The Telltale Tales

Princes, princesses, magic, fairy godmothers, pixies…. All in all the Grimm’s fairy tales and the Hans Anderson tales, filled my childhood in all possible means. It was a bedtime story, a light read and everything else I wanted. The memory of me running to the library only to pick up one of these books, to rummage the pages, to marvel the illustrations, to get lost in the magic that surrounded me …it all runs vivid in my soul. I had embraced all the characters, the story, the setting of each of them and believed them to be true. I never once felt that it was childish to feel that there was some truth in all these stories. Sometimes it was blind belief in those stories, it even presented me hope. A hope that one day all will be good, there will be someone to change everything, there will be magic cast and the good will win at the end. I grew so very accustomed to ‘Once upon a time’ and the ‘happily ever after’ that any other story without it seemed impossible to believe in. They seemed unnatural.

A keen observation in these days however made me think out of the box for a while. I recollected all the fairy tales I believed in, the ones I had even by hearted and they cried out a fact that I had ignored till now.

The typical story line starts with a very beautiful but unfortunate girl who tries very hard to keep others happy. She is very well tormented within herself, most often than not taken for granted, subjected to punishments every now and then. She cries to make the pain go away, expecting things to change. Then in a turn of events a prince comes in the scenario and quite obviously falls in love with her. He rescues from all the evil and gifts her a royal life.

This is almost every time how the story goes. The damsel is always in distress and there is a prince as a rescue plan. The one fact that makes me wonder is why didn’t any of these princesses ever try escaping on her own? Why didn’t she try to bring a change in her life? Why did she do nothing but cry? Why was the change always being waited for, to be brought by someone else?

These questions make me wonder of all the values I have been unknowingly taking in. Not just me, but all the little girls who read these with utmost interest and who gets engrossed in these tales and starts believing in them just like I did. But with time the reality comes to picture where that story is nothing but a utopian land. A land that is not real. In real life, change comes when we struggle for it, and if we decide to cry over all the problems that we face and wait for a prince charming to come and better our lives, then nothing’s going to happen ever. I find those stories incomplete now, because none tried to help themselves. Maybe that’s why they are called fairy tales.

There is one more aspect that every single fairy tales obsessively emphasizes on, that is beauty. The female protagonists are always beautiful. Sometimes I seriously wonder why no one came up with an average looking girl and try to build up a story on it? That too would have been accepted without doubt but it is just that no one ever tried doing it. This unknowingly injects a thought in every young girl’s mind that her value depends on her beauty.

Once grown up these girls obsess on beauty, tries to find her prince charming all her life. She tries waiting for happiness to be brought to her, which more than often disappoints her in life. It is the very single thought of holding someone responsible to make us content and joyful in life that I feel wrong. What we forget all these while is that the one person responsible to make us happy is ourselves. Only we can change our fate, try harder every time the tide becomes harsh, and hold on to life all the more each time.

The female protagonists portrayed in these stories fall short of this very spark. Only if they could have realized that the true happiness lies within themselves, keen to be discovered, to be explored, to break free. Now I know one thing, that fairy tales are just tales. I find them quite void. But there are a few good things that I learnt nevertheless- that the evil never wins, and if it does then the story has not ended yet. It has to go on.

When I see the bright wide eyes of a little girl, I don’t feel like handing her a fairy tale, but feel like holding her and showing her this world. Where things are different and she needs to understand that. I would prefer a little confusion in her eyes rather than a smile coming after reading a fairy tale.