Thode Door Thode Paas - Digital Starvation

 

Thode Door Thode Paas

Hindi, 2025

Genre: Family Comedy

Director: Ajay Bhuyan

Stars: Pankaj Kapoor, Ayesha Kaduskar, Mona Singh, Kunaal Roy Kapur, Gurpreet Saini

Mohan's Measure: ⭐⭐

Our gadgets have become an appendage, a little click of a button opening our senses to a world of our own creation, home to our own interests and passions.  And that's what makes them so dangerous.  Enter Captain Ashwin Mehta, the aging patriarch of a 21st century family, with a solution.  1 crore to family members who go without any digital access for six months.  This also includes such "modern" gadgetry as microwaves, electric stoves, and juicers.  

Yes, it's back to the future for this futuristic bunch, and the humorous results and heartwarming moments are as predictable as they are repetitive.  Indeed, after a while, we begin to wonder why everyone is giving so much credence to this ex-sailor and his eccentricities.

TDTP plays out like a family movie on a religious streaming channel, everyone becoming all goodie-goodie, warm and fluffy, learning valuable lessons from the elderly Mehta and his homespun wisdom.  But this is despite businesses failing, school grades dropping and social life virtually non-existent. Herein lies the problem, everyone winds up feeling sorry for themselves, but no one wants to question the sanity of the old guy, or their own greedy nature.   

That is until the ever-so-sweet daughter vanishes for an uneventful night.  The abrupt change in tone and the quick return to the new normal is so sweet, it leaves a sour taste. Included in the track is an unexpected expression of failed father-son relationship, and the bittersweetness about the loss of a man's wife to the very delusions of utopia without technology.

If none of this is making any sense, we can only attribute it to the AI writing that was possibly responsible for this mixed-up story.