. 

If you are on Instagram or Facebook, there is no escaping content on “brown parents”,  “desi mom”, “desi dad”, “desi uncles”, “auntyji”. Given the Meta algorithm and a smartphone listening to you all the time, Meta aggressively pushes mom content to me. And leading the pack is Joel Joseph and Steffy Sunny, also because Meta knows, in an omniscient way, we are all Malayalis in Delhi. It’s a genre called the Del Mals. The social media content on moms not allowing to vegetate in the bed or drink alcohol, putting pressure to get a regular job, dissing the (ab)use of phone, are presented in a passive-aggressive way. And if you are a Christian (mostly the Suriani variety) from Kerala but residing elsewhere, there is the added layer of Sunday Qurbana, Sunday school and home prayers. Come Christmas and Easter, the content dishes out spoofs on Memmy’s insistence on rosary, fasting and finally feasting. 

Of course, the content is made out of love, with love and more of it. Of course, it is love that makes the mummies take out their slippers to hit them, for they are anxious, without using the term anxiety. In a world where virality and fame of two days is revered, moms want consistency, good grades and a respectable job that gives them regular salary, savings and build a family eventually. Add to it the fear of the Lord, for it is the beginning of wisdom. They insist on community, without using the word, by asking them to go out to church, help neighbours or go to the shop to fetch groceries than order in 24x7.

They have seen how family budgets go topsy-turvy when the pandemic caused pay cuts. They grew up eating home cooked food without worrying so much about protein-carb ratio. They painfully watch and learn about lactose intolerance, gluten and gut bacteria. I am not sure they know ADHD, but they surely were alarmed when Deepika Padukone talked openly about depression. And in their wisdom, they know that 10 real people in the neighbourhood whom you engage with meaningfully is better than the artifice of 100k online. 

What makes Joel’s mum call him ‘patti’ (dog) is what made Harvard educated Amy Chua call her daughter garbage. Mums ranting about housework and how nobody helps them is comic content, but eminently relatable as per the comments on these reels/posts. It is burnout and truck loads of cortisol. Yet this nuance is lost, content turns repetitive and nobody thinks twice about spoofing mums and dads as the lines between private and public blur.

Micromanaging children’s lives is a charge I often see Indian moms (and dads) being accused of. In my family circles, how I tutored my 9-year-old daughter over WhatsApp for her math exam (she in Bengaluru) while I was reading at the University of Oxford is the kind of lore supermom story scripts are built with. Desirable? I don’t know. Fail-proof? I don’t know. Did the kid turn out alright? I think so. Chua’s daughters went to Harvard and Yale, and were certified prodigies in athletics and music. I grew up under a very strict father and as a parent now, I understand where his anxieties stemmed from. I completely relate to Mark Twain’s quote on how he could not stand his father when he was 14, but by 21, he was surprised how much his father had learned in 7 years. I am more than twice 21 and need I say more. 

Children come with no navigation map or DIY manual. They are no IKEA furniture that can be assembled. It is trial, error, instinct, gut and faith. And they take an enormous amount of effort, time and energy, to inculcate a work ethic, eating habits, sleeping routine, hygiene and human values. And Joel’s and Steffy’s mothers insisting on these in a world where 13-year-olds are doing 10-step skin care and fighting mental health issues is welcome. It restores my faith in Asian family systems where an entire family turns up at the railway station and airport to see off and receive their children, pack banana chips and gunpowder in Ziplock bags, sit/stand outside ICU for their ailing grandmother even as she insisted the night before that she has to go.

Dear Mummy of Joel, we need more mothers like you who call out the brain rot of their young.
(The writer is a career civil servant and a creator on Instagram.)