Gori Tere Pyaar Mein

An ill-matched lead pair and phony environment make this film hard to watch

The first half of Gori Tere Pyar Mein is an attempt at cross-cultural humour in Bangalore, and the second discusses the problems of a village in Gujarat. Both are fake, but at least in the urban half there are a host of other actors who prevent you from being isolated with two of the most ill-matched actors in the business.

Watching Imran Khan and Kareena Kapoor together is rather like doing time in Tihar. There is a disciplined regimen of exercise, labour, social work and recreation, but in the end, you are in jail. Back in Bengaluru, fortunately, you are still a free bird with other actors to complement these two, so the back story—how Diya (Kapoor), a Punjabi girl with a beehive in her bonnet, hooked up with Sriram (Khan), an insipid ‘Tam-Bram’—is not so bad.

The movie starts off with an impending arranged marriage between Sriram and Shabbu (Shraddha Kapoor). Shabbu tells Sriram that she is in love with a Sardar, asking him to rescue her by calling it off. Sriram, in turn, tells her about this nutty girl called Diya that he loves. So a deal is made and Sriram absconds from the wedding ceremony—by far the most entertaining scene in the entire movie.

Disowned by the ‘Tam Bram’ community, Sriram follows Diya to the village where she is working, and after that, we are up against the prison bars.

The superficiality of the thinking on social issues seen in Gori Tere Pyaar Mein is unbelievable. In the last decade, Hindi cinema has simply forgotten the village world. Movies are so metropolitan that rural India has become an abstract concept, re-created from the memory of earlier village-set movies. These movies were pretty phoney to begin with, and so the world we get here is totally counterfeit.

This makes Gori Tere Pyaar Mein very difficult to watch.

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Ajit Duara