The Brunch round-up: The week and how it made us feel

Dua Lipa ate and left no crumbs at her Mumbai concert last weekend. Shoutout to her team, or to whoever made that Levitating x Woh Ladki Jo mash-up happen on stage. What a surprise, what a way to give the fans what they want! We hear she also stopped by Veronica’s. Maybe her team could also tell us what those famed sandwiches taste like.

Chronically online folks have noticed that the first day of 2025 falls on a Wednesday. That means the year starts with WTF. It may sound like your life, but it’s not a good omen. This also happened in 2020, and look how that turned out. It’s like even the calendar can’t believe we’re 25 years into the millennium. Wasn’t 1990 ten years ago?

This man never gets the girl. Not in Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai (2002) and Dil Hai Tumhaara (2002). Not in Tanu Weds Manu (2011) and the 2015 sequel, in which he manages to lose the girl and her doppelganger to the same guy. Now, in Sikandar Ka Muqaddar, he plays a cop determined to out a jewel thief. It costs him 15 years and a divorce. No one plays the winning loser better. But give the guy a break, maybe?

The DDLJ musical, Come Fall in Love, first played in San Diego in 2022. It’s heading to Manchester in May 2025. Kya? DDLJ belongs to us. Why did we build the new NMACC? Aditya Chopra directs. Vishal-Shekhar do the music. OK, OK, who’s playing Raj? And Simran? Who’s playing the train?

In the first episode of Be A Parent, Yaar! S2, Ananya Panday accuses dad Chunky of being on Instagram all the time and liking everything on his feed. He says he just likes to know what his daughter is up to. She then tells him that his online activity is bad for her profile, and asks him to delete his account. Chunky Uncle, just get a finsta, yaar!

The Moana sequel isn’t just a great movie, it’s a cultural-studies class. The story is set about 3,000 years ago, in the islands of Polynesia, which include Hawaii, Tonga and Tahiti. So, there are Hawaiian words in the songs. The more linguistically gifted may also recognise Tairāwhiti, a Māori dialect. The villains are voiced by actors from New Zealand, the closest country to Polynesia. Stay for the end credits scene, BTW. That’s all we’re telling you.

We watched Amazon Prime’s Waack Girls, about dancers in Mumbai, and we want to try some of those moves ourselves. The show is cute and heartfelt – women bonding, standing up to bullies and fat-shamers. But we love that they cast Rytasha Rathore as the group’s manager. Her emotional breakdown feels as real as it did in Masaba Masaba, if not more.

Seems like tickets to the Maroon 5 concert were still available, discounted, a day before the show. Adam Levine’s band didn’t play to a packed house. Serves him right. He cheated on his wife, supermodel Behati Prinsloo, when she was pregnant in 2022. And despite his India fanbase, This. Love. Has... Taken its toll on us.