Badhaai Ho does the unthinkable

At a time when sex is still a topic that makes people cringe, the makers of Badhaai Ho have seemingly dropped a bomb by making a film about an elderly couple getting pregnant. The recently-released trailer shows Neena Gupta and Gajraj Rao, who play Ayushmann Khurrana’s parents, surprising their family with the unexpected news of their pregnancy.

Not surprisingly, everyone’s horrified to think that they still have an active sex life. We know what you’re thinking —isn’t it impossible to get pregnant at that age? And we’ve asked an expert on your behalf. According to gynaecologist Dr Manjula Anagani, the older the mother, the higher the chances of a miscarriage. “Age does play an important part when it comes to pregnancy. As a woman ages, she is more prone to hypertension, diabetes and calcium deficiency,” she says.

She adds that while it’s not unheard of for elderly couples to get pregnant, and she’s seen quite a few of them first-hand, most of them opt for abortion. “They fear the social stigma, and more importantly, they fear having to face their own grown-up kids,” she explains.

The Badhaai Ho trailer perfectly captures the extreme uneasiness that comes with such taboo topics such as pregnancy and sex in the form a light-hearted comedy, and it has started up a conversation about this taboo topic, and everyone’s loving it.

On Instagram, actress Dia Mirza has revealed how her own mother was conceived under similar circumstances, writing, “Hillarious!!! Oh My God!!! My mother was born to her parents when her oldest sister was getting married (sic).” And another Instagram user has responded, “Same here also my chachu had son last year... when his first one is of my age (sic).”

Others point out how such situations were quite normal a couple of generations ago. “It is rare to see people of our parents’ age becoming parents again these days. But it was a very normal thing back in the ’70s and the ’80s.

Then, people would get married early and have many children, so the age gap between the youngest and the older child would be rather large. People might think that Badhaai Ho is ahead of its times, but rather, it’s a rare occurrence these days, especially since most Indian middle-class families are choosing to be nuclear,” sums up Aparna Rayaprol, a professor at the University of Hyderabad’s Department of Sociology.