The weight they chose to carry

During my recent visit to India, I went to the mall to clock my steps and escape the peak-summer heat. As my tracker counted my steps, I found myself watching people more than shop windows. It has been an old habit. Having read Desmond Morris during my youth, I am always more interested in faces and the stories they tell, instead of dressed up windows that temp you to buy stuff you rarely need.

After spending years travelling across continents, I have come to believe that if you want to understand a country, don’t look at its GDP. Watch its cafés, airports, playgrounds, queues and shopping malls and that’s where cultural progression quietly reveals itself. What caught my attention wasn’t a luxury store or a flashy advertisement. It was the fathers. Young fathers, to be precise.

Most of them were young couples with infants who couldn’t have been more than a few months old. One patiently fed his baby while his wife browsed through a clothing store. Another gently rocked a stroller with one hand while balancing shopping bags in the other, while another baby had fallen asleep against her father’s chest. The fathers weren’t “babysitting” their own children. They weren’t “helping” their wives. They were simply parenting. For reasons I couldn’t immediately explain, that sight stayed with me long after I left the mall.

I have lived long enough to know that cultures don’t transform overnight. They evolve quietly, one generation at a time. India has long carried a deeply patriarchal social structure because the roles were clearly defined. Fathers – “the providers” and Mothers – “the nurturers”. Emotional labor rested almost entirely with women while most men grew up believing that putting bread on the table was the full extent of fatherhood.

Yet here I was, watching young Indian men who seemed completely uninterested in those old definitions. Perhaps that’s what real social progress looks like, not dramatic, but almost invisible, when equality stops feeling revolutionary hashtag and simply becomes routine.

I often hear conversations about masculinity framed as something that is disappearing or becoming more toxic. I discussed this topic in one of the episodes of my podcast, theLieLlama. What I witnessed was, masculinity evolving. Strength isn’t diminished by tenderness, nor is responsibility weakened by affection. A man carrying his sleeping child isn’t becoming less masculine. If anything, he’s becoming more complete, because fatherhood isn’t measured by authority, it’s measured by presence. Marriages become partnerships, rather than stereotyped roles.

Every generation inherits stories, and they also edit them. Youth, in every generation, is often criticized for questioning tradition. But sometimes questioning existing traditions is exactly how healthier ones are born. Those fathers probably have no idea that they gave an old traveler something to reflect upon. Yet somehow, in the middle of an ordinary shopping mall, they reminded me that hope doesn’t always arrive with grand speeches or hashtag movements.

Sometimes, it arrives carrying a baby.