Hosted and developed by Dr Deepa Narayan, a former Senior Advisor at the World Bank, one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s 100 most influential global speakers, and author of the groundbreaking book Chup, the podcast ‘What’s in a man?’ is a research-in-progress series that breaks open the barriers about what it means to be a man in India today.
For episode 6, ‘Fathers and Sons‘ Dr Narayan explores the relationships, expectations, love, and connections between fathers and sons. The episode delves into how fathers exercise their power and how they practice love. Through conversations with over 250 young boys and men from middle and upper-class families, the podcast examines this relationship whilst reconfirming the view that fathers are a boy’s first hero. Fathers are more comfortable exerting power over their boys than showing love. To help decode men’s relationships with their fathers, she turns in this episode to Dr Harish Shetty, a leading psychiatrist in India, and Dr Ashish Roy, a psychoanalyst at Ambedkar University in Delhi.
“Over and over, what emerges is the universal longing for love from their fathers-- to be accepted and cherished through the ups and downs of life, failures, disappointments, and all the struggles.“ Dr Deep Narayan
The podcast addresses Dr Narayan’s view that gender equality will never be achieved without including men in the equation and follows her research for Chup which addressed issues around women in India and the inequalities they faced.
