The sleeper Bollywood hit of 2018 -- Badhaai Ho -- has crossed the Rs 100-crore mark at the Indian box office. The comedy of manners, as it were, which stars Neena Gupta, Ayushman Khurana, Gajraj Rao and Sanya Malhotra, has earned Rs 100.10 crore after 17 days in theatres. Making the achievement even more remarkable is that the relatively low-budget film, thought to have been made within Rs 20-25 crore, deals with the unplanned pregnancy of middle-aged couple in a middle-class North Indian ‘service’ family without prurience or distasteful innuendo and the audience is lapping it up.
In many ways, Badhai Ho is the coming of an age film of Indian parents! While word-of-mouth promotion and publicity is thought have been the reason for punters flocking to theatres in droves, the familiarity of, as a leading film critic writes, “nosey neighbours, nasty relatives and garish weddings” has been handled by the filmmakers with great empathy. The film makes the point that parents with grown up children can still feel amorous towards each other and have a healthy sexual relationship with dollops of humour, laugh-out-loud set-pieces and rare sensitivity. There is some remarkable, authentic story-writing going on Bollywood nowadays and in Badhai Ho it has reached its apogee; it deserves all the success it is enjoying.
