When Bae was Poo and disowned by Raichands, writer Ishita Moitra reveals first draft of 'Call Me Bae'

Call Me Bae

Ananya Panday's debut web series 'Call Me Bae' is now out of Prime Video. The show backed by Dharma Productions and created by Ishita Moitra has been receiving largely positive reviews. The show which is being termed as fun tells the story of Bella Chowdhary akak 'Bae' who gets disowned by her family after her husband catches her cheating on him. She moves to Mumbai from Delhi hoping to start from scratch away from the shame back home. In the process, she discovers a middle-class lifestyle and gets a cultural shock as she moves cities. While her character reminded people of Kareena Kapoor's Poo, turns out that's where the story began.

Call Me Bae started as spin-off of Poo

Ishita Moitra who is the creator of the show shared images from the first draft of the show that she wrote. The show was titled 'Poo' with the subheading as 'When life gives you lemons-Just Poo it' . The draft mentions the genre as comedy with eight episodes of 20 minutes each. The draft also included a picture of Kareena Kapoor as her iconic character Poo from 'Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham'.

In the second slide, the scene where Bae meets celebrity channel anchor Siddharth Sen for the first time is penned. While the scene was retained on the show, the script had Bae as Poo.

Moitra also shared the part where Bae realised for the first time that she has officially become middle class. In the first script, Poo talks about getting disowned financially by the Raichands. Now, if you remember in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Amitabh Bachchan's family were the 'Raichands'. His wife was played by Jaya Bachchan and they had two kids played by Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan. While SRK gets married to Kajol, towards the end of the movie we see Poo getting married to Rohan (Hrithik Roshan). So going by the first draft, it is clear that the show began as a spin-off of Poo.

Sharing the draft, Ishita wrote, "Thanks to @somenmishra I took a deep dive down memory wali gulley. Here's how it began. How it went and where we are at. Thank you God ki best log milte rahe aur karvaan badhta raha.
Her pain is her couture, it's her Gucci and her Dior.
Who's that girl, you can watch her slay.
Who's that girl - you can call her Bae. ❤️❤️❤️Overwhelmed with all the love. Deep gratitude to all of you and you, dear audience"

The missing Mumbai struggle in Call Me Bae

The script also details Poo getting a new job, new friends in the hostel and also her struggles of taking the local train to commute from one end of the city to another for work. Now that is a classic Mumbai struggle. However, that part was missing in the life of Bae.