FERTILE FIELD

PREGNANCY-CENTRIC SCRIPTS ARE MAKING A BUNDLE IN BOLLYWOOD WHILE HERALDING AN OPEN CONVERSATION ON THE SUBJECT

- Suhani Singh

WHEN IT RELEASED IN Dec­ember 2019, Good Newwz was anything but for Dr Jatin Shah’s fertility and IVF clinic at Grant Road in Mumbai. Bollywood’s go­to doc for surrogacy, who counts Shah Rukh Khan, Karan Johar and Sohail Khan among his clients, Shah found himself reassuring anxious couples who wondered if their sperm too, like in Raj Mehta’s comedy of errors, had gone to someone else. Starring Kareena Kapoor­ Khan, Akshay Kumar, Diljit Dosanjh and Kiara Advani, Good Newwz follows the woes of two couples whose lives are upturned by a goof­up in a fertility clinic. Shah’s patients, though, did not find the prospect funny at all.

Good Newwz grossed Rs 196 crore at the box office. But it’s not the only pregnancy­ centric flick to have caught people’s attention—and rake in the moolah too. A year earlier, Badhaai Ho had audi­ences hooked with its bitter­ sweet storyline of a 50­some­ thing woman’s (played by Neena Gupta) accidental pregnancy becoming a source of embarrassment for her 20­something son (Ayush­ mann Khurrana) and fodder for gossip among neighbours and relatives. And 2021, in particular, was surprisingly fertile for pregnancy scripts, as Kriti Sanon starred in Mimi, a Netflix film in which a young surrogate’s life gets upended when her foreign sponsors change their mind about having a child; Taapsee Pannu’s sprinter doesn’t let pregnancy be a hurdle in her athletic ambitions in Rashmi Rocket on ZEE5; Nushrratt Bha­ruccha plays an expectant mother who battles ghosts and orthodox mindsets in the horror movie Chhorii on Amazon Prime.