What's in a name? Nothing!

In school we used to get this question in our exams a bit too often for our own liking. Explain the significance of the title of a certain poetry or prose piece. One was expected to launch into a detailed explanation, in brief, about whether the name given by the author/poet worked, or didn’t.  If I was to do the same for this movie, here’s my explanation in brief - the title doesn’t work. The tagline - Love goes cuckin frazy - works, but only so much.

Crazy is a loosely used word these days. Crazy doesn’t mean medically certified clinically insane, it just means that you don’t behave like the rest of the herd. In all fairness Meeta (Parineeti) is a bit of both. If you consider being whiplash smart to be a sign of insanity, then she’s guilty. The girl is smart, she’s impulsive, she is very

judaagu. She’s incredible fun because she is a little cuckoo in the head and she also pops anti-depressents like candy. Her daddy (Manoj Joshi) loves her because she has more spunk than his other four insipid daughters. Even when she steals all his money and disappears for seven years.

Nikhil (Sidharth) on the other hand is a boy caught between a doting mother, a pushy girlfriend (Adah Sharma) who threatens to call it quits every month and an ex-IPS father (Sharat Saxena) who knows a bit too well how street smart his son is but doesn’t appreciate the talent one bit.

Meeta and Nikhil have a strange feel-good kind of chemistry. It doesn’t crackle or sizzle, but it makes you feel very comfortable and happy. And that is exactly why

Hasee Toh Phasee (HTP) works and will work. The story isn’t incredible, it is simple and it is nice. Now, nice, is a word that lately has been relegated to the friend zone category, but there’s nothing wrong in being nice. Nice guys don’t necessarily finish last. Nikhil and Meeta are very nice people, ergo, they won’t finish last and the best part is, no one in the audience will want them too.

Ages ago, I was once told that I was allowed to be bat-shit crazy because I didn’t look like the backside of a bus (to put it mildly). I was given Vicky Mendoza diagonal (How I Met Your Mother fame) to understand better. Crazy Meeta scores over her more stable sister Karishma (Nikhil’s erstwhile pushy girlfriend) because she is pretty pleasing to the eye.

HTP hits the right spots with some great dialogues, some incredible fathers - Saxena and Joshi, both and some very effective side characters who create that same magic comfort as the protagonists. Parineeti and Sidharth carry HTP to the end strongly and confidently. The kukkad from Student of the Year has come of age, thank god! Can’t wait to see him in The Villain now. Go watch HTP, much much much better than the horror Abhay Deol and Preeti Desai subjected us to last week.