The truth about love is that it loses its voice in all the noise we surround ourselves with. “It makes it difficult to hear the voice of the heart; but once you do, it’s never too late, honest,” Imtiaz Ali crosses his heart, and delivers a brand- new perspective to an over-stated concept called love. In town on a long overdue Punjab visit, along with film’s lyricist Irshad Kamil and costume designer Dolly Ahluwalia Tewari, the filmmaker brushes aside the ‘love guru’ tag. “I’m nowhere close to a romantic, nor do I watch romantic films. We do in movies what we miss out in life.”

With Imtiaz, stories have always existed in the universe, in his mind space....”I am just a medium through which it unravels. The compulsion of making a story is not intellectual, it’s more pathological. I call it a defect, for not everybody wants to spin a yarn.” Yes, at times he does sound random, but there’s always an order to it. Like, he never behaves like those autocratic, self-consumed directors. He keeps his team in the loop, and bounces off ideas. “Irshad instantly knows what I’m looking for....Giselle Monteiro, for instance, was Dolly ji’s discovery...” Sorry for the interruption, but why was her identity kept secret? “Because I didn’t want the audiences to look at her as a Portuguese-speaking Brazilian. It would have made it difficult for us to convince them, so we kept quiet,” tells Imtiaz, who sees ‘high potential’ in her and didn’t want to lose her. “She is in awe of Imtiaz,” pokes Dolly, who did the flashback costumes, and gave us Harleen Kaur and Veer Singh in Love Aaj Kal. “I liked her instantly, and this girl was ready to learn. Giselle now says she’s found her true identity,” Dolly chats on, on how she dressed up her lanky frame with full-sleeve kurtas, and gave Saif Ali Khan the true-blue Sikh look. “Saif was eager to know...he refused to use this identity to crack jokes or make a mimicry of Sardars. It was his effort and awareness that made Veer Singh’s character authentic and believable,” despite all those trying turban sessions, making him look taller, testing the look endlessly on assistants, buttoning him up in striking check shirts, Dolly feels he makes the most handsome pure sardar of all!

... contd.