And now I am hungry

Basically, I will watch anything if Parineeti Chopra’s in it, but I haaated Aditya Roy Kapur in YJHD. So I resisted seeing Daawat-e-Ishq for a while, but it turns out it’s pretty cute. Gullu (Parineeti) is a young women in Hyderabad, and her father (Anupam Kher) is looking for a husband for her. Unfortunately, the families of the educated men she considers her equals ask for a much higher dowry than her father can afford. After being humiliated when her boyfriend’s family asks her father for 80 lakhs of “help”, she cooks up a plan to catch a rich family asking her father for dowry, then threaten them with a case of dowry harassment and use the money she extorts to go learn fashion design in America.

Her father strenuously objects to this on both ethical and practical grounds, but of course if he didn’t change his mind, there’d be no movie. So they head to Lucknow with fancy clothes and a suitcase full of counterfeit money, which isn’t a terrible idea at all, to find a target.

Tariq (Aditya Roy Kapur in some amazing shirts) is a loud and presumptuous restaurant owner, but his family is rich and asks straight up for dowry on Gullu’s hidden video camera, so she chooses him. But he has conditions too, like getting to know his future wife before the wedding. One knows what to expect at this point, but it doesn’t mean it’s not cute when he has a whole song wooing Gullu with his favorite dishes from his restaurant.

Seriously, those shirts! Now there's a costume department that goes above and beyond.

Not only does she enjoy spending time with him, he turns out to be a pretty decent guy. He thinks dowry is demeaning, and gives Gullu his own money to hand over at the wedding.

And wouldn’t it be nice if at this point she decided that Tariq doesn’t deserve to be conned like this and let him down easy? That is not how these movies work, though, and we still have 45 minutes left to go.

So sure, it’s predictable, but I enjoyed it. The way they handled the dowry issue, though, was pretty tacky. The movie begins with a statistic about how many girls are killed in India for dowry reasons, and then the movie takes the law meant to protect those girls and uses it as a vehicle for a frivolous con job. And while the movie is driven by Gullu’s desire for revenge, they decide to end it on a “dowry hurts men too!” note, which is just really, really, not the point.

So don’t hope for social commentary, but Parineeti is as charming as she always is, and Aditya is pretty winning too. They make a good couple, and that's really what these movies are about, anyway.