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Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham . . .

Our earliest movie experiences are all about pleasure. Before the appreciation of storytelling, composition, technique or subtext kicks in, there is the basic, visceral response of joy. That’s why it’s called entertainment. One of the films that’s given me countless hours of joy is Karan Johar’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham . . .

Released in 2001, K3G was the grand finale of Bollywood’s family drama trend, which started with Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum Aapke Hain Koun . . ! in 1994 and was cemented by Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge in 1995. After all, there was little chance that any filmmaker could top the high-pitched melodrama, the dazzling array of stars, the staggering opulence and the unapologetic consumer porn (the weepy family reunion takes place in a London shopping mall) of this film. Post-K3G, Hindi cinema could only go ‘desi’ (Lagaan, released earlier that year, had already laid the foundation for the shift in sensibility).

I don’t remember why or where, but Karan had narrated the story of K3G to me before he started making the film. The image that stayed with me from his narration was of the estranged brothers, Rohan and Rahul, sitting on a bench in London (years later in an interview, I asked him why so many of his films feature benches. He said that it had once come up in a conversation with his therapist, who explained that it might have something to do with a red bench from his school days, on which he usually sat alone, enjoying his isolation). I didn’t understand then how the gluttonous, overweight Ladoo could grow up to be Hrithik Roshan, but I couldn’t wait to see him and Shah Rukh Khan together on that bench. That frame just felt like magic.

Both Lagaan and Dil Chahta Hai released the same year. Compared to those films, K3G seemed creatively tame—essentially the same wine in a more extravagant bottle. In my review for India Today magazine, I described the film as ‘Bollywood’s first designer film’ and ‘sumptuous eye candy’. I wasn’t wholly seduced by it. I found the emotions of the second half ‘synthetic’ and wrote that Rohan and Poo were ‘underwritten characters’.

In the years since, I’ve come to love it more. I can’t pinpoint how it happened but, over time, watching K3G became a ritual for the extended Chopra clan—a dozen of us get together at least once a year for a vacation and inevitably, on one evening, we sit and revisit the Raichand saga. We marvel, yet again, at the finery of the costumes by Manish Malhotra (Yashvardhan Raichand’s Jamevar shawls are stunning, as is Poo’s unending wardrobe) and the glitter and beauty of the songs by Farah Khan (‘Suraj Hua Maddham’ and ‘Bole Chudiyan’ are my favourites). We swoon over Shah Rukh’s entry—arguably his finest—as he gets out of a private plane into the helicopter and then walks in slo-mo from the helicopter toward the mansion, where his mother intuitively senses he is coming and waits by the door. The emotions are dialled up and someone, sometimes, gets teary. But we also laugh at scenes that come off as silly and synthetic. ‘Keh diya na, bas keh diya’ is a favourite dialogue. So is Poo’s legendary line: ‘Tell me how it was’. In fact, Poo is the family favourite. Of all the characters in the film, the ditzy, clueless fashionista is the most enduring and endearing—her vanity and superficiality combined with, as she would say, ‘good looks, good looks, good looks’, are irresistible.

There is little doubt that K3G is overblown and overwrought, but it continues to exert a grip because Karan skilfully combined the gloss with drama that is, despite the heightened pitch, heartfelt. All the leads in the film weep copiously (usually with the title song blaring in the background). And Karan unabashedly manipulates the viewer, adding to the familial entanglements a generous dose of Hindu ‘sanskars’ (Karva Chauth, aartis) and a dollop of patriotism (the Rohan-arriving-in-London montage is set to an upbeat ‘Vande Mataram’, almost as if the film wants to remind us that despite his cool-kid flash, Rohan is an old-school Indian, who has come all this way to find his older brother). Nothing in this story or its telling (a mansion in Buckinghamshire substituted for the Raichand home in Delhi; the family’s monogrammed helicopter; the licence plates on the family Rolls Royce, which read YR 1) is realistic, but the emotions land. Which is why the film continues to be both watchable and fodder for memes and blogs.

There’s also that exquisitely romantic scene between Rahul and Anjali set at a Chandni Chowk mela—he’s pushing green bangles down her wrist as he talks about ‘dil ke rishtey’ and asking if it pricks. When he finally gets them down, he asks one more time and she nods. He says ‘Mujhe bhi.’ That specific scene has more than seven million views on YouTube. That chemistry doesn’t get old.

You can watch K3G on Amazon Prime.