Simzie's

Kedarnath is remembered as a love story. And it is. But Mandakini (Mukku) (Sara Ali Khan) was already a certain kind of person before Mansoor (Sushant Singh Rajput) ever arrived. The love story is almost secondary to that. What the film is really about is a girl who refused. Refused to shrink, refused to be managed, refused to accept a life that was handed to her without her consent.

She just refused. Constantly. At every single turn.

A Life That Feels Too Small for Her

Look at her sister. Her sister's fiancé is about to marry Mandakini instead. And the sister sits with it. Quietly. She folds herself around the grief and stays inside the house and lets the situation happen to her. That is what this family, this world, produces. Women who receive things. Good things, bad things, it does not matter. You receive them. You do not argue.

Mandakini watches this and feels nothing like it.

She is not performing rebellion. She is not trying to make a point. She just genuinely cannot locate the part of herself that is supposed to accept things quietly. It is not there. It never was. She is curious and loud and completely uninterested in a life that has been pre-decided. And then Mansoor enters it.

Love as Defiance, Not Permission

Mansoor Khan (Sushant Singh Rajput) is a Muslim pithoo who works at the temple. That is the first problem, according to everyone around her. The religion. The distance between their worlds that everyone can see clearly except, apparently, Mandakini, who is not interested in the distance at all.

She is drawn to him the way she is drawn to everything she wants. Completely, without asking permission first. He is gentle and present and he does not try to manage her the way everyone else does. He just sees her. And she, in turn, sees him.

But every single person in her life lines up to say the same thing. Her father. Her family. Eventually, in his own way, even Mansoor. Nobody will accept this. This cannot happen. The religion, the families, the world outside. It is too much. It is impossible. Everyone is very certain about this.

Mandakini listens to all of it.

And then she looks at Mansoor and asks him one thing.

Will you accept it?

Not the world. Not her father. Not his family. Him. Just him. That is the only answer she is actually asking for, because that is the only one that matters to her. Everyone else's opinion is noise. His is the only voice she gave that kind of weight to.

That question is the whole relationship. She is not naive about the world being against them. She knows. She just does not care, and she needs to know if he doesn't either.

When the World Holds Her Down 

When the family closes in, she does not detach. She gets louder. Her father dunks her in ice cold water in the early morning. To purify her, he says. Her mother circles her in prayer, trying to wash something out of her that is not a mistake, it is just who she is. And Mandakini sits through all of it and comes out the other side still saying Mansoor's name. Like a jaap. Like she is the one doing the praying, and she knows exactly who her god is.

Her father tells her directly. No sugarcoating. This wedding will never happen. Not even if there is an apocalypse.

She smiles. She says, then I will pray day and night for an apocalypse.

That is Mandakini Mishra in one line.

Then she gets married to Kullu anyway. Forcefully. And there is this emptiness that settles over her after, this specific quiet that does not belong to her at all. She walks to her room. And the rebellion and the grief and the refusal, all of it, becomes too much to hold inside a body that has just been handed to someone she hates.

She slits her wrists.

It is not giving up. It is what happens when someone who has never stopped fighting is finally held down completely. When there is nowhere left for the feeling to go.

Mansoor comes rushing.

And then the apocalypse comes. The one she prayed for.

The Cost of Wanting Too Much

The flood takes more than it gives. It takes Mansoor. It takes her mother. It takes everything that made the fighting feel worth it.

And still.

Mandakini does not disappear into it. She does not become her sister, sitting quietly inside the grief. She comes out the other side with her father as her only family, without Mansoor, without her mother, without the life she wanted. And she continues. She dedicates songs to him. She keeps his name alive the same way she always did, like a jaap, like a prayer. He lives in her as this very vivid memory. Present tense, always.

People who feel things at that volume do not get to grieve small. The loss is as large as the love was. But she carries it and she does not give up and she remains, unapologetically, herself.

Mandakini Mishra is not a tragedy. She is a person who wanted more than what was offered, who refused every version of a life that asked her to be less, who prayed for floods and meant it. The world could not hold her wanting safely. It never could. But she lived. Fully, loudly, and completely on her own terms.

Ayesha Mehra (Priyanka Chopra) has everything that is supposed to mean she has made it. A company. A reputation. A family that shows up in the right clothes to the right events. She is successful, composed and articulate. From the outside, she looks like a woman in control of her life.

But Dil Dhadakne Do is not interested in the outside. It keeps looking closer, and the closer it looks, the more you realise,  almost nothing about Ayesha's life was actually chosen by her. Not the big things. Not even the small ones.

What She Wanted, Before She Learned Not to Want It

There is a version of Ayesha we never fully get to see. The one who existed before the family got to her.

We know she loved Sunny. That it was real, that it mattered. And we know what happened to it; not a dramatic falling out, not a mutual goodbye. He was simply sent away. 

A quiet, efficient removal of something the family found inconvenient. No conversation, no explanation offered to Ayesha that was worth anything. Just: gone. Because the Mehras didn’t treat their daughter’s feelings as something that mattered or needed to be considered.

That is where it starts. Not with the marriage, not with the business. It starts there,  in the moment a teenage girl learns that what she feels about her own life is not quite a factor. That decisions will be made around her, sometimes for her, occasionally in spite of her. But rarely, if ever, by her.

She grows up understanding this implicitly. It is not a lesson anyone teaches her out loud. It just becomes the shape of things. You adapt. You redirect. You stop expecting to be asked.

Permission Is Not the Same as Freedom

By the time we meet Ayesha on the cruise, she has built something real. Musafir exists because she built it. That took intelligence, effort, sleepless nights. And yet, even that, the one thing that is entirely hers, exists in constant negotiation with everyone around her.

Her husband Manav does not want her working the way she works. Not explicitly forbidden, maybe. But there is pressure in the silences, in the comments, in the expectation that she will eventually scale herself down to fit the life he imagined.

Her mother-in-law has opinions. The family has expectations. Children are a conversation that keeps surfacing, not because Ayesha has decided she is ready, but because readiness is not really hers to determine.

The role in the Mehra family business (Ayka),  that was never going to be hers either. Kabir gets it by default, simply because he is the son. Ayesha is just as capable, probably more equipped, and it does not matter. The structure was decided long before she could prove anything.

So she builds Musafir. And that is strength, genuinely. But it is also telling, she had to build her own table because she was never going to be given a seat at the existing one. Her independence is real. It is also, quietly, conditional. Monitored. Maybe even tolerated up to a point.

The Exhaustion of Being Heard But Not Understood

The subtler tragedy of Ayesha is not one scene. It is the accumulation.

It is every moment she is expected to be the composed one. The responsible one. The one who holds it together on a family vacation while quietly falling apart inside a marriage that has stopped working. She is not allowed to be messy about it. Messy would embarrass people. Messy would make her the problem.

Divorce is not even a real option in the world her family operates in. Not because it is illegal, obviously. But because it would mean something, about the family, about appearances, about what people will say. Her dissatisfaction is treated as a phase, an ingratitude, a random rant. Not as information. Not as something worth taking seriously. Not even by her own mother.

And that is the particular kind of loneliness Ayesha lives in. She is seen. 

Everyone around her can see that she is struggling. But being seen and being heard are not the same thing. Her pain is acknowledged and then quietly set aside, because acting on it would be inconvenient for too many people.She is not broken. That is the thing. She is functioning, high-performing, still standing.

But she has been so long in the habit of overriding herself that she has drifted from her own wants almost entirely. What does Ayesha actually want? The film asks this, gently, and it takes her the whole story to start answering it.

For someone who spent centuries being the most dangerous person in every room, Damon Salvatore was, at his core, just left.

Not feared. Not hated. Just quietly, consistently unchosen. And that distinction matters more than the show sometimes lets it.

The Part That Started It All

Katherine Pierce did not break Damon Salvatore. She just confirmed what he had already started to suspect.

He spent years believing she loved him. That their secret, their intensity, their connection meant something real. And maybe it did, in some version of events. But Katherine also loved Stefan. And when it came down to it, when love had to be something more than convenient, Damon was never the one she stayed for.

That kind of rejection does something specific to a person. Not the sharp, clean kind that ends clearly. The slow kind. The kind where you keep finding evidence that you were never quite enough, and each piece of evidence feels like a quiet confirmation of something you feared all along.

And then there is Stefan. Golden, good, perpetually redeemable Stefan, the good brother Stefan. Damon's resentment toward his brother is not simply jealousy, though that is the easy reading. It is exhaustion. The exhaustion of spending your entire existence being measured against someone and always coming up short. Not because you are terrible, but because the other person is just more palatable. Safer to love. Easier to choose.

That stays with you. Being the difficult one. The complicated one. The one people love in spite of, never because of.

The Armor Has a Name

Here is the thing about Damon's sarcasm, recklessness, the casual cruelty, the flirting, the drinking, the spectacularly bad decisions, none of it reads like confidence once you look at it long enough.

It reads like someone who learned very early that caring openly gets you nowhere.

He jokes constantly because it is easier than being sincere and getting nothing back. He pushes people away because he has already run the math on what happens when he lets them close. He acts like he does not care what anyone thinks because caring, for him, has a track record of ending badly. You do not get to that level of emotional self-sufficiency by accident. You get there because vulnerability cost you something significant, more than once, and you decided not to let it cost you again.

The violence is part of it too. There is something almost deliberate in how Damon behaves at his worst, like he is proving a point. Confirming the narrative. See, this is who I am. Now you can leave with a reason.

It is easier to be left for something you did than for something you are.

Finally, First

When Elena chooses Damon, the emotional weight of that moment is not really about romance. It is about something much older and quieter than that.

She chooses him knowing exactly who he is. Not the potential version, not a reformed, smoothed-out edition. Him, with everything that comes with it. The anger, the history, the damage, the running list of things he has done that cannot be undone. And she stays anyway.

For someone who spent 187 years expecting abandonment, that kind of love is almost suspicious. People who have been rejected repeatedly do not receive love easily. They question it. They test it. They find ways to end it before it can end on its own, because at least that way they are in control of the pain.

Damon does this. More than once, he tries to undo what he and Elena have, because some part of him cannot fully believe it is real or that it will last.

That is what prolonged rejection does. It does not just hurt. It rewires how you receive love, so that even when it finally arrives, you are not entirely sure what to do with it.

There is a version of Tara Agnihotri that is very easy to admire. She has a career she loves, an apartment of her own, a clear sense of what she wants. She does not wait for people. She does not need to. She is, by every visible measure, someone who has figured it out.

But watching her closely, something else becomes clear. Tara is not free. She is just very good at making sure she leaves before anyone else can.

What a Child Understands Without Words

Tara's parents' marriage did not end cleanly. It fell apart slowly, in the way these things do. Fights, silences, instability, a father who eventually left. She grew up inside all of that.

Children don't need things explained to them. They just absorb. They inherit fears before they have words for them. And what Tara absorbed, without anyone sitting her down and telling her, was that marriage was not warmth or safety. It was a setup for disappointment. A thing that begins with closeness and ends with someone gone.

She didn't decide to be afraid of commitment. She just grew up, and the fear came with her.

The Comfort of Keeping the Door Open

So as an adult, Tara keeps exits available. She holds things lightly. She is drawn to Adi partly because he also resists the idea of permanence. Together they build something that works precisely because it demands nothing from either of them. No future, no pressure, just a present kept deliberately small.

From the outside, this looks like confidence. It always does. Emotionally guarded people get called independent, sorted, unbothered. But Tara is not unbothered. She is careful. There is a real difference.

She stays one step removed because attachment, in her experience, turns into abandonment eventually. And the only way to protect yourself from being left is to already be halfway out the door. What she fears is not marriage itself, not the ceremony or the label. It is the specific, quiet horror of a marriage that continues existing on paper long after the care has gone. She has seen that. She knows exactly what it looks like.

What Changed?

It is not Adi who shifts something in Tara. It is Gopi uncle.

Watching him care for his wife, who has Alzheimer's, who is slowly becoming someone he cannot fully reach anymore, Tara sees something she has genuinely never seen before. She sees someone stay. Not because it is easy or returned or convenient. Just because he does. Because that is what care and love looks like when it is real.

Tara grew up watching love run out. Here, for the first time, she sees it hold.

And then comes the moment that says everything. She asks Adi, almost quietly, "If I get lost, will you come find me?"

It sounds small. It is not. Underneath that question is everything she has been carrying since childhood.

The fear that love is temporary. That people leave. That she will one day be standing in a room that used to be full and is now just hers.

She is not asking about getting lost. She is asking whether someone would stay for her when things got hard. Whether she is worth staying for.

Someone's Something

Rani Mehra was not a person before Paris. She was a role. A supporting character in her own life.

Her father's daughter. Her mother's pride. Vijay's almost-wife. She moved through life as a collection of relationships, not as herself. No one thought to ask who she was outside of them. No one, including her.

When Vijay called off the wedding the day before, the world around her collapsed into grief on her behalf. Her mother cried. Relatives whispered. The neighbourhood saw a girl left behind, a girl without a future now that the future she had been promised was gone. “Poor Rani. What will happen to her now?”

They could not see what was actually happening. None of them could.

Alone, not Lost.

She went to Paris alone. On her honeymoon. Alone.

That took more courage than people give her credit for. She was terrified. She had never done anything like that before, never travelled alone, never found her way through a city where nobody knew her or her family or the life she came from. But she still went. Carrying her suitcase, her humiliation, and that quiet stubbornness in her that refused to stay home and let the world treat her like something already ruined.

She sits at a bar in Paris. Orders a drink. No one told her to. No one was there to suggest it, to approve it, to accompany her. It was a small thing, ordering a drink alone. Except it wasn't small at all. It was the first decision she made entirely for herself, with no one watching, with no role to perform.

What Freedom Looks Like to Someone Else.

She meets a girl in Paris. Vijaylaxmi. And Vijaylaxmi has her own ideas about what freedom looks like, dress differently, wear less, be louder, take up more space in the way that a certain kind of confidence does. She means well. She is trying to give Rani something she thinks Rani is missing.

But Rani does not take after Vijaylaxmi. She does not return to India in short skirts and a new attitude. She does not shed her old self like a costume.

And this is the part the film gets exactly right.

Because Rani's transformation was never going to look like that. Her freedom was never going to announce itself through her clothing or her boldness or some visible, dramatic reinvention. Rani's freedom was quieter than that. It looked like sitting across from strangers at a dinner table and laughing. It looked like navigating an unfamiliar city and not falling apart. It looked like making friends she never expected, people from different countries, different lives, and discovering she was someone they wanted to know. She had never thought she was someone strangers would choose to spend time with. She had never thought she was interesting enough, independent enough, capable enough.

Paris showed her she was wrong. Not by changing her. By giving her enough room to finally see what had always been there.

Guilt Trip.

Vijay comes back. He says he's sorry. He says he only loves her. His voice is soft, almost broken. Please, Rani. Please listen to me.

But underneath it all, there is something else. A need. A demand disguised as devotion.

He sees her with friends. With boys. And his voice shifts. Still apologetic, still wrapped in guilt, but now laced with something else. Are you living with boys? My god, Rani. He does not ask it as a question. He asks it as an accusation dressed up in concern.

My mother has planned everything, he says. My mother is waiting. Everything is ready. The weight of it, his sacrifice in coming here, his mother's expectations, the plans that cannot be unmade,  all of it sits heavy in the room.

He is sorry. He only loves her. His mother has planned this. Are you living with boys? All of it blurs together into one confusing, suffocating thing. Guilt that is not really guilt. Apology that is not really apology. Just a man trying very hard to pull her back because he needs her back, because her freedom threatens something in him, because the girl who said yes to him was easier.

But this is the new Rani. She listens to all of this, but then, “Vijayji, I need to go” It's so simple. No apology. Not even a fake one like he offered. She is prioritizing herself. She has a rock concert to go to. His lies and guilt are unimportant, irrelevant. She does not say this without proof, her reply is simple. “You were not even supposed to be here” She rushes away quickly, choosing her peace and her plans over his fake guilt.

What Took So Long

This is where the sadness lives.

Not in the cancelled wedding. Not in Paris. In the years before it. In every moment she had been quietly taught that she was only legible as someone's something. That without a man, she was a tragedy. That her worth lived in the relationships she belonged to, not in who she was when she was alone.

The world had told her this without ever saying it out loud. Her family, her culture, the shape of every expectation placed on her life. And she had believed them. Quietly. Without question. Because she had never been given a reason not to.

Paris did not make Rani. It did not build her from scratch or hand her a new identity. It just gave her enough silence, enough distance, enough freedom from every role she had ever played, to finally hear herself think.

For a film called Laila Majnu, the real story is not the love they shared. It is the loss. Not of Laila. Of Qais.

Qais.

Qais Bhatt, before her, is the kind of person you want in the room when things go wrong.

Not because he is the loudest, though he is. Not because he is the most charming, though he is that too. But because he is calm. There is a certain steadiness to him. That reads as confidence, the kind that is contagious, the kind that makes other people believe things will be okay simply because he tells them it will. He has an answer for everything. Not in a way that is arrogant, but that is genuine. He thinks fast, he moves faster, and he never makes a crisis feel like a crisis.

There is a moment, early, when he realises they are being followed. Laila panics. Qais does not. He reads the situation, makes a decision, moves them both through it without fuss. It is not luck. It is him. It is who he is. The boy who knows how to handle things.

Even when Laila spirals with fear about her father finding out, about what happens next, about all the ways this could fall apart, he holds her steady. It will end well. No matter what happens, I will make sure everything ends well. He says it like he means it, and because he means it, she almost believes it.

He belongs to himself, entirely. He knows what he is doing. He knows where he stands.

That is Qais.

Majnu.

Majnu does not know where he stands. Majnu does not stand.

He roams. Through the forests, the hills, through the cold of Kashmir that he no longer seems to feel. His behaviour is feral in the truest sense, it is not performed, it is not poetic, but it is genuinely, medically, completely unravelled. His nails are long and dirty. The beard is overgrown. There is blood he does not know where from and dirt, and he does not notice either. The body that Qais once carried with such ease and pride has become something Majnu simply lives in, barely.

He talks to Laila. To the Laila that is not there, but to him, is always there. His brother comes home after people call him, worried, if anything. He catches Qais, coming down from the mountains, laughing. “Who are you talking to?” And Majnu stops. Looks caught. His behaviour in that moment is almost childlike, as if being seen itself is the punishment. He is embarrassed, yes. Ashamed, maybe. But then his brother mentions her name, and the embarrassment evaporates. How is she? How is Laila? Because she is right there. She is right next to him. He is certain of it.

Qais always knew what was happening around him. Majnu does not know. Majnu does not care to know. The world has shrunk to one thing, one person, one name. Everything outside of that is noise.

What Happened in Between

He did not break in one moment. That would have been easier.

It was slow. It was the kind of slow you do not notice until it is already done. Each time Laila was taken away, each time the distance was forced between them, Qais did not collapse. He waited. Intezaar. Lamba intezaar. He kept waiting for the wait to end, for the pain to pass, for them to simply be together. He made the hope his reason. For waking up, for not giving up, for staying. And for a long time, that was enough, because she always came back.

Until she didn't.

Four years. He tells his brother. It had been four years. And somewhere in those four years, the waiting became the only thing he knew how to do. All of Qais' certainty, all that calmness and steadiness in him, had slowly tied to just one thing.

That Laila would come back. That somehow, someday, they would still end up in that little house behind the mountains, the one they had talked about so many times it had started to feel real. Like it already existed somewhere, waiting for them.

When he understands that his brother will stand between him and her, he does not argue. He does not reason. He runs. Into the mountains. Towards the house. Towards her.

Qais would have found another way. Majnu only knows one direction.

La Ilaha

There is a moment that explains everything.

Majnu is running down a hill, talking to Laila, the Laila only he can see. Nearby, a group of men are praying. He is loud, present, completely absorbed. They are disturbed. They hit him. They humiliate him. They demand to know how he could be so shameless and so disrespectful of their prayer.

He looks at them, and he says: “I was talking to my God. You were talking to yours. I did not see you. Why did you see me?”

“If your love for your God is real, if you are truly, fully there, how did I reach you? How did the world reach you? I did not notice you because I was not here. I was with her. Where were you?”

He means it. For Majnu, Laila and Allah are not separate things. La Ilaha. You are my God. It is not a metaphor anymore. It is not poetry. It is the full, absolute, irreversible submission of one person to another, the way you are only supposed to submit to the divine. He has made a living, breathing, absent woman his entire religion.

And somehow, at that moment, he was the most focused person there. That was the terrifying part. 

The Reversal.

This is not a story about change. Change implies that something of the original remains.

This is a complete reversal.

The boy who was calm became someone feral. The boy who always had answers became someone with only one question left, always the same one, always Laila. The boy who used to steady everyone else is gone, out of reach now. The boy who always looked put together has turned into a man with dirt under his nails, blood on his skin, and hair matted from days outside. He doesn’t even know how long it’s been or how any of it got there.

Qais was never like that. Majnu is nothing but that.

And still, somewhere inside all that madness, something keeps working. Something instinctive. Animal. Older than thought and language and reason.

Protect her.

That part survives.

He cannot tell you what day it is. He cannot tell you where he had slept the night before or how long he had been walking. But he will do anything to reach her, to talk to her. Bleeding, starving, half-conscious, it does not matter. He keeps moving toward her like his body knows something his mind no longer does.

That instinct is all that remains of the boy who once promised her, I’ll get you out of this. No matter what.

He still means it. He just doesn’t know what getting out looks like now. 

When a person is funny and easy, the world decides they are simple. Because they always seem okay. They always have something to say. The world looks at them and decides there is nothing underneath that laughter. What you see is what you get.

Imran from Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is that person. And what the world perceives about him is completely wrong

The One Everyone Sees

Imran is the life of the trip. He throws Arjun's phone out of a moving car without hesitation. He flirts with Laila just to watch Arjun squirm.

Arjun is tied up in work and the weight of responsibilities he never asked for. Kabir doesn't know what to do with the marriage sitting in his hands. And Imran gets labelled as immature. Unserious.

But he is one thing neither of them are; fearless. Not in the jumping-out-of-a-plane way. He just doesn't have the fear of rejection. The fear that if he chooses to be himself, he will end up embarrassed. He is always, so beautifully, himself

The One Nobody Thinks to Look For

Here is what gets missed.

The poetry in the film, the lines that play at exactly the right moments and make you feel something you were not prepared to feel, those are his. Imran is a poet. He carries a notebook. He has a quiet dream of publishing that he mentions almost in passing, like it is too private to say out loud.

The same person who threw a phone out of a window is writing lines that stay with you for years.

This is the parallel the film asks you to hold. Not one or the other. Both, in the same person, at the same time. The joke and the depth sitting right next to each other. And everyone only noticing the joke.

Because when someone makes you laugh you stop asking what else they might be feeling. You assume the funny one is fine. You assume there is nothing underneath the punchline. Imran has known this his whole life, and he has used it, quietly, to keep the one thing he cannot joke about safely hidden.

The One Joke He Never had a Punchline for

Nobody on that trip knows why Imran is really in Spain.

He came to find his biological father, Salman Habib. His mother did not want him to. He came anyway, carrying this the entire trip, alone, without telling either of his closest friends.

There is a scene, almost cut from the film, where Imran lies next to Nuria after they sleep together and just tells her. About his father. Without performance, without timing, without the version of himself he shows everyone else.

Zoya Akhtar fought to keep that scene in. It is the only moment in the film where Imran is not the funny one. Just a person, saying the plain thing.

And then he meets Salman.

Salman does not apologise. He says he never wanted children, never wanted a relationship, that he left knowing exactly what he was doing. Then, feeling the weight of it, he offers something that sounds almost like sorry.

Imran looks at him and says, no. You are not sorry.

No joke. No softening. Just the truth, said directly, by the person who has spent his entire life making everything easier for everyone else. He names it exactly as it is. And then he leaves.

What the Night on the Road Did

Right after. Not the next day, not after processing. Right after Salman.

Imran and Arjun end up spending the night in the car, parked on a random road somewhere in Spain. And in that darkness, with nothing to deflect with and nowhere to go, Imran apologises to Arjun. For what he did four years ago. For the thing that broke their friendship and that he had never once addressed directly, always laughed past, always made smaller than it was.

It is a quiet moment. Heavy. He is not softening it at all.

This is what Salman gave him without meaning to. Not a father. Not an apology. Just the understanding that some things cannot be joked away, and that the people who stayed deserve the version of you that does not try.

He calls his mother after. Apologises to her too. For going, for reopening what she had buried, for needing an answer she always knew would hurt him.

The funny one came back quieter. Not less himself. Just more honest about who that actually was.

There are people in the world who break loudly. Who let you see it, who ask for help, who fall apart in the middle of rooms and allow other people to pick up the pieces. There is nothing wrong with this. It is, in fact, deeply human. And then comes in Alizeh.

The Thing About People Like Her

There is a particular kind of person who becomes everyone's safe place without ever having one of their own. Who is so reliably okay that the people around them forget to check. Who has, over years and quietly and without meaning to, trained the world to need them rather than worry about them.

Alizeh is that person.

She is the one you call. She is the one who shows up. She is the one who makes it better. She closes the door after you and sits with whatever is left, alone, the way she always has. She does not know how to receive what she gives. She does not know how to be the one who “needs” something. It’s almost like somewhere along the way the role got assigned and she accepted it, not because anyone forced her, but because it fit. Because being needed felt safer than being vulnerable. Because strength, once it becomes your identity, is very difficult to put down.

When Everything Went Wrong

And then everything went wrong.

Not one thing. Not a single clean grief that could be named and processed and moved through. Everything, in the particular way life sometimes decides to test people who have already been tested enough.

Ali left. Not with a scene, just with the quiet confirmation of something she already knew but refused to admit out loud. The person she loved most, the one she never guarded herself against, the one for whom she had set down every careful wall she had ever built.Gone.

And then her body. Cancer. The word that rearranges everything around it. The diagnosis that makes every other problem feel suddenly small and also makes itself feel too large to hold. 

Alizeh dealt with it. Of course she did.

Not because it didn't hurt. Not because she wasn't afraid. But because dealing with things is the only language she has ever been fluent in.

The Moment That Says Everything

Ayan finds out. About the cancer, about what she has been carrying, about the thing she did not tell him because she did not want to become a burden, did not want her pain to take up space in someone else's life, did not want to be looked at with that particular kind of grief that people aim at people they are losing.

He finds out and he falls apart. Because of course he does. Because he loves her, and the news is devastating, and he is someone who feels things loudly and shows it.

And Alizeh calms him down.

She is the one who has been quietly, privately, holding all of this together with both hands and a smile. And when the person who loves her finally breaks because of her pain, she is the one who reaches over and steadies him.

She does not break. She does not say, finally, someone is crying for me, let me cry too. She just gathers him up and makes it smaller for him, the way she has always made things smaller for everyone, because this is what she does. This is who she is. She does not know another way.

Holding his head in her hands, she smiles at him. Even then. Alizeh does this without thinking about it. It is as natural as breathing.

She Does Not Know How to Break Completely

This is not strength in the way motivational quotes mean strength. It is not chosen, it is not loud, it is not something she is proud of. It is just the only default she has ever had.

She does not know what it looks like to fall apart entirely, at least not in front of people. She has never let herself find out. There is always something to hold together, someone to calm down, something to deal with. There is always a next thing. So she deals with the current thing and moves to the next one.

This is the part nobody talks about when they call someone strong. The cost of it. The loneliness of being reliably okay. The way it means that your suffering happens in private, always, because you have never given anyone the cue that you need them to show up for you. And worse, you are aware of it.

For a show named after its protagonist, House M.D. spends a lot of time asking us to be dazzled by him. And we are. That's the problem.  Dr. Gregory House is, without question, one of the most compelling characters ever written for television. He is also one of the most consistently excused. So let's talk about that.

Who Is House, Really?

House is a diagnostician at Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. He solves cases nobody else can solve. He sees patterns in symptoms the way other people see faces in clouds. Instantly, completely, before anyone else in the room has even formed the question.

He walks in with a cane, a handful of Vicodin, and a theory that sounds insane until it saves someone's life. He is extraordinary. That part is not up for debate. But the show has a habit, a persistent one, of letting his brilliance become a reason.

A justification. As if being right often enough earns you the right to be cruel. It doesn't. It never does. And somewhere between season one and season eight, we started to forget that.

The Weight He Refuses to Carry

House has chronic pain. He has an addiction. He has a past with loss and grief layered underneath everything he does. These things are real and they matter. The show handles them with more honesty than most.

But there is a difference between understanding why someone behaves the way they do and deciding that the behaviour is therefore acceptable. House manipulates people. Not occasionally, not under pressure. Routinely. Deliberately. He runs experiments on patients without consent, bends diagnoses to fit his curiosity, and treats the people around him as variables in a problem he is always, already solving.

The staff endures it. The hospital endures it. The audience watches and nods, because he is usually right. Being right becomes a kind of currency that buys him everything, including the willingness of people around him to absorb his worst impulses without complaint.

That is not genius. That is just harm, wearing a very convincing costume.

Wilson

This is where it gets harder to look away.

Dr. James Wilson is House's closest friend. His only real one. Wilson is warm, decent, and genuinely good in a way that the show sometimes treats as a character flaw. He bails House out, financially and emotionally and professionally, more times than anyone should have to. He answers calls he doesn't want to answer. He shows up. Consistently. Without condition.

And House repays him by lying to him. By manipulating him into situations that serve House's needs. By quietly, methodically dismantling every serious relationship Wilson tries to build, because on some level, House cannot tolerate Wilson having somewhere else to be.

There is a moment where Wilson tells House something he needs to hear. House listens. Then does exactly what he wants anyway. This happens repeatedly. It is the structure of their entire relationship.

Wilson is not a friend in House's life. He is a resource. Someone whose loyalty House has correctly identified as unconditional, and therefore feels no pressure to protect. The saddest part is that Wilson knows this, at least in flashes, and stays anyway. The show frames this as devotion. It might be closer to conditioning.

House does not treat Wilson badly because of his pain or his addiction or his fear of vulnerability. He treats Wilson badly because Wilson allows it. And House is smart enough to know exactly where the line is, and to never cross it far enough that Wilson actually leaves.

That is not a friendship. That is something colder.

What We Keep Getting Wrong

House M.D. is a great show. It earns that. But its greatest trick is convincing the audience that House's cruelty is part of his brilliance, inseparable from it, the shadow that genius casts. That if you want the diagnoses, you take the devastation that comes with him.

This is not true. It is a story House tells about himself, and the show tells on his behalf, and somewhere along the way we all started repeating it.

Chronic pain does not make someone manipulative. Loss does not make someone a user. These things can explain a person's history without excusing what they do with it.

Gregory House saves lives. He is genuinely, remarkably good at the one thing he has chosen to be good at. But he is also someone who looks at the people who love him and asks, quietly, how much they will absorb before they stop. And then he pushes a little further, just to confirm the answer.

That is worth naming. Even if the limp is compelling, and the sarcasm is sharp, and he is almost always right.

Masculinity in Dil Dhadakne Do (2015) constantly demands to be seen, asserted, and obeyed. Sunny Gill (Farhan Akhtar) is the only one untouched by that performance. 

He is not trying to be a man. He simply is one.

Who is Sunny Gill?

Sunny Gill is a journalist. He observes more than he speaks, understands more than he reveals. He exists outside the rigid walls of what this movie portrays as masculinity in the first half. He arrives on the cruise reluctantly, pulled by his father’s emotional blackmail. We see him just before the intermission and his presence immediately introduces something unfamiliar to the story.

Calmness. Possibility. 

He enters at the precise moment Ayesha’s life feels most suffocating, most stressful. Yet, his arrival is not loud, neither is it disruptive. He does not try to take control or prove himself. 

Years ago, Sunny was sent away to America by Kamal Mehra himself, his education funded as a disguised act of separation from Ayesha. Sunny and Ayesha used to be close, and Kamal being a controlling and assertive father, decided that it was best in *Ayesha’s* interest to send Sunny away.

Quiet Clarity

Sunny does not reject responsibility. He just understands it differently.

So, when he returns the money that Kamal spent on his education, it isn’t an act of rebellion. It is an act of respect. Of gratitude, even. But also an act of clarity. An act of saying, “I know what was done for me, and I’m going to put it out in the open, and then we can deal with it as an equal.” Because, he is aware, he wasn’t an equal years ago, when Kamal sent him away. 

When his father talks to him about loyalty, and how Kamal was generous, and how he can’t just walk away, Sunny doesn’t debate the issue. He doesn’t fall into the same old traps. He doesn’t fall into the same old thinking. He simply provides an answer.

You can retire.

It sounds obvious, almost too obvious, but that is the point. Sunny sees options where others only see duty. For him, responsibility is not about staying stuck. It is about choosing better when you can. 

He is not bound by obligation.

He moves with awareness.

Where He Stands Apart

Sunny does not learn to respect women. He already does.

In a room where men like Manav casually talk about “allowing” their wives to work, Sunny does not ignore it. He questions it instantly, “Why does she need your permission?”  Not to argue, not to win the argument. Simply because to him, it does not even make sense.

It is also in stark contrast to everything and everyone around him. To the way Kamal shuts down Ayesha the moment she talks about divorce. To the way he speaks to Neelam. Cutting, dismissive, secondary. To Manav, who thinks permission is love, and control is care. 

When the conversation is about the safety of women, he does not dilute it to make everyone comfortable. He does state it. This is what the data says. This is what the world looks like. And when he is asked to be more “positive,” he does not pretend. He does say that he hasn’t found that world yet. 

There is no performance. There is no need to perform. There is no need to be dominant. There is no need to be right. There is just a man who sees women for what they are. And a man who not only knows and accepts reality but also speaks up to change the wrongs of it.

For a film named after its protagonist, Piku rarely occupies the foreground of her own life.

Piku Banerjee (Deepika Padukone) exists in constant response to something else, her father, Bhaskor (Amitabh Bachchan) and his life. So, today, we talk about her.

Who is Piku?

Piku Banerjee is dependable, responsible, and strong. But strength, when constant, becomes isolating. Because when everyone relies on you, there is no one left to rely on. Her mornings are not hers. Her evenings are not hers. Even her thoughts are not hers. They are occupied by medication schedules, doctor appointments, emotional outbursts, and the quiet, constant awareness that if she doesn’t show up, everything will fall apart. She handles things, she fixes things. She stays. 

To most, she might be an irritable, snappy daughter, but none of that comes from cruelty. It comes from exhaustion. From being needed all the time. She has the freedom to walk away, but no inner permission to exercise it.

Always Carrying

Piku carries everything. Not loudly, but constantly. Everyone depends on Piku. There are phone calls she cannot ignore, interruptions she cannot refuse. 

There are moments when the shell cracks. Brief almost invisible moments. 

In the car, when Bhaskor humiliates her in front of Rana (Irrfan Khan), speaking about Piku’s personal life, her personal choices, her private existence. He reduces her as something to be analysed, something to be discussed openly, as if she’s not sitting right there. He strips her of privacy, he does not care for her discomfort.

But even after everything, she stays. She doesn’t explode, she does not scream. She just sits there, eyes shut for a moment too long. Because explaining herself would change nothing. Because this is not the first time it has happened, it is routine, it’s “just another thing baba does.”

This is what reliability does, it trains you to endure. 

Shared Space

Rana (Irrfan Khan) does not enter Piku’s life as a saviour. He enters as a witness. He does not try to fix Piku, he simply understands her, notices the things everyone ignores. He does not speak over her, he listens. He is not someone she has to carry, protect or manage. 

It is Rana who shows Piku what she can’t see. “I hope you realise, he’s a selfish man.” He doesn’t say it to hurt her. He says it because he sees her. Piku, who in turn immediately defends her father by giving an answer that feels like something that has been conditioned into her psyche, “no, he’s not”. But then, a pause. “And even if he is…he’s my father.” It's a mundane moment to many, but this is where the entire movie reaches the plot. The blurred line between love and obligation. 

Rana does not demand her strength, he only makes space for her to rest from it. That’s what makes him different. He’s not afraid of sitting quietly near the river when she asks him to. He never asks her to be reliable. 

Rana Chaudhary becomes the first person who sees Piku as Piku, not the dependable, self-sufficient woman. And she softens around him in ways she never could around Bhaskor.

After Him

When Bhaskor dies, it’s not dramatic. The man who needed her for everything, suddenly needs nothing at all. The room is still. His glasses still at the table. His clothes set, waiting for a body that will never return. The film doesn’t rush this moment. The silence is not comforting, it's deafening. Because there was never silence between Piku and Bhaskor. 

Piku Banerjee does not break. Even at the prayer meet, she says simply, “Baba’s death was a happy one” and there is something devastating in that honesty. Because beneath the sadness, there is relief.

Finally Her.

For the most of her life, Piku existed in response. Her days were shaped around someone else’s dependence. Reliability had become her shape. 

After Bhaskor, she was finally not orbiting, she was standing still, but free.

Bunny has been the poster boy of following your dreams. He is the guy who chases after ambitions and aspirations. His life is the classic idea of success and happiness, but at what cost? Do dreams and ambitions matter enough to let go of everything, everyone you’ve ever known?

Who is Bunny?

Kabir "Bunny" Thapar, portrayed by Ranbir Kapoor, is the carefree, adventurous protagonist of the 2013 Bollywood film Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani. He dreams of traveling the world and living life on his own terms. We all mostly see bunny as a charming, fun loving and happy-go-lucky guy, but I beg to differ. Bunny is more than that. He is a child without a mother, a son to a middle-class father who had a second marriage, probably battling his unhappiness deep down. I feel like these experiences somehow freed him and steered him away from the ability to get attached to people strong enough to care. 

Romanticizing Escapism

Throughout the movie, we see bunny constantly running away from responsibilities and accountability. From the beginning, he is stubborn and wants to go on the Manali trip no matter what. He is adamant on his decision even though his father is worried about his well being. Of course, he does go on that trip. Moving along we see more of his adventurous side when he does not hesitate on climbing the mountain in Manali. This is a crucial point, since at this moment bunny is brutally honest about his ambitions, here comes the famous dialogue “Main udna chahta hoon, daudna chahta hoon, girna bhi chahta hoon… bas rukna nahi chahta.” – Bunny’s philosophy of life is encapsulated in this line.

To many, this line is inspiration, a motivation to wake up, but i believe otherwise, having dreams and ambitions is a necessity but, emotional connections do matter. Bunny has been romanticized for living his dreams, sure but, the fact that he decided to go abroad to study, applied to a college and got accepted, but kept that information from his 2 best friends? Do connections and relationships mean that less? Is there no room for care and attachment when you are following your dreams? One of the signs of a mature adult is being able to deal with the decisions that one makes for themselves. Later when Bunny and Avi met at Aditi's wedding, an emotional detachment was evident. Time had taken a toll. Avi, definitely, was hurt because his best friend just disappeared for 8 straight years without care. Another moment in Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani which raises questions about Bunny's “perfect life” is how he misses his father's funeral. He was so busy and focused on his career that he wasn't there for his family at a dark moment like his own father’s death. His father had always supported him, yet Bunny failed to reciprocate even in the smallest, most crucial ways. This pattern of emotional neglect repeats throughout his journey.

Ambition or Avoidance?

More than ambition, Bunny’s choices often feel like running away. While the film shows his restlessness as passion, it can also be seen as avoidance. Bunny grows up without a mother, in a home that changes before he ever gets the chance to heal. His father’s second marriage, though practical, shifts what “home” feels like for him. Staying back would mean facing grief, discomfort, and emotions he doesn’t know how to deal with. So instead, he keeps moving. Traveling, climbing mountains, leaving cities behind—movement becomes his escape. For Bunny, staying still isn’t just boring, it’s painful. 

A Final Thought.

There is no denying that Bunny got what he wanted. He lived the dream, turning passion into profession, seeing the world, doing what he loved. On the surface, it looks like success. The kind we are constantly told to chase. That cliché exists for a reason: happiness feels hollow when you have no one to share it with. In choosing his dreams, Bunny slowly distances himself from the people who once made those dreams feel meaningful. 

But what stays with me instead is a quieter thought—how much are you willing to lose in the process of becoming who you want to be?