If you live in a city like Delhi or Mumbai you could not miss the excitement around the release of Befikre.
A friend of ours who is a well established person in her PR circles suggested – Hey uncles aren’t you going to do anything around Befikre? No brand partnership in mind? It is a movie that speaks and stands about love, just like StayUncle. Isn’t it?
It sounded exciting, yet I found myself uninterested beyond the first few minutes.
Why?
Because Befikree is not a real love story.
How do you say that Blaze uncle, you may wonder? A young couple having tons of fun, being carefree in love and loving in each other completely free from judgments. Isn’t that what StayUncle stands for?
Yes it does. But Befikree is not a love story.
It is a love drama.
And as it is the case with every other drama – It tends to be over emphasized. Over reacted. Overrated. Unreal.
There are thousands perhaps millions of couples in India who long for the chance to whisper a single word inside their loved one’s year. Something as simple as – You mean tons to me.
They long for 5 minutes of interrupted time together without the fear that someone might pounce on them out of nowhere for doing nothing else but spending time together.
If they are lucky enough the intruder may merely appear with a document in his hands that has Marriage Certificate on it. In worse case he will appear as a violent fool and shed all his frustration on him for no reason.
These couple do not require the glitter of Europe. They don’t dream about some glamour of Paris. They don’t need to dance on red tracks and spill Champaign on top of each other as a proof of their love.
They don’t need the world and it’s vagaries to testify of their love. They don’t require crowds and foreign ambassadors to applaud on them when they kiss.
None of that. They only beg to be understood and left alone. At least not getting killed for merely loving each other.
Befikre is the ideal of the metropolitan India. The India of Delhi for example.
Yet love is put into test every single day in the real India, the India that lies beyond Delhi, in her Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. That is where the problem brews. And the fight of these couples n places where honor killing is not something unheard of is our fight too.
For that reason we refused to consider any association with project like Befikre. Such pseudo event such exaggerated and oversold ideas of how love should be like will only seduce us believing that hey we are doing the right thing, that we are solving the problem when in fact we are not.
So let Befikre belong to the young middle class kids of Defence Colony and CR park and Gurgaon. StayUncle’s fight on the other side lies out there. It is not a rosy one.
