am not a DDLJ addict and yet everytime, it is playing on TV, I catch a moment or two. Seems like yesterday. “Come fall in love’’ said the posters of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Yet, this landmark moment in popular culture is twelve years old. More than a decade since Shahrukh Khan hammered a piano with his fists, joined the stone-carved Amrish Puri in his morning ritual of feeding the pigeons with tentative sounds of “aao…aao.”
Twelve years since he called the Swiss police, “Kutto…kamino..Al Pacino!” Yet DDLJ is no Sholay, 500 weeks of uninterrupted run in Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir notwithstanding. Not even Raj and Simran can hold a candle to the mythology of Gabbar Singh.
Still, DDLJ was arguably the only definitive love story of its time before Jab We Met gave us a more real version of accidental love on a train.
It was arguably the only film of its time in which love felt like love. Not misguided lust. Not disillusion. A cruel joke bleached of all idealism that the Bhatt noir has reduced it to. DDLJ was a magical moment of cinematic Nirvana in which everything was meant to be. And even though it was inspired in large bushels by Sooraj Barjatya’s school of filmmaking (Didi Tera Devar Deewana inspired the tune of Tujhe Dekha To Ye Jaana Sanam) and Nasir Hussain (Ruk Ja O Dil Deewane was inspired by Bachna Ae Hasseno in Hum Kissi Se Kam Nahin), yet it is now a cinematic milestone in its own right. DDLJ addressed the conflicts of Indians abroad, bringing to fore the irony of a Punjabi businessman feeding nostalgia and a brood of pigeons on the Trafalgar Square and expecting a young daughter brought up in England to conform to rural Punjabiyat. It also made us notice how tradition snuffs out a girl child’s aspirations sometimes. The music if not great was instantly hummable and Chopra showed a great flair for song picturisations. And for creating romance out of virtually nothing. We still remember the portentious moment when Raj and Simran pass each other unknowingly on a London street. Simran dancing in the rain willing the love of her life to appear just as a sweat and rain drenched Raj is playing rugby miles away. The moment Simran almost misses her Eurorail and Raj pulls her up. We  see a telling close up of the clasped hands and know that something has begun. The moment Raj discovers that Simran is betrothed to a man she has not seen and asks her what she will do if she falls in love with someone…someone like him. The moment on the bridge when he wills her to `palat’ and she does. And the way he clucks his tongue in a `No’ when she asks him if he will attend her wedding. The moment when Simran stands frozen amid the milling crowds of a subway station. The  delectable ghost of  Raj following Simran home after her trip to Europe. Waving to her in the silence of the night. This was love and how we loved it!  Raj was the prototype on which Shahrukh Khan moulded many subsequent performances. He was a rogue pinching beers, a great buddy son but most of all every young girl’s dream come true. Floppy hair, goofy grin, bruising wit that could in an instant become beguilingly tender. And rock solid integrity. We loved Raj when he moons over Simran over a beer and we loved him when egged by his father, he lands up, leather jacketed, armed with beer cans and a lethal plan, amid the mustard fields of Simran’s ancestral village to woo her brood of relatives and steal a few moments of romance. Who can forget the moment when a repressed, miserable Simran runs into his arms to the strains of Tujhe Dekha. Kajol in DDLJ was not a typical Hindi film heroine. She was Simran. A middle class Punjabi girl caught between her heart and her father’s code of life. An undone upperlip, naturally wavy, almost ungroomed hair, a less than perfect body but a sedate dignity, emerald eyes oozing love and pain and a quiet beauty that glues us to the screen. And yet there was more. The funny love track between Himani Shivpuri and Anupam Kher. The intractable Amrish Puri softening up momentarily to sing, `Aye Meri Zohra Zabin,’ a bloody lipped Raj breaking Puri’s will in an intense eye lock from a receding train till Puri sets Simran free to follow her heart. And when we see the clasped hands once again, we know we have come home just like Simran. And that the ride was worth every minute. In DDLJ, the Indian audience savoured a bonafide romance that made one want to celebrate life and to go fall in love. No wonder it is still running somewhere.  

 With every replay on TV, I realise why Kank did not work. Yes, there was too much crying, too much gloss for a story that should have been told intimately but certain moments stay with me till date. Moments before her wedding,  a bride sits alone on a bench, wondering if marriage based on friendship can quench her hunger for the real thing called `Mohabbat.” 
Dev (Shah Rukh Khan), a cautiously optimistic stranger chats  her up and tells her that Mohabbat is no longer what it used to and that it is wise to make do with what is on offer than to wait for something that may never appear. His  wife, for instance,  may not be his one great love but they have built a happy life and that should suffice, right? Wrong, because years later, the bride (Rani Mukherjee’s Maya) has morphed into a frigid wife while her mostly loving and occasionally frustrated husband Rishi (Abhishek Bachchan) grapples helplessly with her unresponsive heart and body and wonders why he never sees a reciprocal leap of joy in her eyes. In a moment of extreme hurt, he screams, “When was the last time we came close, touched, became intimate?’’
Dev is now a limping cynic, routinely poking holes in the pretences 
of happy domesticity in his own largely mechanical marriage to Rhea  (Preity Zinta)who loves him despite his failures and her success but has no time for their family.
Are we dreaming or was this really a Karan Johar film, telling us that a little love obviously does not go a long way and a lifetime can seem a long time when your heart is not where it should be in a marriage? 
Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna, hit me as unexpectedly as  a slither of lightening on a hot summer day. Yes, the dreamsmith finally got his hands dirty with reality despite the lush frames, the long stemmed roses, sequinned sarees, autumn leaves, snow flakes, superstars strewn all around like confetti, the glitz of Manhattan and the chutzpah of Prada. But no, it was no longer all about loving each other to death. 
Johar dared to treat an extra-marital affair without hypocrisy or judgement and allowed it to end on a dignified, positive note. 
The film did not work because it did not make blanket statements about family, morality and marriage and instead gave us a patriarch who asked his daughter-in-law, not for an unrealistic promise to protect the non-existent sanctity of her marriage but that she be realistic and walk away from his son because she does not love him and is probably keeping him away from the love of his life. 
Finally, here was a film where a woman did not have to justify her right to fall in love. Many viewers and critics have questioned why Rani Mukherjee’s Maya  cannot love a husband who adores her and why she falls for an obviously inferior man. These questions are answered in the film  by Shahrukh Khan  who tells the shocked guests during a sit-down dinner, “Relationships are defined by circumstances, not by people.’’ 
Or as Amitabh Bachchan’s outrageously flirtatious but deeply perceptive Sam  says, “Mohabbat aur maut bin bulae mehmaan hote hain.’’ (Love and death arrive as suddenly as uninvited guests in our life).
Infidelity grows organically from the circumstances of the protagonists who stray in the film. They are not bad people. They  just find answering vacuums within each other. Johar spares us nothing as they strike a friendship over innocent cups of coffee and soccer dates and then become illicit  lovers, blurting out their passion for each other, glowering in sexual rage when they see each other with their spouses.
They show us how painful it is to love a woman or a man who belongs to another and to hurt people who trust you and love you.
The young boy who had come to Bangalore to promote K3G and had looked visibly crushed when this writer had asked him why he was not making path-breaking cinema like Farhan Akhtar and Ashutosh Gowarikar, has grown up alright.
After making silky smooth on the surface and occasionally lumpy in the middle, glycerin and chiffon pies  like Kucch Kucch Hota Hai and K3G, he has gone beyond Karva Chauths, weddings and designer funerals. With KANK, Karan Johar may have annoyed the moralists but he shut up all the critics who accused him of playing it safe.  
 

When cinema becomes more than just make-believe, it becomes timeless and grows old with us. Not all films have the capacity to transcend the screen or go from reel to real but if made with conviction, even flawed films speak to us in parts. Rewatching Naseeruddin Shah’s Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota revealed to me its flaws. It was not smoothly narrated and some tracks just did not work but it had an original and topical story. Bollywood clichés were  absent in an upredictable narrative that chooses to show us extreme close ups of a few diverse lives, all bound together by a common desire to flee their stifling lives, their restrictive coops to America.
Tilottma Punj (Konkana Sensharma) is newly married to her internet love Hemant (jimmy Shergill). She is a Bengali, he a Punjabi and their  idyll is interrupted when the groom leaves for America leaving his hassled bride to cope with his dysfunctional family. There are incisive, perceptive moments in this story that show us the power games played by a bitterly resentful  mother-in-law (an effective Carla Singh) to suppress Tilottma till one evening, she changes into her premarital denims and boards a plane to America to join her husband.
There is also the story of stockbroker Salim Rajabali (Irrfan Khan) who along with his brother (meaningfully named Javed!) has to flee to America to escape a murder rap. He is painfully in love with choreographer Namrata (Suhasini Mulay) who repels and attracts him in equal measure with her lack of scruples and  frightening sexuality. 
Then there is the soft-spoken, dreamy eyed and impoverished Rahul Bhide (Ankur Khanna), who nurses his delirious, sick father in a hell-hole while his friends benignly plot his departure to an American university. His unspoken love for a rich heiress Khushboo (Ayesha Takia) creates some gentle ripples in the story. 
The show piece story is that of Rajubhai Patel (Paresh Rawal) who charges in lakhs to take young people to America via his dandiya troupe. He lives a money driven, compact, bachelor’s life till his lost love Tara (Ratna Pathak Shah) reappears with her daughter.  Soon Tilottma, Rajubhai and Rahul are flying towards their dreams or are they? What Shah should be thanked for doing in this film most of all is to show characters  who are never given center stage in the youth, beauty and glamour obsessed Hindi film industry. He shows us the touching love between a married woman and her old love, a man who looks at her fading beauty and grey hair and says “You have not changed at all.’’
The scene between Ratna Pathak Shah and Paresh Rawal when he  tenderly snips away at her plaster to release her hand and sets a table for two with a plastic lamp in the middle is one of the most poignant depictions of love. There is also the middle-aged Suhasini Mulay who routinely plays a mother and mother-in-law in films and on TV  but is unabashedly though unconvincingly seductive here.
Rawal is heart-wrenchingly nostalgic as he tries to reconnect with his past. Irrfan is compellingly watchable. This is an actor who needs no props to make an impact like in the scene where he makes a long-distance call to the woman he both loves and hates and cries into his phone. 
Konkona is an absolute natural. Watch her in the prawn curry sequence where she is chattering away in Bengali on the phone and cooking and answering the door bell and back answering her infuriating mother-in-law. Pure brilliance. Imad showed off his mop of defiant curls and his pure, knife sharp diction.  And then ofcourse there is the climax that gives a  human face to the tragedy of September 11. Coming in the wake of the 7/11 blasts, Yun Hota Toh Kya Hota was a  timely film. And as Shah masterfully used TV footage of the WTC towers and panned closer to the image of a human figure falling from one of the floors, you realized that he did not want us to ever  forget the human stories buried under the rubble of bombed buildings and mangled trains. 

 Forget Ram Gopal Varma Ki doused Aag, that seminal moment when Nagarjuna’s Shiva pulls out a cycle chain and wraps it around  his knuckles, still gives you gooseflesh.
Shiva is the kind of a cult film one cannot fault even in retrospect. The hero who spoke with his hooded eyes and with his fists to take on a dysfunctional system and a loose lipped, coldly menacing Bhavani (played by an unforgettable Raghuvaran), is still an indelible memory. Even sixteen years later, in the darkened lounge of PVR’s Gold Class as you watch Shiva chase a goonda down the never-ending  college corridor through the jerky gaze of a steadycam, you shiver with an almost forgotten rush of fear and excitement. When was the last time cinema did that to you? But when Ram Gopal Varma talks about revisiting the angry young man of yore in a new packaging, you wonder if he really can resurrect that magic without actors like AB, Nagarjuna and Co? Do the younger heroes have it in them to convey that hungry angst?
You ask him, hoping that he won’t take the criticism personally and he retorts because he thinks you are appropriating his right to make the films he wants. He says, “I don’t make films for you. I won’t  make another Rangeela just because you are missing a musical! I make the films I want to make.’’
Point taken but why remake Shiva or Sholay? 
He responds, “It is unfair to say that young actors (like Mohit Ahlawat) do not have what it takes. An actor is the character he plays. And acting is not such a big deal. Acting basically means imitating a feeling. An actor is an exhibitionist. Someone who does not fear the camera and can face it and has the guts to open himself to criticism. If he has this part right and the part written on paper is good, anything is possible. What is an X-factor that you are talking about?  Maybe its luck or something that cannot  be recreated but do remember that actors like Amitabh Bachchan and Rajni Kant worked in films designed to promote their stardom. Mr Bachchan has also worked in films like Mrityudata that failed.  No one can understand  Rajni Kant’s success  but if he had worked in wrong films, even he would not have become the phenomenon he is today. The vehicle is always more important than the star.’’
Has his own angst and intensity, visible in every frame of the gritty Shiva, been diluted? He thinks and says, “Maybe it has. I don’t know if that is good or bad. There was a `thehrav,’ a silence in Shiva that I cannot bring back. I am scared of holding the moment because my audience has changed. They are sitting in the theatres with mobiles, sending text messages and film makers are desperate to hold their attention. Films today have no recall value because they are made in a hurry.  Everything has been changed by consumerism. Music, books, theatre. The world is ruled by the remote control. My mind has also changed along with the audience.’’
You remind him how moments in Sarkar had inbuilt silence but he grins, “ Some people disagreed with my use of  the background music and found it  too  in the face but I used it  to supplement the silence. Otherwise Sarkar would have looked like an art film!’’
And why have women become peripheral in his films unless they are required to undulate on the beach? He laughs, “Maybe as a man, I like to see sexy women on screen but seriously, Naach was strongly female centric. So was Bhoot.’’
But why are his recent heroines only being repetitively sensual for no reason unlike in Rangeela where the heroine was sensuous within a context?  Sensuality never works unless it is thematically relevant. He nods generously,“ You are right.’’
Does he consider himself to be an anti-establishment director? He did make the comment that he feels like a small terrorist cell hoping that he would not be wiped and bombed out by the Yash Chopras and Karan Johars! He asks, “What do you think is the establishment? And why would you feel that I feel alone? I consider myself to be an alternate establishment. But if 16 years after I made my first film, people are willing to invest time, energy  and money in me, I must be doing something right. You can’t exist in this industry unless your films work. I do not make films for the critics. I don’t make hardcore, safe films. Even I am appalled that I am still here.’’
Irreverent as ever, he even swears on his mother, sister and Siddhivinayak that he has nothing against Karan Johar and infact thinks that KANK is the best film since Titanic!
Like everything else in his life, Varma demystifies film-making as well. He says, “It is no big deal. Anyone who can tell a story with clarity and has a love for  films can make films. In my time, the film-making tools were not accessible. We learnt by watching films. Now anyone can make a film with Digi camera. If tomorrow no one buys my films, I will still make them and see them myself!’’
Have multiplexes helped him? “I was making films with or without multiplexes,’’ he retorts.  He sees cinema as a library teeming with something for everyone. “All sorts of films should be made, not just one kind. None has the right to take away anyone’s right to tell a story,’’ he says.  

 Comedy in Indian cinema was once serious business. Even doyens like Dilip Kumar did capers like Kohinoor and Ram Aur Shyam to prove that they could elicit guffaws as easily as tears. The scene in Kohinoor when Dilip Kumar fools a drunk Jeevan and plays musical high tens  in Meena Kumari’s boudoir mirror is a classic. The scene had a spin-off in Manmohan Desai’s Amar Akbar Anthony where a sloshed Amitabh Bachchan plasters Band Aid on his own reflection! Comedy then was a respected genre that big stars often experimented with. Dev Anand did it in Munim Jee. Sunil Dutt played an image-shattering village bumpkin in Padosan. Shammi Kapoor built his initial success on romantic comedies. Raj Kapoor’s career mascot was Chaplin’s goofy oaf. And in the 70s, top stars loved to frequent Hrishikesh Mukherjee gentle, homely comedies. Dharmendra did a cameo in Mukhrejee’s Guddi and then outdid himself as the inimitable, Hindi spouting Pyaare Mohan in Chupke Chupke. He was excellent in Pratigya and his comic scenes in Sholay remain the high-points of his career. Sanjeev Kumar brought the house down in hits like Manchali, Angoor and Pati Patni Aur Woh. Rajesh Khanna proved his comic credentials in Bawarchi, Joru Ka Ghulam but most memorably in Anand. Amitabh Bachchan’s Angry Young Man laughed a lot too in his prime. No one can forget his egg splitting Anthony Gonzalves. Or his attempts to catch an errant fly in Namak Halal as he slaps bald heads around a conference table. Or his “Vijay Hazare told Vijay Merchant’’ monologue or his claims of “I can walk English, I can talk English!” Or his Haryanavi pop wisdom in the song `Pag Ghungroo bandh Meera Nachi Thi.’’ His drunken turn in Satte Pe Satta when he is describing his six brothers to a wily Amzad Khan. Or when he is reeling off Dharmendra’s sterling qualities before a stunned Leela Misra in Sholay. Or when he is beating a bunch of goons with utmost courtesy in Sharaabi to get his belongings back. Laughter lost its punch with the decline of the cinematic greats of the 80s. Manmohan Desai died after regaling us with his indescribable genius for slapstick and situational stunts in Dharam Veer, Parvarish, Chacha Bhatija, Amar Akbar Anthony and more. An occasional Andaz Apna Apna notwithstanding, it was Govinda who emerged as the leading comic talent of the early nineties. He was spontaneous. Mad. Spoofing greats like Sanjeev Kumar, Dilip Kumar, Rajesh Khanna. Adlibbing. Creating nonsense into an art in runaway hits like Aankhen, Hero No I and Haseena Maan Jayegi but it was all considered low art by critics. Perhaps because Govinda unlike the comic heroes before him did not have star quality. He remained within the parameters of a slightly risqué, a little bawdy and a little over-the-top cinema and refused to work outside his clique of trusted film-makers, most notably David Dhawan. Today, even Dhawan uses actors like Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan who bring a manic energy and glamour to comedy. But comedy is no longer given the respect it deserves. Even a massive hit like Munnabhai MBBS is not considered for top awards. Saif Ali Khan is always nominated as an afterthought despite a Hum Tum. Comedy is now the last refuge of directors who milk double entendre to make a quick buck. Cases in point? Masti. Kya Cool Hain Hum. Bach Ke Rehna Re Baba. An occasional flash of genuine humour surprises us in films like Dil Chahta Hai, Hum Tum, Khosla Ka Ghosla and Bheja Fry. The Munna Bhai series and Shaad Ali’s Bunty and Babli are important chapters in contemporary Hindi cinema. The latter marks the return of the pure comedy celebrating the witty turn of phrase, madness and unadulterated joy without once stooping to vulgarity. Watch Amitabh Bachchan recount his doomed love affair to an attentive Abhishek while `Dil Cheez Kya Hai’ from Umrao Jaan plays cheekily in the background. Or Babli going “Mummyyyyy’’ in a fit of melancholy while Bunty looks embarrassed and ineffectually tries to pat her hand. Or when a domesticated Babli cries to AB in desperation, “If I make mango pickle one more time, I will die!” Shaad Ali crowds his colourful canvas with cinematic allusions, playing old film songs in key situations, giving witty one-liners to all characters, allowing them to feel the pulse of the film and let themselves go. Most importantly, the film reminds us what great fun it is to go to the movies. And what a wonderful thing laughter can be. Too bad, Shaad followed it up with Jhoom Barabar Jhoom. We are still recovering from that one.