Humpty Sharma ki Dulhania

My fiancée was in the mood to watch Bollywood and I happily obliged. Even though my brothers are married to desis, both sister in laws are born abroad. Only mine is an Indian (with her mother’s relatives spread over Gujarat and her dather’s in the South & abroad; the great Sindhi-NRI diaspora at work).

Anyway back to my point that I watched the film and it was pretty decent; they could have made it better with a subtle (yet effective plot twist). It was reasonably dark (and erotic, welcome to modern India) for a Bollywood film but I remember reading that apparently the more licentious & libertine the society the less libido which makes sense (people won’t pay to get an orgasm, they pay for the build up to the said effect).

Alia Bhatt is fast capturing the Kareena Kapoor market of feisty Punjabi heroines (this movie seems like a remake of jab we met) but other than that Bollywoods ongoing sophistication and canny lay testament as to why it’s such an effective global counterweight to Hollywood in certain parts of the world (then again Filipino soaps are popular in Kampala).

Good on India for leading on soft culture.

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Brown Pundits Archive

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