I Remember Ae Dil Hai Mushkil’s fun-loving & fearless Alizeh who did not give in to the regular emotional blackmails of her best friend, Ayaan? Remember how she shuts down Ayaan when he notices the “Ali” tattoo on her wrist? Turns out, this Ali was her ex and her tabaahi. Tabaahi yes, because the otherwise kickass woman totally gets undone when she ran into “DJ Ali” on a vacation and was ready to leave everything and go back home.
Alizeh is not the only one. Bollywood characters have been pining over their exes and glorifying break ups and its romantic films have time and again imitated love and heartbreaks. Kajol’s Anjali pined so hard and bluntly for Shah Rukh Khan’s Rahul in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai that while her fiance Aman was forced to imagine her love, Anjali ended up singing a song for Rahul in her own engagement!
And how can we forget Devdas? Yes, the same Devdas who missed Paro so much that he totally ignored Chandramukhi who gave him a shelter in her home and even paid for his medicines. Almost a decade or two later, hardly anything has changed.
A four-minute song was dedicated to Deepika Padukone’s Tara in Tamasha where she was shown sad and uninterested in work and life in general for four years after returning from Corsica, breaks up with her boyfriend, refuses to dance with a random guy and finally gets transferred to Delhi where her sole motive was to visit Social and find Ranbir. I hope you know, Imtiaz Ali that four years is a lifetime in somebody’s twenties! Also, if this was not enough, she goes through the vicious circle of heartbreak once again that too after rejecting Ranbir and clearly did not find a sense of fulfillment in anything else. It is thus implied that she’ll wait for Ved to find his way back to complete the “love story”.
Seems like Deepika has been a regular victime of heartbreaks. She also pined for Ranbir Kapoor’s Bunny in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani but thankfully there were no extended scenes or songs dedicated to it! In Cocktail, she played the character of free-spirited Veronica who was so shocked after getting dumped by Saif Ali Khan that she transformed herself into desi Meera just to fall into the wife material category. And wait, the list doesn’t end here. In Love Aaj Kal, she can’t seem to get over Saif Ali Khan’s Jai even after breaking up mutually and singing the closure song Chor Bazaari and ends up breaking her marriage and waits till Jai realises that he loves her too and comes back looking for her. I mean, really? Does that even happen in real life?
Two years before Love Aaj Kal, we had Geet from Jab We Met (yes, Imtiaz Ali again!) who was her “own favourite”. However, her world came crashing down when her boyfriend refused to marry her. She was so broken that she became a shadow of her former self and regains her confidence only after being rescued by Shahid Kapoor. Then we had Taani partner from Rab Ne Bana De Jodi who was so lost after her fiance’s death that she could not spot the difference between her husband with and without moustache!
With all these characters and many other that I have missed, Bollywood has glorified heartbreaks to the fullest. But what it overlooked was that there are people in the REAL world whose life doesn’t end if a relationship goes wrong.
Yes, breakups are horrible and if there was no fun in falling in love, nobody would sign up for this pain (not that they actually do while falling in love!). But hey, things do go wrong and there are ways to deal with it. You can either whine or pine like our Bollywood peeps do, or you can eat a lot of ice-cream (chocolate, if I may suggest), listen to a few sad songs, learn from the whole episode and MOVE ON!
Everyone seems to handle their heartbreaks differently but those who can’t get it together after one incident seem to exist only in Bollywood. Also, let’s admit that while Deepika Padukone and Kareena Kapoor Khan looked radiant in their respective breakup songs and SRK seemed alocholic look great on-screen, real life pining is much uglier and has far worse consequences than our dear Bollywood portrays. So, if Bollywood can stop glorifying the heartbreaks and stop showing people that this is how breakups are dealt with, it would be win-win situation for everyone.
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