Kabaddi, kabaddi, kabaddi...
"Don't let your past blackmail your present to ruin your beautiful future."
— Jug
Dear Zindagi is an English and Hindi-language film from India. It was directed by Gauri Shinde, stars Alia Bhatt and Shah Rukh Khan, and was released in 2016.
Kaira (Bhatt) is a Mumbai-based cinematographer at a low point in her life: she dumped her childhood sweetheart for a man who proceeded to get engaged to someone else, she's evicted from her apartment and has to move in with her headache-inducing family, and she's dissastisfied with her job. She seeks the help of therapist Jehangir "Jug" Khan (Khan) for the insomnia that develops. Jug's methods might seem unconventional, but his expertise and wisdom help Kaira resolve some of her own issues along the way.
Tropes:
- Calling the Old Man Out: At her brother's welcome-home party, Kaira yells at her parents for abandoning her at her grandparents' as a child while they tried to rebuild their business and their constant dissatisfaction with her life.
- Coming of Age Story: Over the course of the film, young artist Kaira gets in touch with herself, starts mending her relationship with her parents, and completes a short film that she needed to kickstart her career.
- Commitment Issues: Early in the film, Kaira dumps her longtime boyfriend for another guy, only for him to become engaged to someone else. While home, she dates a musician but then is reluctant to take that new relationship to another level. Late in the film, Jug suggests that she has commitment issues which stem from abandonment issues in her childhood.
- Cool Big Sis: Kaira to Kiddu, who's the only member of her family she's at ease with.
- Get Out!: Kaira screams "Get out!" repeatedly at Raghuvendra when he turns up in Goa to talk to her.
- I Have This Friend: During her first session, Kaira pretends that she's in Goa to help out a friend struggling with guy problems and her job. Once she starts, all the details come rushing out. Jug immediately clocks that Kaira's friend is made up and these are actually her problems but humors her for a bit.
- Infant Sibling Jealousy: Kaira was envious of her new baby brother because her mother arrived home with him and spent all her time with him after abandoning her for years at her grandparents'.
- Intimate Psychotherapy: Defied. Kaira falls in love with her therapist Jug, but he gently rebukes her, saying it's a common reaction. They end on a good note.
- Parental Abandonment: After Kaira's parents' business failed, they left her at her grandparents' home for years while trying to find work and gave false promises that they would come back soon. Her mother only coming back for her brother's birth and Kaira overhearing from an argument between her mother and grandfather that her parents were lying to her to spare her the truth of their difficult situation led to her trust issues.
- Plot-Inciting Infidelity: Variation in that it's the protagonist Kaira who cheats in the beginning, but it doesn't work out with the guy she left her boyfriend for either. The one-two punch of that and her landlord evicting her sets up the emotional arc of the film.
- Purely Aesthetic Glasses: Raghuvendra ribs Kaira about the glasses she wears, saying she only does it to look older.
- Sand In My Eyes: After hearing that the guy she's seeing got engaged to someone else, the aloof Kaira bites into a pepper. When her friend asks if she's crying, she angrily comments that it's just the spice.
- Scenery Porn: The film devotes a lot of time to the tropical shores of Goa, including scenes where the leads run into a beach and bike along the coast.
- The Shrink: Jug is the Awesome type. He immediately positions himself as different from other stuffy therapists by wearing jeans to a conference and is able to draw Kaira completely out of her shell by the movie's end.
- Slut-Shaming: Subverted. Kaira admits to her therapist Jug that she had more than one guy in her life before marriage and then immediately gets defensive at his response, accusing him of seeing her as a cheap slut. It is apparent, however, that Kaira is thinking this of herself, and Jug gives a comforting metaphor about needing to try out several options before settling on a life partner and not to worry about societal criticism.
- True Companions: Kaira, Fatima, Jackie and Ganju, who all have big aspirations and go out on fun nights together to make up for their mundane jobs.
- The Unfavorite: Kaira's family openly prefers Kiddo over her for being a good kid who did well in school and now has "proper" professional opportunities ahead of him, while she has a more complicated relationship with them and an unstable creative job. After the above Calling the Old Man Out, they make an effort to reconcile with Kaira.
