Choice, Compatibility and Consent in “Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya”
摘要
Can AI help find your perfect match? Sure. But can AI become your perfect match? The recent Bollywood movie “Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya” (“My heart is tangled in your words”) portrays such a possibility through a romance between a man and his machine. Celebratory media and viewer remarks about the “unlikeliness” of this “experiment gone awry” suggest that this “gleaming” film is just “harmless fun”. In this critical analysis, I argue that far from being a laugh-a-minute, revolutionary tale of a perfect partner made possible by scientific advances, this film may be read as a troubling reflection of the complex terrains of marriage in contemporary urban India, particularly as they speak to notions of choice, consent, and compatibility. Guided by Atwood’s notion of ustopia, this paper explores the possibilities and perils of emotional robots. At one end, the film holds a mirror to the impossible demands that the Indian middle-class places on its women by showing us that even a robot programmed to fit the exact needs of its admin(man) falls apart. At another, the admin’s physical violence resulting in the death of the robot serves as a reminder of the severe implication of patriarchal noncompliance, a warning to women gone wild.