I have an interesting story for you today!

The girl is 19 years old. Let’s call her ‘Heroine’. She is from a very famous family. She falls in love with a guy from a not-so-famous family. Let’s call the guy ‘Hero’. They both want to get married. Heroine apparently tells her parents about it, but as you can guess after watching so many Indian movies in your life, they say no.

A year passes by, and the Heroine decides to take matters into her own hands. She runs away from home with the Hero, and they both get married secretly. Their friends plan it to perfection, right from making all wedding arrangements to breaking the news to press in a dramatic fashion. The Hero and Heroine then disappear, nowhere to be seen. Not even the Hero’s parents.

The crowd goes wild. They love such stories, more so because the Heroine happens to be the daughter of their favorite movie star. The dad himself had starred in such roles in so many movies. Almost always, the Hero wins out at the end. So the crowd wants to know if the same thing happens in this case too.

A few days later, our Hero and Heroine show up in a far-away city, with attorneys by their side. The Heroine alleges that her husband now faces threats from her family and that they need security. Specifically, she points her fingers at her babai (dad’s younger brother) as the one threatening her husband.

Now a little bit about this babai. He is known to be cocky. So let’s call him that - Mr. Cocky. Rumor has it that goons belonging to a now-dead faction leader once shaved Mr. Cocky’s head and mustache as punishment for being, well, cocky in a real estate tiff. Anyway, coming back to our story, Cocky is now upset that the Heroine accused him of threatening her husband. He wants to prove his innocence. He goes to the nearest police station to hand over his licensed revolver, obviously to make a point that he no longer poses a threat to the newly weds, because he ain’t got no gun on him! But the press people wouldn’t leave him in peace. They want to know everything from him. So Mr. Cocky talks to the press outside the police station, with the revolver in his hand - a pose that would have made even James Bond proud!

You would have figured by now who this story is all about…err, it’s not really a story, but a “real life movie” currently playing out in Andhra Pradesh, my home state in India. Nobody knows how long this movie will play, or for that matter, what the ending would be. But I do hope that common sense will prevail eventually, and that there would indeed be a happy ending for the “movie”.

As for our Hero, he needs to find a job for himself quickly. Because running away with the girl is the easiest part. He now needs to support her through thick and thin, and hopefully make peace with the Heroine’s very famous family too!