A picture worth a 1,000 weeks

A leading news magazine describes 1995 as the year “the Shiv Sena came to power in Maharashtra, Bombay became Mumbai and Mayawati became Uttar Pradesh’s first Dalit chief minister”. The round up of that year’s major news events also included a match-fixing controversy involving Shane Warne, the Charar-E-Sharief shrine in Kashmir being torched, Amitabh Bachchan’s ABCL being launched and the Enron project scrapped, the death of Ranjan Pillai, Gary Kasparov’s win over Viswananthan Anand at the PCA World Chess Championships, and the controversy Madhu Sapre-Milind Soman courted by posing in the nude for a shoe ad.

There was also this headline among all the others: “DDLJ is a smash hit”. For Bollywood, 1994 was the year of Hum Aapke Hain Kaun: Joint families were cool, as were family values and endless rounds of antakshari. The next year’s Bollywood releases would include Bombay, Rangeela, Coolie No. 1, Karan Arjun, Raja, Sabse Bada Khiladi and Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. The film was an immediate phenomenon. News reports at the time estimated that the film would go on to do a business of about Rs 50 crores a landmark amount in the days before the 100-crore club was created. Ultimately, it would go on to earn Rs106 crores in India and about '16 crore in the US. It would also win 10 Filmfare Awards and a National Award.

As it completes a 1,000-week run at the Maratha Mandir theatre today, the longest running film in Indian cinema, we look at what made the film special. What was it about DDLJ that drew so many people to the theatres? Was it the Raj-Simran romance and how we rooted for it to work out? Was it the glimpses of Europe in the pre-Internet, fully globalised era- that seduced us, even as the film reiterated that there was no place like home? Was it the music or the dialogues or the story or a combination of all three? DDLJ stuck to many Bollywood tropes, established a few, overturned many others. And somehow, in doing all this, it managed to make us do just what its tagline asked: “Come… Fall In Love”.