The trailer for the second Pakistani web-series that will be streamed on Zee5 dropped yesterday. Titled Ek Jhoothi Love Story, the series boasts of some of the biggest and most talented names in the Pakistani entertainment industry as a part of its team. Written by the Zindagi Gulzar Hai and Alif fame Umera Ahmed and directed by the ace director Mehreen Jabbar, Ek Jhoothi Love Story has Bilal Abbas and Madiha Imam as its leads. Respected names like Mohammad Ahmed, Hina Bayat, Mariam Saleem, and Beo Rana Zafar are also part of the project.

By all means, everything associated with the project is enough to raise excitement for the viewers. However, after the trailer was released, some netizens pointed out how the story that the trailer is showing a preview of, might not be entirely original. More specifically, Ek Jhoothi Love Story seems to have taken its inspiration from a Bollywood movie Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge.

A coincidence?

The snippets shown in a trailer are meant to give the viewers an idea about what to expect from the story. While there is no way of knowing what the actual story of Ek Jhoothi Love Story is until the show is released for streaming at the end of this month, the bit shown in the trailer where the characters played by Bilal Abbas and Madiha Imam make fake profiles and pretend to be someone else, seems to be heavily inspired by a Bollywood movie.

Mujhse Fraaandship Karoge is a Bollywood movie that was released in 2011. The film’s plot revolves around two characters who pretend to be someone else on Facebook in order to fulfill their romantic fantasies online. The characters remain oblivious to the fact that the deception is happening from both sides and this causes much confusion and chaos.

Ek Jhoothi Love Story seems to be going the same way judging by the trailer. The characters played by Bilal Abbas and Madiha Imam are also shown to be making fake profiles on Facebook in order to establish relationships online. The trailer also shows that both Bilal and Madiha end up meeting the other’s online persona in real life, without knowing that the person that they think they have been dating online all this time, does not know about them in real life. Which, we assume, will end up causing much confusion and chaos.

All speculation

This is all pure speculation at this point. Catfishing is a reality of the virtual world of social media. It is also a common trope that can be found in much of our media. The 2018 Netflix movie Sierra Burgess Is A Loser was also based on the idea of catfishing. There’s a long-running reality show in America Catfish: The Tv Show that documents the truths and lies of online dating.

Umera Ahmed is a highly respectable name in the industry. While Ek Jhoothi Love Story is very different from the kind of projects and scripts that Umera Ahmed is usually known to be doing, it doesn’t feel right that she would choose to get so blatantly inspired by a Bollywood movie like this.

We hope that the web-series has more to offer and that it would not actually end up being lazily inspired by a Bollywood film.