New Khosla Kunj – Cultural Collision

The Khosla family is culturally challenged when they start interacting with Meghna’s (Tara Sharma) theatre troupe. Their discomfort with many of the things that they observe about the people in the troupe shows us the world that is alien to the middle class households in India.
It starts with Mr. Khosla’s daughter being amazed at discovering that Meghna lives all by herself. Her reaction upon learning this is full of surprise and desire. (You live alone here? All alone, by yourself? Wow!”)
The second surprise is when Mrs. Khosla asks Meghna about her parents. When she learns that they are living separately in Calcutta and Bangalore her first reaction is that Meghna’s father must have been transferred. It is a shock that she cannot handle (and thus changes topic) when she learns that her parents are divorced.
The third surprise is to see a girl smoking – once again it is Mrs. Khosla who is being exposed to the ‘extreme fringe’ when the 20 something young girl at her door walks in with a cigarette in her hand.
The third surprise is felt the most by Mr. Khosla – it is about food. When Cherry orders pizza for everyone at dinner-time. Ordering Pizza as a meal is a concept alien to most of the middle-class men. Thus when Mr. Khosla is offered a Pizza he says would we now stop having proper food in this home(“ab ghar pe khana bhi nahi banega kya”) seeing her husband distress, Mrs. Khosla offers to make sabzi (fresh vegetable) for him.
Though times are changing yet all of the above instances indicate the classic middle class aversions.
Fractured families, liberated young girls who smoke or are living all alone in the city ‘like boys do’ or something as basic as having western food (read as junk food by the middle class adults) as meals are some social concepts that are alien and mostly unacceptable to the adults/elders in the middle-class families in India.