Why is Bollywood normalising cheating and often connecting it with feminism?

Recently, yes very recently I watched the movie Aap Jaisa Koi on Netflix. Though the movie was released on Netflix quite a while ago, I only got the time to watch it recently and I was so happy to see Madhavan again as the main lead.

The movie is good and I liked the title card, the cute aesthetic, the beauty of Kolkata and the clarity of the film. Though it portrays the typical Bollywood-style Kolkata life which I am not a big fan of, I still continued to watch.

The story is simple. There is a man who is our hero. He is not married till 40 and is still a virgin. He decides to use an app where you can talk to strangers over the phone and speak freely about your sexual desires. One day he speaks to someone and the connection between the two is impeccable. All of a sudden the hero’s Bengali neighbour brings his cousin as a marriage alliance and their wedding gets fixed. On their engagement day she starts calling his name in a husky tone which reminds him of the voice of the woman he had the fling with and later he realises it is her. So he calls off the wedding.

I was actually in support of the heroine using that talking app when she was single and needed someone to talk to just like the hero she can and no one should judge her. Let’s not distinguish them as male or female because when it comes to feelings they are both humans with emotions and hormones. How the heroine explains this to the hero forms the rest of the story.

The place where I got angry was near the climax when the hero’s sister-in-law is shown secretly cheating with the heroine’s uncle and everyone in the heroine’s family supports it. Not just that, even the sister-in-law’s daughter and somehow even the hero kind of support it.

Really, seriously how come cheating is considered a solution for an unhappy marriage? If you have the guts to cheat, why not first speak your thoughts honestly to your partner? If they still don’t understand, move on, get divorced and then be in a relationship with someone you truly like. How come Bollywood keeps normalising cheating and connecting it with feminism and bravery once again? Such a pathetic story plot.

This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon 2025