Yet, it ended up making you feel guilty for siding with Dev and Maya.

KANK could have been an alternate Silsila. And the film gave us that - eventually - but not before falling prey to Bollywood’s age-old trope of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ The Indian audience, that back in 1981 needed to see Chandni (Rekha) make way for Shobha Malhotra (Jaya Bachchan), the lawfully wedded wife to Amit Malhotra (Amitabh Bachchan) in Silsila, was most certainly ready to see the story take a different turn 25 years later in 2006. The dichotomy of this dysfunctional web these four find themselves trapped in is that, unlike what is socially accepted, love here happened after marriage - and with someone other than the partner. The only catch is that they’re both married to two very loving partners - Maya is Rishi Talwar’s (Abhishek) wife and Dev is Riya Saran’s (Preity) husband. They see each other’s incompleteness, they spot the crack that the world fails to see, and they try to mend the broken in the other.

(Photo: YouTube screengrab)ĭev Saran (Shah Rukh) and Maya Talwar (Rani) - two people, complete as society would label them, happy because what can they possibly complain about - meet and fall in love. And we blame it on the sloppy direction and immature handling of it.įor Rishi and Riya to emerge as 'good,' Dev and Maya were portrayed as 'bad'. What does one do when one realises that their husband is cheating on them? Or their wife? After the usual succession of disbelief, heartbreak, anger, resentment and acceptance, the question that pops into the mind is if the love is over? Or better still, was there ever any love, to begin with?ġ3 years ago, when Karan Johar’s Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (KANK) released, after initially grabbing attention for its brilliant ensemble cast - Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukerji, Abhishek Bachchan, Amitabh Bachchan, Preity Zinta and Kirron Kher, it stood out for the sensitive subject it meant to deal with - the infidelity angle.

Kabhi alvida naa kehna