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After Siddharth Anand directed War in 2019, Ayan Mukerji was an interesting choice for its sequel War 2. Like Anand, Mukerji also began his career as a romantic comedy director, but eventually proved he can deliver even when the stakes are high and the canvas is large. Case in point: Brahmastra: Part One – Shiva, his 2022 supernatural drama with Ranbir Kapoor and Alia Bhatt. From the school of Karan Johar, Ayan has helmed memorable rom-coms like Wake Up Sid (2009) and Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani (2013). But let’s face it: in terms of range and commercial track record, he’s no Siddharth Anand, who’s managed to taste success in both the defining phases of YRF of the new millennium — the NRI rom-com of the 2000s and the YRF Spy Universe of the 2020s.
Maneesh Sharma is the only other YRF director who’s been as versatile, having straddled a Band Baaja Baaraat (2010) and a Shuddh Desi Romance (2013) with a Fan (2016) and a Tiger 3 (2023). But the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer, which boasted of a unique voice, is at best considered a noble failure, while Tiger 3 was as homogeneous as Pathaan, War, and other instalments of the YRF Spy Universe. Meanwhile, every film that Anand has directed so far has registered moderate to blockbuster success, whether it’s the four rom-coms he helmed between 2005 and 2010 or the four action movies he’s championed between 2014 and 2024, despite mixed reviews for most. In that sense, his has been the smoothest transition from YRF’s one phase to another, romance to action, intimate interpersonal stories to hugely mounted tentpoles.
In fact, today, September 9, marks 20 years of Anand’s 2005 directorial debut Salaam Namaste. Prior to that, he served as an Assistant Director on Kunal Kohli’s Mujhse Dosti Karoge (2002) and as a co-writer on Kohli’s Hum Tum (2004). Unlike Kohli, Anand managed to take ahead that uber-cool NRI rom-com genre with more consistency. But his finest of that lot remains his first, Salaam Namaste, because of how it balanced breeze with gravitas, Indian morality with Western aspirations, and the yin energy with the yang energy.
Like Hum Tum, Salaam Namaste also starts off as a battle of the sexes, though in more micro fashion. Ambar (Preity Zinta), a doctor-cum-radio jockey in Melbourne, starts off on the wrong foot with Nick (Saif Ali Khan), an architect-cum-chef. She’s a doctor; he hates hospitals. She doesn’t mind mess; he’s a cleanliness freak; she wants to keep their baby; he wants nothing to do with it.
Let’s put this into context: this is Hindi cinema of 2005. Four years prior to that, Abbas-Mustan’s Chori Chori Chupke Chupke released, in which Preity Zinta’s character of a sex worker turns surrogate for Salman Khan’s… by sleeping with him. Or a year before that, when Kundan Shah’s far more progressive Kya Kehna dealt with pre-marital pregnancy, but was still too shy to say the s-word out loud. “Tumhare bachche ki maa banne wali hoon” was still the long desi euphemism for “I’m pregnant.”
Anand took the lead actors of that film — Preity and Saif Ali Khan — and gave the same film his own youthful spin. They don’t have a one-night stand, but are consciously cohabiting. Salaam Namaste took baby steps too — instead of screaming ‘live-in relationship,’ it had the characters clarify they were living in the same house but in different rooms, till they weren’t. Rarely had any Hindi film by then depicted the daily struggles of a pregnant woman — morning sickness, pregnancy cravings at “Paune Barah Baje” (what was it? Ben & Jerry’s Belgian Dark Chocolate), and a full-blown delivery scene in the hospital (with Abhishek Bachchan’s hilarious cameo) years before Aamir Khan’s outrageous All-Is-Well medical miracle.
Anand’s next directorial, Ta Ra Rum Pum (2007), may not boast of the frothy flair that Salaam Namaste was redolent of, but like its predecessor, it graphed the thorny journey of a boy into a man. Yes, it was quite far-fetched to proclaim “Ta Ra Rum Pum did it first” when Brad Pitt-starrer F1 released earlier this year, but Anand’s film isn’t a bad Bollywood counterpart. One can imagine Pitt’s has-been racer living out of a trailer, but within the Indian ecosystem, RV’s (Saif) return to the tracks isn’t his redemption alone. Sure, he’s now a cab driver who needs to regain his lost glory, but the hopes of his financially shaky family are also riding on him. Of course, one can’t forget his son eating a piece of glass from the trash can out of hunger, but what remains rent-free in my head is the image of Rani Mukerji playing the piano without feeling any music in her life.
After repeating Saif in his second film, Anand did his next two with Ranbir Kapoor as the lead. Bachna Ae Haseeno (2008) had him saunter around like a playboy till his own heart gets broken (ironically by Deepika Padukone). The best track of that film, however, wasn’t between the two real-life lovers, but the one where he becomes Bipasha Basu’s right-hand man for leaving her at the altar. Basu nailed her diva act there, but her most striking moments came in the scene when she drops that tough-boss guard to understand why Ranbir would go to any extent to seek her forgiveness. But she doesn’t fall prey to his puppy-eye energy, insisting that she still feels hurt and he can’t turn back the time to fix their equation anymore. Just that her toughness there stemmed not from her boss-lady image, but from the pain of a heartbroken “Small Town Girl.”
Anand’s last rom-com had enough signs to prompt him to venture into another genre. Anjaana Anjaani (2010) had a fairly romantic premise of two suicidal strangers falling in love with each other while attempting to end their lives and then going on a journey together to finish each other’s bucket list. But again, the film failed to conjure the lunatic lover energy of its foundation and was stretched thin beyond a point. Nonetheless, even at his weakest as a rom-com director, Anand managed to pull off a moderately successful rom-com, better than most of his contemporaries.
The 2010s were not the best time to be an NRI rom-com director. After Manish Sharma’s Band Baaja Baaraat, the Indian audience was waking up to new smells, sights, and sounds of homegrown rom-coms. Set in West Delhi, the seminal romantic comedy didn’t have the youngsters Shruti (Anushka Sharma) and Bittoo (Ranveer Singh in his debut role) aspiring to relocate to the West. They were fiercely ambitious, but only to the extent of becoming wedding planners for a big fat South Delhi wedding at Sainik Farm.
Given this turn of events at YRF, and the Indian rom-com ecosystem in general, Anand was forced to switch gears. Bang Bang!, starring Hrithik and Katrina Kaif, was an official adaptation of Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz-starrer action comedy Knight & Day. It was surely a step up for Anand, but it felt too obsessed with its action that it forgot to be funny or even romantic, unlike the original and unlike Anand’s previous directorials. He also added a dollop of patriotism to it, going for the good ol’ masala films of his father Bittu Anand and his grandfather Inder Raj Anand, the producer and the screenwriter of Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Shahenshah.
It wasn’t until Anand roped in the holy trinity of producer Aditya Chopra (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, Mohabbatein), screenwriter Shridhar Raghavan (Khakee), and dialogue writer Abbas Tyrewala (Main Hoon Na) till he finally got some hold of the masala potboiler with War. And he dialled that up even further with Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Pathaan in 2023. But again, in both War and Pathaan, he seemed so occupied with getting the scale and the world-building right that his origins of a rom-com director couldn’t take over the driving seat. There was more romantic tension between the male leads Hrithik and Tiger Shroff than there was between Hrithik and Vaani Kapoor. One could also claim the same for Shah Rukh and John Abraham instead of Shah Rukh and Deepika in Pathaan.
In the vastness of the YRF Spy Universe, Anand lost his keen eye for romance to the trappings of the genre. Both his leading ladies — Vaani and Deepika — were reduced to either a Bond Girl prototype or a sacrificial pawn. So much so that the best love story in all of the YRF Spy Universe disappointingly remains its retrofitted inaugural film — Kabir Khan’s Ek Tha Tiger (2012), in which Indian spy Salman Khan and Pakistani spy Katrina’s elope together, much to the dismay of their respective agencies.
In Anand’s latest directorial, Fighter last year, Hrithik’s Patty dismisses Deepika’s plea for romantic resolution by declaring, “Fighter hu. Jang ladta hu, jhagde nahi” (I’m a fighter. I engage in wars, not lover quarrels). Erm, sure. But just having a patriotic purpose doesn’t absolve Patty of being a self-obsessed jerk like Nick from Salaam Namaste. Dear Siddharth Anand, can we, once in a while, go back to the affable protagonist who faints at the sight of blood?
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