You and me could write a bad romance.

 Some Bollywood heroes are charming scoundrels, some are callow youths in need of a valuable life lesson, but the hero of Gori Tere Pyaar Mein! (2013) is just a jerk.  At least to start - can he become less of a jerk?  I certainly hope so, or the movie is going to be a bad romance.

Sriram (Imran Khan) is young, handsome, rich, and a trained architect, though he spends his time partying and disappointing his father (Nizhalgal Ravi) rather than architecting.  After Sriram skips his grandfather's deathbed, and funeral, and memorial service, his family decide that the best way to deal with the lad is to get him married.  The prospective bride is Vasudha (Shraddha Kapoor), and Sriram likes her smile.  Vasudha takes Sriram aside and asks him to reject the match, since she is in love with someone else, but Sriram cheerfully accepts the match because he's a jerk.  Basically he's the unsuitable bridegroom from a more conventional Bollywood romance.

They've got nothing but time, so Vasudha tries to find out exactly what Sriram's deal is, and he tells her about his previous fiance, Dia (Kareena Kapoor.)  Dia is a social worker, loud, passionate and always involved in some charity program or protest.  The relationship was always rocky, since opposites might attract but they're still opposites, and no one is really surprised when the relationship finally crumbles and Dia goes home to Delhi.

Vasudha doesn't buy it - their first date was to a place Sriram used to take Dia, he talks about her a lot, and he still owns the pet crab that Dia adopted and left in his care.  Sriram still loves Dia, so why aren't they still together?  With some prodding he details the end of their relationship, when he sold a plot of land she wanted to use to build an orphanage because he wanted a new car, and when she confronted him he called her a hypocrite who dabbles in social awareness while shielded by her privilege, lamenting the lot of the hungry from expensive Italian restaurants.   That's more than enough to end the relationship permanently, salting the earth for good measure.

Or it would be, but Vasudha convinces Sriram to flee the wedding ceremony and go find Dia.  It's not that hard - he asks her parents, and they tell him that she's working in the tiny village of Jhumli, a place which is nearly cut off from the outside world apart from a rickety rope bridge.  Sriram travels to the village and witnesses the poverty and brutal conditions firsthand, and he also sees Dia doing everything she can to help.  Naturally he wants to take her away from all of this, but she won't leave until the work is done.  Almost all of the village's problems could be fixed if they had a proper bridge, allowing ailing villagers to go to the hospital and children to go to school, and Sriram impulsively vows to build a new bridge, while Dia impulsively vows to leave with him if he succeeds.  But they'll have to get past the region's gleefully corrupt and vengeful collector (Anupam Kher) while Sriram rockets through his character development, because the bridge is not just a bridge, it's an objective correlative.

It's hard to balance goofy romance with a redemption arc, but Khan and Kapoor are both effortlessly charming, and Sriram is such a jerk early on that every good deed feels like progress, while Dia has flaws of her own and also enjoys some character development.  I hope that they keep a relationship counselor on speed dial, but that's the case with a lot of movie couples.