Saiyaara: Love in the time of Coldplay scandal

Dubai: Love has been on life support lately. Let’s be honest—after the recent Coldplay debacle, where a married billionaire CEO was photographed canoodling with his human resources head, the institution of marriage looked like a corporate restructuring exercise. Fidelity? Loyalty? They’re now just words buried deep in HR manuals nobody reads.

And then, out of nowhere, comes the Bollywood romance Saiyaara, out in UAE cinemas now.

This unapologetically syrupy, wide-eyed love story has crashed into our jaded, doomscrolling timelines like a golden retriever at a board meeting. No glossy press tours, no breakneck speed-dating interviews where actors recite answers like chatbots. The makers just dropped the film into cinemas, and boom—it’s all anyone can talk about.

The Plot? Simpler than an HR policy

Confession time: I found Saiyaara so saccharine I could feel my dentist calling. The acting? A bit coltish—think baby deer learning to walk. And yet, here I am writing about it because the world cannot stop watching.

The story is deceptively simple. A boy, tempestuous and mercurial, a troubled musician rebel with a permanent storm cloud over his head, falls for Padda, a luminous girl who lights up the screen just by existing. She’s that rare presence who makes you want to switch off your phone and just watch her breathe.

Then comes the inevitable heartbreak. She is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. In a time when ghosting is considered conflict resolution, this boy sticks around. He marries her, memorises her quirks, her rhythms, and learns to love her as she forgets who he even is.

Clean. Old-fashioned. A plot that feels like it was handwritten in ink, not typed up in some streaming service writer’s room.

The world is eating it up

Here’s the thing: while I was rolling my eyes at the sentimental sugar rush, the rest of the planet has been busy crying into their popcorn.

Videos of people sobbing uncontrollably in packed theatres are breaking the internet. Spotify charts? Dominated by Saiyaara. People are watching it twice, thrice, dragging their IV stands into the theatre if they must.

This is not just a film anymore—it’s a cultural therapy session. In an age when love feels like a liability and loyalty is a punchline, this movie dares to be earnest.

Why now?

Maybe it’s timing. Maybe we’re all so exhausted from reading headlines about CEOs behaving like hormonal teenagers that the idea of a love story that doesn’t implode under the weight of temptation feels refreshing.

Or maybe it’s that Saiyaara offers what reality refuses to: the fantasy of unconditional love. The boy becomes the saviour, the girl the soul, and together they remind us of what devotion looks like when you strip away cynicism. There’s no violence—unless you count him smashing a guitar or two, an angsty expression of pure love.

Generational catnip

What’s fascinating is how universal this movie has become. Gen Z, who usually treat love stories like a bad meme, are swooning.

Boomers are sniffling quietly. Millennials? They’re reliving their early-2000s belief that love can conquer all.

In the middle of our most Coldplaying era, Saiyaara is a full-bodied rebellion. It is pure, clean, unfiltered emotion—so out of sync with today’s headlines that it feels almost revolutionary.

Do I still think it’s saccharine? Absolutely. Will I remember it? Against my better judgment, yes.

Love, it seems, just found a way to trend again. And all it took was two kids, one luminous Padda, a stormy boy, and a refusal to let the world’s cynicism win.