Yeh kaisa pyaar hai, asks a character in ‘Love Storiyaan’. Nothing unusual, you might say, about Aekta Kapoor and Ullekh NP getting together. She, a North Indian Punjabi woman, comes with baggage from a failed marriage; he is from Kerala, with a mother reluctant to accept that her beloved son could go in for such a ‘dangerous’ relationship, as opposed to a ‘normal’ marriage.
After meeting Aekta and her grown-up daughters and Ullekh and his mother, whom we see softening during their trip to the latter’s homestead in Kannur (An Suitable Girl, directed by Hardik Mehta), we move on to the rest: two radio jockeys, Hindu and Christian, meeting through an unusual conduit (Love On Air, by Vivek Soni), a Hindu-Muslim couple coming back to Dhaka to relive their romance (Homecoming, directed by Shazia Iqbal), a Dalit-upper class Brahmin meet-cute in the backdrop of big-dam protests in Chhattisgarh (Raah Sangharsh Ki, by Akshay Indikar), an Afghan man and an Indian woman’s relationship cemented by distance (Faasley, by Archana Phadke), and two Kolkata-based individuals who find their identities through a gender-switch (Love Beyond Labels, by Colin D’Cunha).
So what, you might say, there’s nothing new about people who’ve broken the mould, whether it is inter-state, inter-caste or inter-faith, to get hitched. And you might be right. But the reason ‘Love Storiyaan’, streaming on Amazon Prime Video, needs to be acknowledged is that it courageously celebrates the joys of romantic diversity at a time when the space for such things is shrinking rapidly.
In the India of 2024, and especially in the India of 2024, any ‘deviation’ from the norm is up for challenge, especially when the state is determined to get into our bedrooms in order to police the forms in which we can love and live.
It’s in this background that this new show, quite appropriately from Karan Johar’s stable, and executive-produced and conceptualised by Somen Mishra, becomes so precious. It gives the people who are retelling their love stories, as well as us who become participatory viewers, a chance to celebrate the many hues of romance, to realise that there is no set construct for people to fall in love, that Cupid– that poor, overworked god of love — can strike anytime, anywhere. It gives us a chance to breathe freely, and to feel all is not lost.
The six stories, based on journalists Priya Ramani, Samar Halarnkar and Niloufer Venkatraman’s Instagram page, The India Project, are clearly carefully chosen to represent different parts of the country, and different kinds of ‘love’. Not all six are equal. The best efforts are from Indikar and Iqbal, who keep us with their narratives — the former springs to life around the bright-faced Dalit activist Subhadra Khaperde who is alive to the rhythms of her sexual life with her partner; the latter does have the courage to show us that not all homecomings are hunky-dory, and that you carry your happiness with you. The other four are looser and not as impactful.
There’s also the presence of banal situations, and while we do get that not all romance can be full of drama as it would be too exhausting, we do hope that the next season takes care of this. The device of using actors for flashbacks is more annoying than inventive, and the background music threatens to make things generic. Real-life love is and can be really spiky, and we the viewers, can not only deal with it, but revel in it.
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But then you look at the faces of these lovers, who have fought the hard fight, and have made a home together in the face of tremendous odds, and you break into a smile. Haan, yehi pyaar hai.
Love Storiyaan directors: Hardik Mehta, Vivek Soni, Shazia Iqbal, Akshay Indikar, Archana Phadke, Colin D’Cunha.
Love Storiyaan rating: 2.5 stars
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