Musing about SRK movies

I was channel surfing one lazy Sunday afternoon, and stumbled upon this Shah Rukh Khan movie “Chalte Chalte”. It took me two full rounds from channel 1 to 90 before I caught this movie, the reason being the ad break in that channel. Well actually more than half of the channels were playing ads as I was surfing past them. But that is another story altogether and for a later day.

Coming back to the movie, this was one Shah Rukh movie that I had not seen and so sat down to see what it was all about. This guy is a bundle of energy, even if his films are bad, he usually sparkles in his role – hamming away in his inimitable style and getting the best lines. This one also had him playing himself and not the character. But as the story was unfolding, I realized that this one also had SRK loving and wishing to marry a girl who is engaged to or about to get engaged to another man. I was struck by the fact that, most of his movies have had this theme running. Even as I am writing this, he is serenading the girl in a lovely foreign locale under the pretext of taking her to meet her would be husband. I say chaps, how more weird can u get??

While in DDLJ he traveled all the way from London to Punjab, in this movie he throws away everything and travels to Greece to win over the girl. How easy!!As one character says in the movie, he is going to Greece and not Ghatkopar, but being the hero he has everything ready made for himself like tickets, visa and doles of dough to finance everything. In kuch kuch hota hai he picked the girl right out of the marriage hall, while in Dil to pagal hai, the setting was a dance stage in front of a few thousand people. In veer zara he went one step further and wanted to marry a Pakistani girl engaged to a rich aristocrat Pakistani. He deservedly got 22 years in the prison for this, but what the heck; he did get the old preity zinta in the end.

Along the way he has been helped by some seriously fickle minded ladies, who, after a few songs, a few outrageously foolish acts in the name of love (like diving into a lake to retrieve a coin and throwing away an air force job to hop over to Pakistan) and a few sentimental dialogues by our hero, fall hook line and sinker for him. And not to mention a few chevalier gentlemen who so magnanimously sacrifice their girl for our hero. Plus the Anupam Kher type father /uncle/ whatever who egg on our hero in his mission “flick the female”.

Coming to think of it, it’s not just our SRK, but all the heroes have to get the heroines in the end. This is the norm for standard Indian cinema. After all who does not like a happy ending?

Alas, if only things were this easy in real life, u know, like falling in love after a couple of meetings, getting the girl to accept u, even if she accepts u; to get the relationship going for a long time, if the relationship does go on; then to stay committed for a long time, and after all this to face the parents and convince them. Gosh, this is a long and torturous path, aint it?? Am sure many would have failed or come to the brink of failure at any one of these stages.

The lucky ones would have braved them and gone ahead and who knows may enjoy these movies

The unlucky ones write blogs criticizing such movies.