Admit it, you paused for a minute when you read “storys” instead of stories when you saw the title I Hate Love Storys. Why was “Storys” spelt/spelled that way? Was there a missing apostrophe or did someone make a typo when registering the title of the film? Or, maybe it was a deliberate ploy to draw people’s attention? I will never know the answer since I don’t have contacts to co-producer Karan Johar even though I follow him on Twitter or director Punit Malhotra, who is also on Twitter.

Bollywood’s latest offering is I Hate Luv Stories – a light hearted movie about Bollywood and addresses our collective subconscious on why are Bollywood films so formula driven? At times you get the feeling that I Hate Luv Storys is about a tight knit group of Bollywood insiders letting you in on how movies are made, but that is not the focus of the film since you only get passing references about it.

Boy meets girl, boy/girl like each other, there is some tension, which gets resolved and the couple live happily ever after. This syrupy Bollywood formula has kept us engaged for years and I suspect will continue to engage us in the future too unless they start producing desi versions of I Robot or Star Wars. I Hate Luv Stories at times felt like an inside story of a tight knit group of Bollywood folks who are letting us in on how Bollywood films are made.

I Hate Luv Stories is a movie within a movie. Jay or J (Imraan Khan) as he prefers to be called is an assistant director  and Simran (Sonam Kapoor) is an Art Director. Both work for a successful Bollywood director  Veer (Sameer Soni), who has that elusive midas touch and has happily churned out one hit after another. Guess who is the inspiration for that successful director? Did I hear you say Karan Johar? Well, it is. Our hero hates 2 things: love stories and dating. Simran on the other hand loves films and is a big believer in the power of love and is engaged to be married to Raj (Sammir Dattani). But things change once sparks start flying between J and Simran and that is the stuff this movie is made of. There are lots of tongue and cheek references to Bollywood and if you pay close attention you will notice a couple of interesting T-shirts, including one that boldly proclaims Bollywood sucks. I wish they had fleshed out developed Sameer Soni’s character as a Bollywood director. It would have been interesting to see what really goes on in his mind when he creates these frothy romances that never fails to seduce his audience.

There is lot of natak (drama) in the movie but the audience clearly like it.  I watched I Hate Luv Stories in a packed theatre  in Silicon Valley where there is a huge desi population (many of them are under 30 years). Many of us have that absent makes the heart grown fonder syndrome and one of the things we appear to grow fonder as time goes by are Bollywood films. I know people who left India in the 1960s and 1970s and stopped watching Bollywood films once they landed here. (There are many reasons for that and that is a whole different story). Now these same set of people watch Bollywood films regularly and marvel at the improvement in the production, story line and packaging of Bollywood films. Karan Johar clearly recognizes this fact and he has the Non Returning Indian (NRI) on his mind when he makes films. A good portion of the revenue for many Bollywood films comes from outside the country. I suspect I Hate Luv Stories will do very well with the NRI audience, especially the younger generation.