People!
I just saw Kuch Kuch Hota Hai on good old Doordarshan, with of course, plenty of kuch kuch… ads from Dabur to Vicco and Cherry Blossom ads, which completely transported me to the 1980s. (Yes, I’m watching DD after a long time!)
Seriously, Doordarshan is really caught in some kind of a time-warp.
Yeah, seriously, the same old Vicco Vajradanti, the same old Charlie Chaplain imitation by Rajesh Puri (I think, don’t remember his name, it was that long ago when someone with that kind of a name was a TV star)…
Every ten minutes, there was 20 minutes of ads for the first two hours…
Yet, yet…
This movie still had me glued to the telly.
It’s not my favourite movie, it’s not in my Top 5 if you guys have noticed.
I have a thousand spoof ideas for the movie, I laughed my ass off in a lot of scenes, especially when they were trying to be cute with the brat, who, to me, came across a psycho kid. Nor I couldn’t digest the whole premise of the eight letters that Rani, the letters that were to be given to her daughter every birthday.
Plus, Rahul’s sudden and almost instant love for Anjali on seeing her in a saree or instant love for Tina seeing her in a mini-skirt only drives home the impression that Rahul is just a simple man with basic instincts…
Oh, yeah, there’s the conveniently and easily explainable phrase and phenomenon behind most love stories… Love at first sight! Ha!
In the town Suderman lives, unfortunately, it’s called lust! Damn!
Yet, yet…
This movie is surely something… Kuch hai isme!
Which I was what I wanted to figure out today.
And, guess what… it still beats me.
Which is why I want to call it the magic of Karan Johar.
Just consider this:
Shah Rukh Khan is Shah Rukh Khan, in almost every movie, maybe excluding Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa… so nothing new there.
Rani and Kajol, charming as ever… I totally loooove them. As my friend Abhishek was telling me last night there there’s no one today who can compete with a Madhubala or Dimple or Madhuri, the Aati Kya Khandala song appeared on TV almost suddenly as to remind us, we have Rani Mukherjee.
In Kuch Kuch, Rani is pure magic too, yet, it is Kajol who steals the scenes from her.
Awrite, so the combined star charisma of SRK, Rani and Kajol is one reason why the movie works, but was that all?
No.
The Karan Johar touch to the drama between the three central characters and I hate to admit it, the psycho kid, actually contributes to the success of the film.
There are the stereotypes from Archie comics, a hajaar other Bollywood stereotypes – the SRK gimmicks, the Farida Jalal sugar sweet Mom stereotypes, the Salman Khan happy-go-lucky-lover stereotype(though I didn’t mind it at all)…
There are fake sets, designer clothes, unreal characters, situations that aren’t plausible… How psycho kid Anjali finds out about the summer camp is so conveniently simple that it sucks… Or how the whole family of Daadi and Shah Rukh settle down at the summer camp for that matter…
Yet, yet…
There are scenes that bring a tear to your eye, as much as you hate to believe it. There are scenes that make you feel good… And I think the latter is because of the former. The greater the struggle the greater the glory, the sweet-sour logic from Vanilla Sky… The sweet is never as sweet without the sour, remember…
We Indians are suckers for sentiment… how else can you explain the success of little kids not doing homework to sit and watch soap operas… its just simple soap opera sentiment that Karan Johar blends with star charisma to keep you glued… Plus Lata Mangeshkar’s Aaa-Aaaa-Aaaaaaa strains have so fascinatingly settled deep down into our subconscious that they signal the right neurons that control the tear gland on cue… All we need to see is our favourite actors with glycerine in their eyes and abracadabra… kabhi khushi kabhi gham, kuch na kuch hota hai…
Maybe there’s something about Dawninheaven’s theory of how we all relate to hurt more… At some level, everybody’s probably been an Anjali – seen your best friend fall in love with somebody else in front of your eyes…
The unrequited love syndrome.
The main reason for success of love stories in India. A majority of Indians do not get to live with their first love or the love of their lives. In the movies at least, we get to live that fantasy of seeing love succeed.
Plus, there’s another fantasy many of us have… of meeting your first love or old friend of the opposite sex after many, many years and falling in love with that person…
In Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, the combination of these two fantasies (unrequited love and childhood first love… both coming true) cleverly tied together by Karan Johar holds the key to why we all like the movie, at some level.
In spite of its dumb-enough-to-make-you-puke quotient.
PS: People, next week they’re playing Dil to Pagal Hai and tomorrow or rather today on DD, there’s Mohabbattien, a film I absolutely LOOOOVED for its lines… I didn’t dig the story too much but I love the face-off’s Amitabh and SRK have… they make the movie totally worth it… of course, apart from the fifty odd cleavage shots you get to see in the movie! 😛
MADRAS INK. 