Bollywood Nets a new theme

Bendre, who features as the female lead in the movie reveals that she’s quite an Internet freak herself. "I surf the Net very often, and I’m very curious about all the chat sites," she says. "I don’t think it’s impossible to fall in love over the Internet. If it was, I wouldn’t be convinced into doing this film," she adds.

By the end of the year, filmmaker Hansal Mehta is slated to wrap work on Shaadi.com, a romance starring Tabu, quite a Net freak herself, which is set in the dot com age. Explaining the title, writer Suparn Verma says that it reflects the dot com age the couple are living in. "Not quite an Internet love story it traces the life of a couple after a year of their marriage," he says. “The couple also use email a lot to communicate with each other in the film,” he says.

Interestingly, 25-year-old Verma, who has been working with rediff.com as a Chat and Broadband Producer for the last five years, met with Mehta while conducting a chat programme with actor Manoj Bajpai. "We discussed movies extensively, and a few days later he emailed me to ask if I wanted to write a script for him," Verma recounts. After considering several subjects, the duo finally settled on Shaadi.com. "It’s really a comment on society. People are placing matrimonial advertisements on the Internet, meeting others and now even getting married on the Net. Surely there’s a story out there," he says. However, Verma strongly believes that the country is not ready for a real Internet love story. "You’ve Got Mail was just a strong love story with the Internet serving merely as a tool to further their romance. A real Net story would be one that goes into details and projects a truer picture," he says.

Another scriptwriter, Rajiv Sethi who co-wrote the Sunny Deol-Mahima Chaudhary starrer, Pyaar Koi Khel Nahin says the Internet might serve as an interesting backdrop for a film, "but one needs a gutsy producer to agree to an unconventional story like this." Sethi, who insists that most Hindi films are either love stories or love triangles, believes that movie-makers in India are either not willing to take on new ideas, or too slow to do so. He points to Boney Kapoor’s Sirf Tum, which he says was an unconventional but interesting idea about a couple falling in love through written correspondence. "I guess the Internet love story is an idea which would have crossed every writer’s mind," he admits.