Strangers getting married. A practice that has almost become a custom in India. Arranged marriages are a part of the social rites that are society has become so used to that we fail to see the whole point behind the union called marriage and stay focussed on the wedding. Two strangers from different cities and very different backgrounds come together in this holy matrimony without any knowledge of each other’s personalities to be sealed forever in the bond of marriage. Natak presents a very apt short film: Unarranged. Here the bride and groom meet for the first time, that too on their wedding night!
This beautiful short film is a tale which goes back and forth between the two would-be married couple if it were not for their wedding jitter. As the two contemplate about escaping the whole fanfare of getting married, they decide to hitch a ride together and run away from their wedding in a collaborative effort.
And while the popular notion remains that arranged marriages can be very scary, Unarranged actually tries to break the norm of how people view them. Arranged marriages need not be the godforsaken syndrome that all bachelors and spinsters need to be running from anymore.
The short film has a latent message which seeps deeply into our society without us knowing about it. The bride accuses the groom of merely agreeing to the wedlock by seeing her photograph, and the groom has nothing much to say. While thousands of marriages are only based on the As the bride questions the groom to check whether he is ready or not, the exasperated boy replies “Aur kitna taiyaar honge.” Since we forget to ask ourselves if we are entirely ready for the marriage or not, instead we keep pleasing the buas, chachi and taijis of the world.
Natak Pictures has produced a nuanced version of how the girl and boy casually go for a chai date and talk about the many options of how they can avoid getting married. And over this chai pe charcha they finally find out things about each other as they question each other about the other person’s past girlfriends/boyfriends. Probably how arranged marriages should happen, don’t you think?
And with the increasingly nagging bride, the groom asks the bride one last time whether they should get married and the short film leaves it upto the audiences to guess what would have happened next.
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