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Jab Shah Rukh Broke My Heart


For some reason I thought I posted on July 25th as well. But apparently not. I was expecting the day to be a bit low key and only for myself and also very slow - the way i like it. But it turned out to be quite manic. Quite frankly, I didn't mind it at all - i ended the day with a lovely three, maybe four part meal/drinks sessions with some of my closest friends in Singapore and it's always heartening to spend time with the ones you love and ones that love you back as fiercely. If July 25th is to be a harbinger of the days to come by - I better be prepared, because that means I'll be running from pillar to post for the rest of the year. And truth be told for the last one week or so I have been going quite mad, trying to fit everything and everyone into my schedule. It's nice to be busy - but to be crazy busy isn't very nice as I know from many years of experience. Hey, I get to say many years to experience now - after all I am 30 !

We've spoken a lot about me and I've enjoyed narrating those stories of my life but now I can safely go back to hiding behind someone else's stories and fiction - something I revel in. But before I do that, today I feel like writing about Shah Rukh Khan. Adithya mentioned that I hadn't mentioned or dedicated a post to him. I believe i did, in fact I started a "Hello 29" last series with a "Are you finally Over Shah?" - a question that pained me tonnes to even think about leave alone type those words out for the world to see. I have loved him unconditionally and in fact I still do, I do not think my amazing levels of admiration and love for him will ever leave the core of my being. So I think I asked that question out aloud to in fact hear myself say "Of course not, you will always love him". It's weird I said unconditionally two sentences back and yet I "expect" him to deliver on certain promises I think he has made to everyone who loves his brand of cinema and is generally an admirer of Hindi films. My love for him and my respect for him are two different things I guess. I will always love him, but maybe my respect for him is dwindling a bit after the recent slate of debacles I've been forced to witness and often First Day First Show. My disillusionment with him started with maybe Ra.One, followed very closely with Chennai Express, Happy New Year, Diwale and the the last one that truly broke my heart was Jab Harry Met Sejal. In between all of these was Fan and Dear Zindagi, which quite frankly I liked. Yes ok, Dear Zindagi was hardly his movie - but I liked how after a very long time he looked convincing playing a character on screen. Fan was sadly such a great concept and one that he obviously put a lot of effort into - but i do realise the story somehow derailed - but his acting was not off the mark at all. I often hear people say "SRK is so full of himself, he played himself in a movie." Now what can you say to that, there will always be haters. 

The problem is really when those who love him start questioning his choices. I don't know if I have mentioned this before, but I read or maybe watched an interview of his where he speaks about people critiquing one of the movies I've mentioned and he says "I wanted to do something for myself and i wanted to have fun on a set and so I did this movie". And while that is a beautiful line of defence because of course people should have fun doing what they love, especially if you are Shah Rukh Khan, but not at the expense of looking very moronic on screen and betraying all those who put you in that position in the first place. Wow, I'm being very harsh eh. Having fun doesn't mean making terrible movies. What does his statement mean in the first place - did he not have fun all this while when he made good movies with decent scripts and great music and gorgeous acting? Happy New Year - this one gets defended by the cast with statements like "It's very difficult to play the fool on screen, it's very easy to essay regular leading roles, but to do comedy is tough". I agree, comedy is a very hard genre. But that should be the case for good comedy and a great story again, not for everything trashy people decide to put out. This movie had an especially great cast and yet amongst all of these great actors they couldn't put up a decent, let alone good show. I think it did wonders at the box office in terms of collections, because well every Shah Rukh movie would, but I'll never forget how it made me feel to watch Shah Rukh in it - ashamed would be a small word. But maybe not as ashamed as I was after watching Dilwale. I think i started being heartbroken with him after Diwale and then Jab Harry Met Sejal completed that process. Dilwale was the epic come back movie for Kajol and Shahrukh - the pair from DDLJ and many other great movies, at least those of us in the fanclub believe so. And it ended up being something worse than Happy New Year - a feat i did not think could be achieved, at least for a Shah movie.  How wrong I was. I almost walked out of Diwale, I think i booked a bunch of tickets ( by a bunch I mean at least 15) for my friends and me to go watch it in Singapore and some walked out, I was tempted but I forced myself to sit through it anyway, for the love of Shah. It disappointed as a love story, as a comedy, as a story, with acting and also with the music. 

Now, the focus of this post - Jab Harry Met Sejal. This one was written and directed by Imtiaz Ali, who happens to be one of my top 5 movie makers for Hindi films right now. He makes movies where he shows characters with many many layers come of age. They have a strong back-story, there's individual internal strife and then there's intense human drama that plays out between the characters themselves, there is gorgeous music and always lovely locales whether the scenery of the north of India or that of Corsica from one of my all-time favorites, Tamasha. I have defended Tamasha to the moon and back. I genuinely believe in the story the movie was trying to tell. I understand the concern that the problems of the characters seemed very "first world", but i did not believe it deserved to fail the way it did. In fact it somehow failed to strike a chord even with the urban indian - those who should get these so-called "first world problems". For me the movie was my life playing out on screen - my need to not do a regular job and break out of my shell and go pursue my dream, the fears that stop me from it, the societal pressures stemming from "keep the job, run the race" lifestyle, the freedom I seek in travel and often find and how invincible that makes me feel, only to come back to the blunt brutal grunt of everyday reality of an office card hanging around my neck. I say this for Tamasha, but i've found a little bit of myself in each of Imtiaz's characters, including the claustrophobia that Alia Bhat feels in Highway, not in a sexual molestation context but because of the pretense that infects most of Upper Middle Class Indian families and is worse amongst the richer from what I've heard. Also, I always wanted to be a truck driver driving across India only so I could eat at dhabas - so i totally identified with that aspect of the movie. I'm only half kidding here. 

The depth in each of Imtiaz's characters make them feel real, like he has known them personally, like he has been friends with them, or lived with them, sat down and spoken to them over a cup of chai. Their struggles are modern yes, and maybe that is why to me they are very relatable - i live in this world which inspires Imtiaz to write. His movies are the few Hindi movies where I have connected with the characters so totally and so honestly, that I forget myself when viewing the film. Not a single beat or decision that the characters choose or pursue seem out of sorts to me - it's all things I could have done if you put me in those exact situations. Irrespective of how many times I have watched them, if any one of his movies is playing on TV or on selection on an airplane entertainment system, I will choose the show and spend the next few hours laughing and weeping with immense feeling and emotion. I have said this multiple times and I repeat it again - I will one day write about how deeply Tamasha affected me. In fact,  other than Shah's movies, Tamasha must be the only movie where I booked 15 tickets for friends in Singapore - sadly none of them got the movie. And even today they mock the movie and how invested I was and how hard I was weeping in certain scenes - and my many attempts to make them understand how and why it affected me so much often goes in vain. One day I will write about Tamasha. 

Now that I have spoken about Shah Rukh and Imitiaz, I will talk about their combined effort at making a movie - Jab Harry Met Sejal. When I heard about the movie being made, I was ecstatic. I thought to myself, it is going to take someone like an Imtiaz to tell a story that would redeem Shah and finally the world would see the brilliance that is Shah Rukh in a romantic story. Everyone has always praised Shah Rukh in movies like Chak De and Swades, he does well when he is not hamming as a lover boy they say. And now, I said to myself, now they will see that his true talent does indeed lie in essaying a lover boy on screen. I booked myself a show for 2:00 PM on a Friday, which is the first show for Bollywood movies in Singapore, bunked work and took off to watch Shah Rukh and Imtiaz burn the screen with magic. They did burn the screen but with mediocrity instead of magic. 

The movie opens quite well with a gorgeous track by Arijit Singh, Safar, in the backdrop as Shah Rukh, a tour guide shows groups of people around Europe. While the opening credits roll, the viewer is given an acute sense of how lonely a life Harry aka Harinder Singh Nehra leads. The lyrics from the song, with the visuals of lovely European locations and Shah Rukh's complete devoid of any joy lifestyle tug at your heart. Shah aces these scenes where he looks pained to lead the life he is leading, almost robotic, day in and day out - the kind of portrayal Imtiaz excels at - showing how everyday drudgery can rob you of your spirit of life. There's even scenes of an old indian village sewn intermittently through this song and through European scenery, letting the viewer know that there is a life Harry longs for, one that he has left behind - something we hope the movie will unravel eventually through it's run-time. The lyrics though - such wow, typical Imtiaz. I was happy - if this is how the movie has started, it promises to be good - also there was so much material that the movie had already started hinting at - why was he is Europe doing what he was doing? Why was he unhappy? What is this secret alleys of an indian village that he had left behind? Why had he left it behind? What was the one heartache that pained him so much that it showed on his face while, as the lyrics of the song says, "shehar shehar fursatton ko bechta hoon", he sells leisure from city to city. I never got the answers to any of those question even after I walked out of the theatre two hours later.

Just as the movie was sailing smoothly after the song and after Harry sees off a Gujarati group of tourists at the airport, faking his way through the goodbyes, dying to head out and be done with them. You see that relief on his face as he slips into his own car and puts on the radio and is ready to take some well deserved time off, only to notice that a girl from the group is waving out to him. Enter, Anushka Sharma, what is most probably the single most irritating thing about the movie. Now don't get me wrong, I admire Anushka professionally and personally. But I just can't stand her on screen and yes while I am biased, I can usually put my strong opinions away and watch a good movie she has starred in and appreciate it anyway - NH 10 being case in point, I actually did not even mind her first movie - Tujh Mein Rab Dikhta Hain, also with Shah Rukh Khan. But her loud obnoxious acting in Jab Tak Hain Jaan wanted me to puke. Yes maybe it was her character too, but Anushka's screechy screaming shouting loud performance wanted me to switch off the show then and it evoked the same emotions in me this time around too. Add to that her over the top Gujarati accent and her immense effort to try to convince us that she is a naive Indian girl who is too trusting of the world and of men. It just all falls flat - if any of it is meant to be endearing, it is not. She is the weakest link in the story - well of course, after a point there is no story at all, so you can't really blame her too. Her lack of direction in life, her not knowing what she wants from her fiance or from Harry, her obvious lack of awareness about a continent she has spent a month travelling in ("Is Amsterdam in France?") and her very obvious stupidity - all traits of a very weak female character - almost as if Imtiaz did not spend enough time with her at all. And Imtiaz tends to do that with some of his female characters - from Heer in Rockstar to Aditi in Socha Na Tha (great movie by the way!) Megha in Ahista Ahista (another lovely film) and maybe to an extent even Tara in Tamasha - they are all some great characters brought to life by great performances by the ladies playing that role, but all of them are plagued with lazy writing, almost as if he is expending so much energy in fleshing out his male protaganists he has not time or energy left in adding some meat to the female characters. But in spite of that, great acting and a strong story-line have made sure that the female characters held their own and added to the overall performance of the film and the male protagonist. Unfortunately Anushka failed to do it for Sejal. Imtiaz has also written some very strong female protagonists - Veera from Highway and of course, who can forger Geet from Jab We Met. So you can't pin him down as someone who doesn't write great roles for women - he truly knows how to, but there have been instances in the past where he hasn't. The problem with Jab Harry Met Sejal is i guess I he didn't write strong roles period - neither for Sejal nor for Harry. 


Now going on with the story - Sejal has lost her engagement ring during the trip and enlists Harry's support to help her track it down. Her fiance has conveniently left in Europe while he flew out with the rest of his and her family back to Bombay. Now a family that is made out to be very traditional (to the point that their engagement took place in the center of a hotel room with all the other relatives sitting around) is ok with leaving their daughter all alone in Europe and trust a tour guide with her "safety" is just very difficult to believe. Stick to a line - either make the family modern with no qualms about having their daughter stay back in Europe (which is totally ok btw - I am not arguing for women to be handcuffed to their relatives all the time) OR show them as an out and out traditional family that insists on having the daughter come back and then have the daughter push back and fight to stay. Here there is absolutely no consistency. Also what kind of a loser leaves his fiancee to search for the engagement ring all by herself in Europe across countries and cities? Any I digress - basically nothing about this movie was convincing. Harry initially very reluctantly agrees to hep her out after pressures from the boss who is being asked by the family to help the daughter out and they only supposedly trust Harry with their daughter. Harry doesn't want to. Why? Because he has a terrible reputation with his female clients and he says as much to Sejal who scoffs at him and says he doesn't need to worry about her, for she isn't the kind of woman who leaves her fiance to run away with a tour guide and that she is not a 'gandi' or dirty woman. I don't even know what to think of these dialogues. 

Now who can resist Shah Rukh's charms ? Everyone knows that these two are going to fall in love and she will need to leave and then they will both realise the seriousness of the situation and eventually it's all going to end well. At this point you still have some hope because Imtiaz has a habit of springing surprises. So you suck it up and continue to sit through the movie. Also watching Shah Rukh on screen is still a treat to me plus of course there's Europe. These two traverse through Portugal, Budapest, Prague, Frankfurt in search of this ring -  which i wonder is meant to be a metaphor for what? Or maybe I am ascribing too much importance to the idea of this ring - maybe it was meant to be an excuse to roam around Europe and nothing more. An encounter with a flimsy hero in Portugal and a staff yielding Don in Prague make it from bad to worse - these were additions we didn't need in this journey. And they hardly function as the "Decent hotel" comic interlude from Jab We Met, which actually turned out to be an iconic scene from the movie then. Here both these above scenes seemed comical. Shah Rukh's backstory stay as dry as ever, with no light ever being shed on the questions the opening track made us ask. And Anushka manages to piss us off even more with her dilly-dallying, she asks Shah to find her hot and look at her like he looks at other women (to which he tells her - you're like a porcelain vase, that one keep safe and only looks at from a distance - whatever that means dude), she asks him to consider her his girlfriend for the duration of their travels so he doesn't feel lonely - i literally said a soft "oh come on now" when  this happened on screen. There is no depth in their relationship - there isn't even a convincing friendship let alone the promise of a romantic relationship. There is nothing there - which rarely happens with Shah Rukh and his leading ladies - this obvious lack of any chemistry, I mean even the very un-emotive Katrina Kaif and him managed to evoke some reaction in Jab Tak Hain Jaan.

One series of scenes, I'd like to particularly lament upon is the one before the song Radha plays out. Shah and Anushka are lying next to each other -oh this is another thing they do - sleep next to each other through the trip and apparently not have anything physical to do with each other - even the most naive person won't buy this. Anyway, back to the scene, Anushka has her head on  Shah's shoulder, when he suddenly awakes. He is in obvious emotional distress because of a dream which is multiplied by her nearness to him. He slowly withdraws himself from her embrace and walks a bit away and breaks down - literally has to sit on his heels and cry while patting himself to try and calm himself down. Anushka having woken up, walks up behind him and asks if he is crying, he brushes away his tears and gets up and says to her "do you know in Punjab why the farmer that drives a tractor sings so loudly? It's so his voice can he heard above the noise of the tractor" and then he starts to sing and they both break into a dance and Radha starts blaring. What could have been a truly gorgeous strong emotional scenes ends up being quite plainly stupid with this random song and dance sequence thrown in almost as though without thought for what the character has just gone through. 

These two also find themselves in Frankfurt to celebrate a friend's wedding and play hosts to the families - playacting the role of a  husband and wife. At this point, Sejal has found the ring, it has all along been in her handbag and she chanced upon it when she held it upside down to look for an antiseptic when Shah get hurt after the comical Bangaldeshi immigrant crime-lord scene. She has obviously kept this information from him because as he had rightly predicted, she has fallen in love with him and doesn't want to let go or end this journey. So she keeps up the farce of searching for the ring. Of course, it can't go on forever - and in what maybe the movie strongest scene, she confronts him and asks him what he wants, he refuses to acknowledge his love for her, and asks her a question instead - if she would become that horrible person who leaves her fiance for a tour guide. Either the way it sounds is horrible or the truth of her situation dawns on her or she realises he will never confront his own emotions - whatever the deal is, she decides to head back home to Bombay. 

Her departure re-launches his sterile everyday existence but of course he comes to realise he is missing something and he really should have stopped her when she asked him to. So a day before her wedding, he packs his bags and is on a flight to Bombay. Upon reaching the wedding destination, he realises it's not Sejal's wedding after all - which was called off. He heads out into the garden and encounters Sejal - they both proclaim their love for each other and the movie ends with a song, Butterfly, in Punjab where the camera shows us Shah walking in the alleys that he dreams of at night and into the house that he sees in those dreams- reuniting with his relatives and his mother. And that's the end. Something that has been the reason for his sadness is given two minutes of screen time in the end. 

When I walked out of the movie I wanted to cry, I held myself, waited until I was inside a bus back home, on the upper deck hidden away prying eyes. And then I broke down. I was so disappointed, so heartbroken, so utterly broken at having been betrayed by Shah Rukh and Imtiaz both. I was so distraught with grief that I went home and cried even more. A lot of my friends who watched the movie said it wasn't that bad and it was a "light watch" - but then these folks also have zero expectations from Shah Rukh, because of all the nonsense he has done over the last few years, they expect him to choose and act in horrible movies with horrible scripts and play horrible characters. So when they were presented with a half-decent story and characters and good music, they didn't mind it at all. Such a sad thing to have happened to the actor that is Shah Rukh - to be compared to his own crass work (Dilwale, Happy New year etc) and be judged with sentences like "it wasn't as bad as...", "at least i didn't want to walk out of the theatre" - I never thought I would one day want to walk out of a Shah movie - but I now have three movies i barely could tolerate sitting through.

This post is many years delayed. And the reason I write it today is because on a flight from Singapore to Bali - I gave Shah Rukh and Imtiaz Ali one more chance. Jab Harry Met Sejal was in the entertainment offering and I watched it - hoping maybe that I missed out some aspect of the movie or I couldn't understand what Imtiaz was trying to say all along - maybe the movie contained some subtle hidden clues which would when discovered truly make it all better - but I again, walked away with nothing but disappointment. I enjoyed the music a bit more - and i won't lie, it was a joy to just watch Shah on screen but everything else made me cringe and sigh in sadness. And that is when I decided to write this pending blog. I know I have been harsh - but truth be told I could have been harsher. I am not looking for a light time-pass watch from a Shah Rukh - Imtiaz collaboration - I am looking for a great story, a director that captures raw emotions on screen (case in point - Agar Tum Saath ho from Tamasha), a music score that adds to the screenplay instead of taking away from it, writing that has depth, characters that you relate to and cheer for, and acting that is convincing and elevates an already great script to a higher level. None of which Jab Harry Met Sejal delivered on. 

I'll end with these lyrics from Safar

 अब ना मुझको याद बीता 
मैं तोह लम्हों मैं जीता 
चला  जा रहा  हूँ 
मैं कहाँ पे जा रहा हूँ
कहाँ हूँ ?

इस यकीन से मैं यहां हूँ 
की ज़माना यह भला हैं 
और जो राह में मिला हैं
थोड़ी दूर जो चला हैं  
वह भी आदमी भला था 
पता था 
ज़रा बस खफा था
वह भटका सा राहीं 
मेरे गाँव का ही 
वह रास्ता पुराण जिसे याद आना 
ज़रूरी था लेकिन जो रोया मेरे बिन 
वह एक मेरा घर था 
पुराना सा डर था 
मगर अब न मैं अपने घर का रहा  
सफर का ही था मैं सफर का रहा

इधर का ही हूँ न 
उधर का रहा 
सफर का ही था में सफर का रहा 
मैं रहा  ....... 

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