Done that, seen this
Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi
Love is a yellow tiffin stuffed with garma garam khana, balanced between the knees of that scooter rider going down a small-town road, on his way to his public sector office, and fellows called Sharmaji, Varmaji, and Sahniji.

Or that’s what director Aditya Chopra would have us believe. His new film has Shah Rukh Khan playing Surinder Sahni, a small cog in a big ‘sarkaari’ wheel, living an ordinary 9-to-5 existence. He has a best friend who revels in the name of Bobby aka Balwinder (Vinay Pathak). And he’s just acquired a new wife, Taani (Anushka Sharma), who’s mourning the untimely exit of an old love.

Tiny three-membered cast, instead of the standard full-scale Yash Raj ‘baraat’. Middle-class homes and offices, instead of ornate palaces and Swiss chalets. A hero who wears a thick moustache, black-framed spectacles, and pants that don’t fit. And a simple, unmade-up heroine, dressed, for the most part, in salwaar kameez and phulkari dupattas. No gulp, pastel chiffons. Could this really be Yash Raj turning over a welcome new leaf ? Uh huh: the outlines of the characters are new, but the brush-strokes that fill in the whole, aren’t. In its telling, the few fresh touches in Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi are overpowered by those that are all too familiar.

It opens with one of the oldest tricks in the book—dying dad asking hero to wed heroine. You’re still getting over that when the film whisks you off to Amritsar, where Surinder and Taani’s love story is destined to unfold. It begins well—they sleep sweetly in separate rooms, and swap such winsome exchanges as her saying ‘Aap lucky ho ji, ki aap ko kabhi pyaar nahin hua’, with him replying, a tad poetically, ‘Isse zyada pyar ki na toh mujhe aadat hai na zaroorat’.

... contd.