Cast: Shah Rukh Khan, Anushka Sharma, Vinay Pathak

Director: Aditya Chopra

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

Or that’s what 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). And he’s just acquired a new wife, Taani (Anushka), who’s mourning the untimely exit of an old love.

Tiny three-membered cast, instead of the standard full-scale Yashraj ‘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 which 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 Yashraj 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.