The crack that is starting to appear in their relationship is Rhea’s excessive attention to her career. (Forget about him being a former model, he’s still handosme, but my Gawd, with that voice, I wish he did books-on-tape, or at least better dialogue in his starring roles.) Dev and Rhea have a young son, Arjun, about whom the young girl next to me at the cinema declared “he looks like Chicken Little”, likely because of the big round specs. He’s an aspiring soccer player, on his way to the A league and a big contract, and she’s an ambitious fashion magazine editor, who reports to the very deep-voiced Arjun Rampal. Khan and Zinta, in the very early part of the film seem to be ok, but not without problems. The story, for anyone who hasn’t read the million + 1 articles that have already summarized the plot, centers around two couples: Dev (Khan) and Rhea (Preity Zinta), and Rishi and Maya. Such a directive would never had come forth from the mouth of Yashovardhan Raichand, the stern patriarch AB played in K3G.

to say this, Johar had to make him a Hugh Hefner-lite figure, livin’ large in The Big Apple, far, far away from the prying stares and meddling relatives that help keep everyone in line back in Bharat Mata. These unfulfilled relationships don’t make anyone happy.” By staying with him, you are denying him someone else’s love and yourself true love. After catching daughter-in-law Maya in an illicit clinch with Dev, and ending up in hospital shortly afterward, he intones to her alone: “Leave my son. The man who is the Voice of God in Indian film (and also in a hellva lot of advertising), is the widowed father of Rishi Talwar (Abhishek Bachchan). In Karan Johar’s long-awaited Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, the puckish filmmaker comes down hard on the side of love over the rigid expectations of traditional Indian society.Īnd who better to help him get that message across than Amitabh Bachchan?

I’ve wondered a lot in the past 10 years how middle class India would handle the MTV-ization of their increasingly consumerist, globalized segment of society, particularly vis-a-vis the long-held assurance that high divorce rates are a Western problem only. Infidelity and divorce are ok, if it’s all for love (not merely sex).Ĭontrast that with the “Family is family” mantra that Dev (Shahrukh Khan) and Maya (Rani Mukherjee Mukherji), the emotionally unfaithful spouses, repeat half-heartedly to each other, as if aware that they’re mouthing a bad knock-off of a Karan Johar film tagline.

Rani mukherjee kabhi alvida naa kehna