My Grandmom Also Saw Veere Di Wedding & Here’s What She Had to Say

After the release of the film, curious similarly worded tweets on scandalised grandmothers started showing up.

In the wake of the much-anticipated release of Veere Di Wedding, these curious tweets started showing up on the timelines of many users:

At first I was really puzzled and not by the fact that the wording is suspiciously consistent and makes the tweets seem like part of an engineered exercise to serve a specific agenda.

No, what threw me off was that a whole host of Indian millennials voluntarily took their presumably non-woke grandmothers to watch a film that is for all intents and purposes a desi version of Sex and the City. My puzzlement was soon replaced by the warm enveloping hug of true joy as it dawned on me that this meant that I wasn’t some kind of a socially maladjusted freak for having watched Veere di Wedding with my dadi.

So below you will find, in no particular order, the things my grandmother said during Veere di Wedding, all of which totally happened and is not just a thought experiment designed to induce LOLs and maybe dish out some social commentary:

1. But Sonam got married, no? Why is this mother so intent on getting her married again? Oh, that was real life and not a film? Wow, old age really does a number on cognitive abilities, eh?

2. Oh, the large woman married a gora and the dark one smokes and is getting a divorce which means she too is married? Maybe there is hope for you too, hehehehehe.

3. Sumeet Vyas’ family accepted Kareena just like that? Where is the discussion of caste compatibility and the consultation of star charts?

4. I love that blue gown on Kareena and I think the whole engagement set shows restrained good taste.

5. This film is supposed to be aimed at the concerns of urban women, right? So the only real all-encompassing concern of urban women, going by this film at least, is men? Hmm.

6. Wow, did this film introduce a battered domestic servant who is clearly the victim of domestic abuse just so that Sonam could loudly threaten to sue the husband for divorce while a potential rishta looks on scandalised? That was a cheap LOL.

And we’ll never hear from the servant again, much less see her story resolved? Then the film-makers will also throw in a “nobody calls my best friend a bai” joke? This film is going out of its way to make it clear that intersectionality has no space in the kind of cocktail feminism it espouses.

7. Where is Phuket? In Haryana? These girls can wear THAT there?

8. So Swara is writhing alone in bed under covers while her husband looks on in disbelief. She flops onto the pillows momentarily and then gets out of the bed to reveal some pink stick-like thing that is heavily visually censored. As a largely non-literate elderly woman who has spent most of her life near rural Aligarh, I cannot even begin to guess at what the object is or does and will move on in confused silence.

9. So she is proposing to him? Now I’ve seen everything!

10. See, even she with all her issues learned to compromise in the end and married him. When will you do it and give me great-grandchildren?

If you will excuse us both now, we have another film to catch for my new column Movie Watching with My Grandma. Maybe I’ll make it Fifty Shades this time.