Dating Dr. Dil by Nisha Sharma
If Shakespeare was an Auntie #1
Romantic Comedy/Contemporary Romance
March 15, 2022, by Avon and Harper Voyager

Review by Kate H.

For me, one of the best things about Dating Dr. Dil was that as a romantic comedy, the humor was in the situation and the snark, and not in the characters. Both main characters are fully drawn and easy to identify with, even when I didn’t agree with them. Kareena Mann is a thirty-year old who provides legal counsel to women start-ups. She really knows her mind and her love for her late mother inflects a lot of her choices and passions. She was a strong character, but not rigidly so – she can stand up for what she wants, but she is not without moments of doubt. Dr. Prem Verma, the hero, is a cardiologist with a talk-show on a local South Asian Network. Several years before the novel begins, his fiancée had died of an undiagnosed illness. Since then, he had been working towards opening a clinic where the specific medical needs of the South Asian community, and other patients of color, would be attended to. He uses his talk-show in part to share health information with the Desi community in the NJ/NY area.

Here’s the situation: both Kareena and Prem have reasons for needing to get engaged. They had what I would call a hot “partial” hookup, no spoilers, but what keeps Kareena from agreeing to Prem’s proposal of a fake engagement is their fundamental, philosophical difference on the matter of relationships. Kareena is looking for a Jeevansathi, a life partner. She believes in love marriages, like the one her parents had. Prem believes that what is mistaken as love is a fleeting biochemical reaction. He believes in arranged marriages based on compatibility, communication, and resulting in what to Kareena seems like a very businesslike relationship.  As a result, Kareena only agrees to the fake engagement after she exhausts all her other online dating options before her 4 month deadline. Her Aunties, who are described as “progressive” in the novel (and definitely come across that way), help her in her journey. But like a Greek chorus, they know which way the wind is blowing.

I loved the sequence of dating app messages and first dates. Some of it was laugh out loud, some of it was infuriating, as it was meant to be. As she is trying to find love, we learn more about Prem and his aversion to emotion. Sometimes I wanted to shout at both at them to see what was in front of their eyes, sort of the opposite of telling a protagonist in a horror movie not to go down into the basement. Luckily, increasingly hot sex scenes between Kareena ad Prem signal to the reader what the protagonists don’t necessarily realize.

Dating Dr. Dil is also a critique of the misogyny in Desi culture related to dating, marriage, and sexuality. There are moving scenes when Prem’s mother and Kareena’s father open up to their children about their own marriages.  One character that never gets to “explain” themselves is Bindu, Kareena’s sister. She’s the bridezilla in the novel, the spoiled younger sister who is about to get married. I kind of saw her as another victim of the pressures highlighted in the novel, but I was never sure.  

CW: misogyny, death of mother, death of fiancée

Grade: A-

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