Long-distance relationships have a very specific texture. The time zone math. The conversations that have to carry more weight than a single conversation should. The question of who, eventually, is going to move, and what they’ll be giving up when they do. Bollywood has been making films about NRI relationships for decades, which means it’s been making films about distance without always knowing it. Here’s the ones that get it right.
Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003): the geography of unavailability
KHNH is set entirely in New York, but it’s structured like a long-distance relationship film because Aman (Shah Rukh Khan) keeps himself at an emotional remove that functions like distance. He’s physically present and structurally unavailable. The film understands something true about long-distance relationships: geography isn’t always the actual barrier. Sometimes the barrier is a decision one person has made that the other person can’t cross.
Preity Zinta’s Naina spends most of the film loving someone who is there and not there simultaneously. If you’ve been in a relationship where you were technically in the same city but practically nowhere near each other, KHNH is going to feel familiar in ways that aren’t about location.
Namastey London (2007): culture as the real distance
Namastey London frames its central conflict as culture rather than geography, but those two things are frequently the same for desi diaspora couples. Jasmeet (Katrina Kaif) has grown up in London and wants a British boyfriend. Her parents arrange a match with an Indian man (Akshay Kumar’s Arjun) from Punjab. The distance between their worldviews is more complicated than any flight would be.
The film’s resolution is too neat, Jasmeet’s British boyfriend turns out to be awful, which conveniently clears the path, but the central tension it sets up is real. When two people are separated not by miles but by the gap between the culture they grew up in and the culture their family is from, the reconciliation is never just logistics.
Ae Dil Hai Mushkil (2016): loving across cities and continents
Ayan and Alizeh meet in London, part ways when she goes back to Mumbai, reunite in Paris. The film is constantly moving them across geography because Imtiaz Ali understands that distance is one of the cleaner excuses people use for not having the harder conversation about whether the relationship is actually working. As long as there’s distance, you can blame the distance.
ADHM also shows the particular loneliness of long-distance: the way you can feel completely seen by someone you can’t touch, and the way that gap between emotional intimacy and physical presence becomes impossible to sustain after a while.
Dil Se (1998): the unreachable person
Dil Se is not a long-distance film in the geographic sense, but Amar’s relationship with Meghna is the definitive Bollywood portrait of loving someone who is structurally unreachable. She’s present and he cannot reach her. That’s the emotional reality of some long-distance relationships: the person exists, you can see them occasionally, and yet the relationship you want is permanently out of reach for reasons that have nothing to do with miles.
Mani Ratnam shoots the whole film with this quality of light that makes everything feel temporary. It’s the most visually accurate film about the feeling of loving someone you know you can’t hold.
What Bollywood long-distance films get wrong
The consistent failure of Bollywood long-distance films is the resolution. Someone always comes back, or the distance ends, or the cultural barrier dissolves. Real long-distance relationships don’t always resolve that cleanly. Sometimes one person moves and resents it. Sometimes the reunion is the beginning of new problems. Sometimes the distance revealed incompatibilities that proximity would have hidden longer.
If you’re navigating an NRI relationship right now, the piece on desi situationships addresses the way that “we’ll figure it out” functions as a relationship-sustaining ambiguity rather than an actual plan.
And if the long-distance thing just ended and you’re back in New York looking for a reason to be in a room with other humans, come to a show. Garam Masala Dating runs weekly at Top Secret Comedy Club in Manhattan. garammasaladating.com.
