A decade and a half on, Karan Johar’s Dharma Productions still hasn’t topped the meta magic of I Hate Luv Storys

On the surface, it is the most textbook rom-com you could imagine from a mainstream banner. It’s as dated as the idea of love pretending to be new. A boy too smug to believe in love ends up head over heels. A girl too sensible to fall for a guy like him… falls anyway. One confesses, the other freezes. Then it flips, the other confesses, and now it’s their turn to be stunned. They go in circles. Across cities, across continents. They sing under skies, they cry to soft tunes, they miss flights that were supposed to matter. And in the end, well, the ending is happy, of course it is. I told you, it’s cliche to the bone. But the thing with cliches is they earn their name. Not for what they say out loud, but for everything they sneak in underneath. And damn, sometimes, they just bloody work. Sure, Dharma has made better rom-coms since I Hate Luv Storys. Sure, a film like Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani offers a far more layered and even greater entertainment.

But there’s still something irresistibly bold and unapologetically fun about what Punit Malhotra pulled off in 2010. It may lack polish, but few films wear their meta-commentary with such cheeky confidence. Because, look closer, and the film unfolds as a love-hate letter. It is Karan Johar having a cheeky showdown with himself, and the very syntax that built him. Jai (Imran Khan), the assistant director, shadows Veer Kapoor (Sameer Soni), the country’s biggest filmmaker. And if you know Johar, watched all his films, followed his life closely, Veer is no one else but Johar. Amplified, exaggerated, laid bare. The way Veer dreams up his films, the way he lives every line, weeps at his own scenes, that’s Johar’s signature. It’s like Farah Khan cracking jokes at his expense, gently roasting his big, emotional, all-in sensibility. But here’s the kicker, Jai is another Johar too. He is the version you catch in interviews, calling out his own dated tastes, predictable story beats, and shaky plots.

Also Read | Imran Khan says Samir Soni’s character in I Hate Luv Storys was inspired by a ‘famous director’, spelling of film’s title was ‘butchered’ to serve ‘numerology’

Jai can also be that Karan Johar of the late 2000s, caught in the multiplex surge, watching fresh voices like Anurag Kashyap, Dibakar Banerjee, and Zoya Akhtar rewrite the rules. He wanted to belong, suddenly seeing his own language as stale and worn out. So he swung big. So he made a My Name Is Khan, backed a Wake Up Sid, trying to keep pace. Then there’s also Simran (Sonam Kapoor), Johar’s purest self, the unfiltered lover of his craft. The one bold enough to show Chandni Chowk in London, daring enough to paint the biggest star in the country as flawed, even unfaithful partner. I Hate Luv Storys isn’t just a rom-com. It’s essentially a love triangle. A collision of who Johar was, who he is, and who he pretends to have become.

A fascinating reading of the film could be that the character of Imran Khan is actually a stand-in for Karan Johar, who is bold enough to call out his own work as dated and contrived.

It’s no coincidence that the film begins with Jai mocking the great romances of Hindi cinema. Yet, it’s equally unsurprising that, in one of its most poignant sequences, Punit Malhotra meticulously stages scenes from the three seminal romances Karan Johar has shaped: Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, and Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. And fittingly, as Jai watches these iconic moments play out back-to-back, he’s swept into an unexpected reverence, falling in love with the very cinematic language he once dismissed. It’s a profound meta-cinematic gesture, rich with subtext. Sure, Dharma has had flashes of self-awareness before, and after, but never quite like this. Here, it achieves something far more complex: a reflective prism revealing the existential tensions of an artiste negotiating his past triumphs with an uncertain present. A filmmaker confronting and embracing his own legacy with both irony and affection.

As mentioned earlier, it’s no wonder the film opens by mocking the language of mainstream romance, only to end up surrendering to it. Much like Imtiaz Ali’s Tamasha, which begins by questioning why we tell the same story over and over, and then proceeds to tell exactly that. And perhaps it’s no surprise either that I began this piece insisting Karan Johar’s meta-conflict was a subject for another day, only to end up tracing its outlines here. I also began by pointing out how the current Dharma aspires to be I Hate Luv Storys, but no longer has the wit to get there. Watch Nadaaniyan, and it’s painfully clear. It tries to replicate the grammar of this film, or more specifically, of a Student of the Year, but misses the mark. There’s a thin line between self-reference and self-parody. Those earlier films worked not because they leaned on cliche, but because they were in conversation with it. The meta wasn’t surface-level; it was introspection, an auteur reckoning with his own image, his own contradictions, through the very thing he loved most: cinema.