In true Bollywood style Farah Khan gave birth to triplets this week and no doubt has already written the script around them. Two girls and a boy — so will she call them Shanti, Shanti and Om? It was with the same productive inventiveness that she has become India’s most successful female director, ever. In fact, right now out of all the Khans (mostly male) she is the reigning monarch. As Om Shanti Om (OSO) wows German fans, I have to confess that I have also fallen for its dubious charms and Queen Khan’s determined exploitation of logic-defying Bollywoodese.

It was not easy to fall in love with OSO. To begin with, when I saw it in London I was appalled at how much hype can distort your sensibilities. The film had none of the criteria that I associated with good cinema (first mistake): it had a completely wild plot, Karz meets Madhumati, and the latter film was not even acknowledged; terrible acting (second mistake), Shah Rukh does not make the slightest effort; and very little research (third mistake) nothing about the so-called ’70s in the film struck a chord within me. After all, in the ’70s, while Farah was still a very young school girl, I was in a Delhi college, and my memory of the era is completely different. In fact, Deepika looked nothing like the heroines whom we all adored in the ’70s — pert voluptuous Mumtaz, large-eyed abundant Asha Parekh, sexy long-legged Saira Banu — the list went on and on. I could not understand why India had been bowled over by OSO, when nothing in it looked or felt authentic or even re-created a nostalgia. I walked out of a nearly empty auditorium on Shaftesbury Avenue perplexed and bemused.

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