The DIY love project

Illustration/Uday Mohite

My friend shared what seemed to be a news clip of a couple being interrogated on a small YouTube news channel by a reporter, bizarrely, in dark glasses. The allegedly unhappy couple themselves run a YouTube channel - Mithu-Manasi channel - chronicling their love marriage, now apparently on the rocks. "No one becomes Ambani by playing bat ball all day," says Manasi, throwing shade at a sullen Mithu.

"Was he the DM of Sitmarhi when you married him, that you now say he's good for nothing?" asks the reporter. Manasi scoffs. Mithu imagines arriving into a grand future but someone has to book tickets in the present. Mithu hopes that ticket is their YouTube channel. "Bas followers milein" says Mithu. "Followers will come with good content," quips Manasi, implying Mithu is anything but.

The video (no surprise) sent me down a rabbit hole. I came out grinning like a Cheshire cat. Mithu-Manasi's vlog is one among several in the Wild West - or is it the Enchanted Forest? - of social media, which self-chronicle love marriages. For instance, an older one by Nandini and Ashish is called simply, Love Marriage Couple.

To be a love marriage couple, it is understood, is to go against family, make one's way in the world differently, and need social support. The world may see us as deviant, but these video diaries of daily life beg to differ. Nandini makes kathal. They install a cooler. What to do when ‘Hamare battery ka distilled water khatm ho gaya'? At some point, family reconciliations happen. Perhaps propelled by the birth of baby Gullu? It is documented sideways in a video called ‘Pehli baar ma ke liye banayi chicken curry'. Marital discord results from the sheer drudgery of child care and house work. Later, anxiety about Nandini's sister's board exams hints at more reconciliations. The audience supports.

Mithu Manasi's channel clearly begins as Manasi's enterprise. Her first video says "Hello guys, welcome. I'm from Sitamarhi, 12th pass. I've done a love marriage and have no support, so please support me." A few videos later Mithu enters, bumbling, but learning as he goes. Their channel pushes for drama with jealousy, suspicion, even violence, culminating in the video where divorce seems imminent. The twist? What at first seemed to be a news video, has been created by Manasi-Mithu themselves (title: Jald Hoga Talaq) featuring the reporter's impressive improv. Sorry Orry, so behind the curve babe.

Manasi-Mithu are enacting their downfall and will chart their return even as elites, bolstered by their own media universes and ideological bubbles, present themselves as exceptional, crafting their self-narratives of tradition and modernity. What is real and what is not? Asking that question is like asking what is love and what is not? Who is traditional and who is modern?

The women here play out traditional gender roles, cooking and cleaning with sindoor bhari maang. Yet the enterprise of producing these video-narratives of imperfect life after love marriage, the quest for glamour and importance, is clearly a joint one meant to assert the self, not uphold love marriage as exemplary. These stories do not stop at the threshold of the happy ending, or preserve the boundary between public and private, realism and fantasy, as bhadraloks media prefer. This DIY love project is an ongoing and messy one, quite like the construction of new realities mixed with old ones, called life.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com