https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vVHK97hJkA
There is a reel going viral. Eleven million views in under twenty-four hours, if the LinkedIn post announcing it is to be believed. The creator — earnest, articulate, and clearly skilled with AI tools — has made a thirty-second video in which she steps into iconic Bollywood scenes and pulls women away from their men. The mission, as she calls it: saving women from toxic men.
I watched it. I read her explanation. And I found myself with that particular feeling you get when something is clever enough to be convincing but not quite honest enough to be true.
Let me tell you what bothered me. Not in the way of outrage — I am not outraged. More like a quiet, persistent itch that refuses to be scratched away by eleven million approving thumbs.
The first problem: the films she is rescuing women from are not quite what she says they are.
The most iconic scene in the reel features DDLJ. Raj. Simran. The train. The outstretched hand. The moment when India collectively held its breath.
But here is what actually happens in that scene, if you remember it without the revision that nostalgia sometimes performs on memory. Simran's father — Bauji — turns to her and says: Ja Simran, ja. Jee le apni zindagi. He releases her. She runs. She reaches for Raj herself.
She is not dragged. She is not trapped. She chooses.
Now, one can absolutely have a conversation about whether the film's broader structure — where a father's permission is the pivot of a woman's freedom — is itself worth examining. That is a legitimate and interesting conversation. But that is a conversation about patriarchal family structure, not about Raj being a toxic man. Conflating the two is not analysis. It is a convenient simplification dressed as insight.
If your feminist reel interrupts a moment of female agency and replaces it with a rescue, you have not liberated anyone. You have just changed the rescuer's gender.
The second problem: the premise is built on a misreading, and the misreading is the product.
The creator is thoughtful enough to admit, in her own words, that she changed the narrative. She did not claim the films were secretly feminist all along. She said she reimagined them. That is an honest creative choice.
But the LinkedIn post then frames the eleven million views as evidence of deep emotional truth — as proof that women always knew, somewhere inside, that these relationships were wrong and that someone should have intervened. That is a very different claim. It moves from I made a fun AI edit to I tapped into a collective wound.
She makes two claims simultaneously. Claim one: I changed the narrative — an honest admission that the films did not originally carry an anti-toxic message. Claim two: eleven million women connected with this deeply — implying the reel struck something true and long-suppressed.
But these two claims cannot both be right. If she changed the narrative, the emotional resonance cannot be proof of pre-existing truth. You cannot rewrite a story and then cite the applause as evidence that the original story was always secretly yours.
And if Simran was free to run, if the nostalgia is for something more complicated than victimhood, then the reel did not tap into suppressed truth. It tapped into the far more available thing: flattery. It told women they were always smarter than the culture around them — that they saw through it even as they loved it. That is a beautiful thing to be told. It is also precisely what lets everyone off the hook. Real cultural critique leaves a small bruise. It asks you to reckon with what you accepted, not just celebrate that someone has finally arrived to save you from it.
The third problem — and this is the one that stayed with me longest — is that the rescuer in a feminist video is still a rescuer.
The visual grammar of the reel is unchanged from the structure it claims to critique. A powerful figure enters the story. The woman in peril is passive. She is moved from one situation to another by someone else's intervention. The camera follows the person doing the saving, not the person being saved.
The reel's message, if you strip away the AI filmmaking and the nostalgia and the cinematic editing, is this: women were too conditioned to recognise the problem themselves. So someone had to come in and fix it for them.
That is not empowerment. That is the oldest story in the world, with a woman in the hero role.
Genuine feminist storytelling — the kind that actually costs something to make and something to watch — would show the woman herself seeing the pattern. Choosing differently. Walking away on her own terms. The power in that story comes from within. It does not arrive on a rescue mission.
There is a particular irony in the fact that Simran's moment of agency — running towards a choice she made — is the scene being "corrected." In the name of feminism, she has been made passive again.
I want to be fair. The creator clearly has talent. The technical execution is impressive. And the underlying cultural point — that Bollywood has a long history of romanticising control, possession, and boundary-crossing as love — is worth making. Kabir Singh exists. Darr exists. There is genuine material to work with.
But eleven million views built on a shaky premise are not the same as eleven million people having a genuine awakening. It might just be eleven million people enjoying the comfort of being told they were always, already, right.
The most useful question a piece of cultural commentary can ask is: what did you miss, and why? The reel never asks it. It only answers: you missed nothing. You always knew. Someone just had to come and get you out.
That is a very satisfying thing to be told. It is also, quietly, the problem.
