“Never forget what you are. The rest of the world will not. Wear it like an armor, and it can never be used to hurt you.” This profound line by Tyrion Lannister (from “Game of Thrones,” for the uninitiated) appears to have become the mantra for all Bollywood Nepo-babies. When Khushi Kapoor’s Pia brands herself as the ‘poster princess of privilege and entitlement,’ it is in line with the same confessional spirit that Ananya Pandey and Sarah Ali Khan channeled in “Call Me Bae” and “Murder Mubarak,” respectively. But absolution cannot come if you do it half-heartedly. To follow Tyrion’s advice, you would need to embrace all of your fallacies. Privileged and entitled? Sure. But there is one other fallacy that seems to have escaped them. The fact that in “Nadaaniyan” (2025), they cannot act to save their lives.
Pia Jaisingh (Khushi Kapoor) is, quite self-admittedly, a thoroughly spoiled brat. Her family is shown to be affluent. Maybe not to the degree of obtaining a country’s leader’s services to promote your private zoo, but Jaisinghs are rolling in money, to say the least. Pia seems to have it all. But she has her ‘struggles’ too. A lack of a boyfriend is one of them, for instance. A situation arises, quite idiotically to be honest, but then again, Pia and her friends are idiots. Pia has to get someone to pretend to be her boyfriend so that her best friend does not doubt her, who seems to think Pia has the hots for her crush. A boyfriend to save the friendship? Sounds like a “Seinfeld” episode.
But the team of Ishita Moitra, Riva Razdan Kapoor, and Jehan Handa (the writers) are no Larry David. So it does not become funny, not intentionally at the least. With Gen-Z friendly lingo all around, Pia plucks her green-flag boyfriend, Arjun (Ibrahim Ali Khan), from the sea of red flags. Arjun, who shows his six-pack abs to win a mock debate, which was more a child’s idea of a rap battle than an actual debate, seems to be shocked by this attention from Pia. But his shock increases as Pia offers him twenty-five thousand rupees per week to be her pretend-boyfriend. Wish we could have been a pretend-audience in a similar arrangement.
Anyway, from that moment onwards, the film progresses as you would expect a rom-com to progress. The ruse becomes a reality as they start to fall for each other. Of course, there will be obstacles and misunderstandings in this teenage love story. Quite predictably for Bollywood, “Nadaaniyan” has the classic ‘societal statuses of the families not quite matching’ conundrum. However, what is extraordinarily unique in this film is that Arjun’s family is not quite poor. With outside garden-side dining arrangements and fireplaces, Arjun’s doctor father (Jugal Hansraj) and teacher mother (Dia Mirza) do not seem to be in stark contrast to Pia’s parents, Rajat (Sunil Shetty) and Neelu (Mahima Chowdhury).
Remember the classic Bollywood Romeo-Juliet-coded stories like “Bobby” (1973) and “Maine Pyaar Kiya” (1989)? In those stories, the poor fathers were shown to be fishermen or mechanics. You would expect that, in 2025, the appropriate societal progression would show the blue-collar workers as the exploited class, rather than people to be pitied. However, as with everything these days, Bollywood also moves backwards. We see a portrayal of perfectly rich doctors and teachers not cutting in this Karan Johar world.
Debutant Ibrahim Ali Khan and ‘veteran’ Khushi Kapoor form one of the least charming romantic couples to have graced the silver screen. Understandably, the characters are tailored in a way so as not to expose the performance issues of the lead pair. So, it is perfectly sane to assume Pia and Arjun are the extensions of Kapoor and Khan. And, quite predictably, they struggle to play themselves as well. The experience is watching something as jarring as Batman romancing Lois Lane. The supporting cast is okay, as they have to be, given the competition. It is nice to see the “Dhadkan” couple of Sunil Shetty and Mahima Chowdhury paired in another failed romance.
With Delhi-based characters that ought to be slapped by another Delhite Hathiram Chowdhury (from “Pataal Lok”), “Nadaaniyan” is a colossal waste of cinematic space. Directed by debutante Shauna Gautam, the film’s most outrageous fallacy is not the vapidness of its romance. It is the outrageously shameless thoughtlessness that takes the cake. There is a scene where the privileged friends of Pia bully Arjun for asking for common “non-mineral-non-bottled” water to drink. Something ninety percent of Indians do. It is quite ironic for Bollywood to do so, when all of them would take a dip in water infested by the feces of the same ninety percent, when the orders come. To quote another Game of Thrones character, Cersei Lannister, “Power is power” after all.
![Arrival [2016] : Alice in No-Man’s Land](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Arrival-highonfilms.jpg)
![Booksmart [2019] Review: A Refreshing, Raunchy & Rambunctious Relish](https://www.highonfilms.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/booksmart-1-768x432.jpg)