Acharya Prashant questions the societal perception of a mother's role, asking if her purpose in life is merely to make parathas, even if she makes them well. He observes that the image of a mother that immediately comes to mind is of a woman in a saree, with a veil, cooking delicious food in the kitchen. People become emotional seeing this, saying they are very sentimental towards their mother, but they do not realize the condition they have put her in. He points out the hypocrisy where children want to travel to America, Japan, and Germany, and become engineers and managers, while they have confined their mothers to the house. Their praise for their mother is limited to her cooking skills, saying she makes excellent pulao or that her parathas are wonderful. He asks if the mother was born just to be their cook. The speaker criticizes the practice of calling the mother a 'goddess' to justify her confinement. This narrative suggests that a mother, being a goddess, has no worldly desires like traveling and finds her only joy in the kitchen, thus denying her the right to her own all-round development. If a mother expresses a desire to leave the kitchen, work, and see the world, she is condemned for wanting to leave home and not caring for her children. By making the mother a 'goddess,' he states, you have essentially killed her. He notes that, generally, mothers in households are kept in a state of ignorance, unaware of world affairs, not reading newspapers, and watching only domestic soap operas. Acharya Prashant challenges the audience by asking how many housewives would know about topics like blockchain, artificial intelligence, climate change, or major historical events. He asserts that it is society that has drowned mothers in a 'well of ignorance' while superficially chanting that 'heaven is at the mother's feet.' This reverence is conditional, lasting only as long as the mother does not raise her voice against her confinement. He concludes by asking who has submerged the mother in the darkness of ignorance, answering that 'we have,' while we get her to wash clothes and cook, and then claim that heaven lies at her feet.
