Last weekend, after an exhausting day, my mom and I sought comfort in the familiar digital rabbit hole — binge watching. The candidate for our redemption — no review read, no opinion formed — was the latest OTT offering, ‘Babita Singh Reporting’.Babita Singh aka Baby is a teacher-turned-cop in Madhya Pradesh. While on a visit to her hometown, her childhood friend Bansi is allegedly murdered, and she finds herself compelled to investigate. The story could have just been a crime thriller, but this is precisely where its brilliance lay.Having already lent strength to the acclaimed Malayalam drama ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’, Nimisha Sajayan returns as a closet feminist in her role as Baby. She sees, she endures, sometimes she speaks. But she knows.Right at the beginning, we are compelled to make a choice: to recognise the micro-aggressions that reek of patriarchy, or to pull over the veneer of normalcy to explain what Baby endures. After all, do we not watch cinema to forget the ills that plague us?An alpha male chasing a girl is not just considered acceptable, but called love. A male actor courting a female actor half his age is never frowned upon, for we attach expiry dates on women, a privilege male actors are bereft of. We cheer cinema that calls out social ills too, but label it social messaging, arguing the veracity of the tenets in our own homes, for vices reside outside our peripheries. We cheer cinema we should sneer at otherwise, but cinema is an escape and an excuse.And this is the excuse ‘Babita Singh Reporting’ allows us, for the patriarchy is woven so deftly that you recognise it only when it invokes muscle memory.Trapped in the quagmire of a no-leave desk posting, Baby jumps into quicksand when she accepts a false accusation, only as it will allow her leave to visit her in-laws. She, and us, are reminded subtly how getting leave is important for her familial obligations. Her husband graciously offers that she quit her police job once his shop loan is repaid. This is a familiar trope: a woman’s job is within the home, and if the husband can bring the bread, who needs her to add the butter? More so, as Baby lands up as a cop on an ex-gratia post. She sees, silently.Baby endures. She reaches Rewa, to her husband’s mother and sister politely reminding her of her underactive thyroid, and how it affects her appearance and chances of conception. A particularly poignant scene, where Baby is shown pasting make-up for a family function, stands out. Nimisha brilliantly captures the weight of patriarchy, where the much chastised ‘lipa pothi’ is not a choice, but an imposition.These moments are easy to blink by, for we notice only what we feel. This also is not about Baby being a victim, and we are quickly reminded as to how patriarchy is a generational construct. The same household that bruises Baby is also bleeding; her sister-in-law is reeling under similar patriarchal expectations and taunts from her in-laws. But of all generational bonds that bind us, patriarchal bondages are the toughest to break. We pass them on like the plague.Baby speaks with empathy, loud enough for us to hear but soft enough for us to ignore. When she tells her colleague that she cannot understand what it is to be married, she likens it to how Baby cannot understand what it is to slog for a government job. When Baby’s husband mocks her in front of his cousins, hinting at her need to lose weight to be able to conceive, she is quick to quip, much to the chagrin of her husband.And she is not the only survivor of this patriarchal violence. We learn how Bansi, her friend, committed suicide succumbing to the burden of patriarchy, which heavier on a few genders crushes us all under its generational weight.‘Babita Singh Reporting’ thus ends as an oxymoron, for Babita does not report in the usual sense of the word. Her silence and her soliloquy leave an unbearable burden, a rising tide one cannot silence.— The writer is an IRS officer. The views expressed are personal