Was Vaidehi's selfishness romanticized in Badrinath Ki Dulhania? - Page 2

I'm quite surprised by the interpretation of Vaidehi as terrible and selfish.

To be honest, Badri wasn't a catch by any means nor was his family any great. It was deeply patriarchal and Badri was raised to believe he is special. For one when a girl told him she wasn't interested, he interpreted it as try again with grand gestures. It takes him to be stranded in a foreign land dependent on Vaidehi to realize her worth. Had she never left him at the altar he may have never learned that to be a good partner you have to respect them and treat them as your equal.

Sure, being left at the altar is a sucky thing. But I have no doubts Badri's family would have left Vaidehi at the altar if she said she wanted to be a free woman. My girl Taytay said it best....

I never trust a playboy

But they love me

So I fly him all around the world

And I let them think they saved me

They never see it comin'

What I do next

This is how the world works

You gotta leave before you get left

I can feel the flames on my skin

He says, "Don't throw away a good thing"

But if he drops my name, then I owe him nothin'

And if he spends my change, then he had it comin'

This movie was problematic in many ways. Vaidehi running away on her wedding day wasn’t one of them.

My surprise was her becoming attracted to Badri in the first place after he was established as a thug and a stalker, though the stalking part is par for the course in Bollywood romcoms unfortunately.

He flew to Singapore with the intention of kidnapping her, threw her in the trunk of his car, tried to strangle her. In return got rewarded a free place to stay at her apartment and got gifts from her as clothes and she cooked him his favorite sweets. Again, highly problematic movie. Don’t even get me started on the attempted rape scene that was played as comic relief.

It definitely was romanticized

Under the garb of the "strong, independent, career-driven woman" theme, they've neglected basic human consideration through Vaidehi's sudden flight. Yes, maybe her family would have forced her to marry Badri had she told them that she didn't want to get married at the last minute, which would obviously have been wrong. But the least she could have done is tell Badri about her aspirations/that she didn't want to get married before the wedding instead of abandoning him on the altar. Then she could have fled idk. It wasn't fair to lead him on and let the poor guy be so excited for their wedding.

she wasn’t selfish but just another girl who was the victim of patriarch society .. she did what was right for her and decided to choose her career as she should .. Badri was a spineless and a coward who couldn’t stand up against his father and was low-key misogynist .. glad they showed his character development

Originally posted by: return_to_hades

I'm quite surprised by the interpretation of Vaidehi as terrible and selfish.

To be honest, Badri wasn't a catch by any means nor was his family any great. It was deeply patriarchal and Badri was raised to believe he is special. For one when a girl told him she wasn't interested, he interpreted it as try again with grand gestures. It takes him to be stranded in a foreign land dependent on Vaidehi to realize her worth. Had she never left him at the altar he may have never learned that to be a good partner you have to respect them and treat them as your equal.

Sure, being left at the altar is a sucky thing. But I have no doubts Badri's family would have left Vaidehi at the altar if she said she wanted to be a free woman. My girl Taytay said it best....

I never trust a playboy

But they love me

So I fly him all around the world

And I let them think they saved me

They never see it comin'

What I do next

This is how the world works

You gotta leave before you get left

I can feel the flames on my skin

He says, "Don't throw away a good thing"

But if he drops my name, then I owe him nothin'

And if he spends my change, then he had it comin'

She WAS terrible and selfish. "He would have left her anyway" is not a valid argument to defend her. Vaidehi did not once consider how Badri and his family would be humiliated if she ran away. She had no right to bring shame to the family.

If she was such a p*ssy that couldn't stand up for herself and call off the marriage, then she should've sucked it up and got married, instead of chickening out like a coward.

Originally posted by: IAmLuvBolly

This movie was problematic in many ways. Vaidehi running away on her wedding day wasn’t one of them.

My surprise was her becoming attracted to Badri in the first place after he was established as a thug and a stalker, though the stalking part is par for the course in Bollywood romcoms unfortunately.

He flew to Singapore with the intention of kidnapping her, threw her in the trunk of his car, tried to strangle her. In return got rewarded a free place to stay at her apartment and got gifts from her as clothes and she cooked him his favorite sweets. Again, highly problematic movie. Don’t even get me started on the attempted rape scene that was played as comic relief.

Badri wasn't your typical thug. He was misguided by the lessons of patriarchy that his father had been feeding him all his life. He was a softie who thought that he was so "tough". Otherwise why wouldn't he have killed her after kidnapping her? Put him in a different circumstances away from his father's influence he was intelligent enough to learn that maybe Papa was wrong. Vaidehi paid his bail because she felt bad for dumping him at the alter. She had no intention of seeing him again. It was during his drunken mumble comparing her to her selfish ex that she realized that he really loved her after all and that she had hurt him badly. That the damage was much higher than some public humiliation.

Badri was definitely a stalker in Singapore. But in India, things were not that clear cut. Vaidehi shooed him off with just a couple of smart comments. She didn't feel threatened at all.

Originally posted by: capricornrcks

Badri was definitely a stalker in Singapore. But in India, things were not that clear cut. Vaidehi shooed him off with just a couple of smart comments. She didn't feel threatened at all.

And therein lies the problem with a lot of hero stalking scenarios in Bollywood movie. The heroine never “feels” threatened. That’s almost irrelevant. A woman shouldn’t have to feel threatened for it to be wrong for a man to follow her around.

Badri was a thug. He met Vaidehi at a wedding. Wasn’t he there to collect the dowry the groom was getting? I’ve seen the movie only once so I don’t remember the exact details. But at some point in the kidnapping strangling sequence Vaidehi tells him he can get the death penalty in Singapore and that’s what makes him stop. This was one hot mess of a problematic movie that pretended to be woke and feminist. I can’t believe everyone involved with it didn’t get raked over the coals at the time.