Why our movies never show how Indians actually talk

In Scenes from a Situationship, an urban Indian film that has released on YouTube, a young couple drifts closer, losing their anonymities in companionship, liking, talking, bickering, making plans, making love, abusing, making up, taking it for granted that they are adored and still dissatisfied, as though they know what it is to be satisfied.

- MANU JOSEPH

They may think they are the first of their kind, but whole generations before them have had the same conversations and same lives; just that we may not have seen it in an Indian film. They love sex, though maybe not equally. She can make him bathe by promising sex; but he doesn't have that sort of power. She, in fact, blames him for his mediocre technique; he blames the mysteries of girls. They have a lot of time, a lot; like many young people, they are billionaires of time. These two don’t have to send money to parents, or worry about them. They are the type of young people whose problems are themselves. They have friends like them, who are couples and who say that to be in love is to be bored with each other. They are proud of this observation, which they suspect is deeply philosophical.

It is such a rare, real and delightful Indian film, one of the best written in my recent memory. I do not have the heart to call it independent or ‘art cinema’, though it is, because Indian fringe cinema is generally dreary or at least dour and fake, intended for the lottery of foreign acclaim on the festival circuit and made by urban people who do not belong to the world they claim to portray. Scenes from a Situationship, directed by Vaibhav Munjal, who has also co-written the film with Vaishnav Vyas, one of the two remarkable lead actors, Shreya Sandilya being the other, is the work of people who belong exactly in the world they depict.

The achievement of