Total Siyaapa – Brown Pundits

I went to see this film where Indo-Pak romance meets Meet the Parents. It was quite silly and obviously set up for a part /2 (he got to meet her side, but she still hasn’t met his side and then both sides have to meet).

It was nice to see images of London but some are quite disconcerting as the shots are all over the city where the characters could have in way traversed them as they did (London remains after all a city of 32 villages/boroughs).

The Indo-Pak angle wasn’t really touched upon and frankly the movie could have been far more interesting (lucrative) if it had taken a few creative leaps. Instead it was a tired formula and also tried to make it a national dichotomy (Indo-Pak) instead of a religious one. I think a Pakistani non-Muslim remains a more preferable match than an Indian Muslim for an average Indian Hindu family.

Other than that it was pure “time-pass” as they say (a concept completely unknown in London) and other than that I was actually meant to see Shaadi ke Side effect but I would have been the only person (Thursday 10pm is not a popular time for films in Kampala). Incidentally 3 other strangers were with me in the theatre watching total Siyaapa with me but by the end of it I was the only one left. Says it all I imagine.

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Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary. Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin. View all posts by Brown Pundits Archive