Imtiaz Ali’s films taught me that getting what you want won’t save you

What came to mind almost instantly was Harry (Shah Rukh Khan) from Imtiaz Ali’s Jab Harry Met Sejal. There is a moment when the restlessness he has spent so long outrunning finally catches up with him. The tears do not solve anything for him. They simply carry him through what words cannot. They emerge from a deeper estrangement, from the feeling of being unwanted, of no longer knowing where to place yourself in your own life. For him, they become a passage through that bewilderment. For me, it was very much the same. The tears did not offer clarity, nor did they lessen the weight of what had brought them forth. They simply gave form a to a grief that had loitered too long without language, carrying me through a loneliness I had spent months trying to reason with and a year trying not to name.

Harry breaks down after feeling lost in a city he once escaped to.

There is a stunning montage in Love Aaj Kal, edited by Aarti Bajaj and set to the kinetic pulse of late KK’s voice, that captures a tragedy few films articulate with such perfection. Jai (Saif Ali Khan) lands his dream job in San Francisco, he is everything a young man imagines he should be. Work becomes a calling, almost a faith. The city unfolds before him like a promise. He throws himself into new projects, new friendships, new streets, new possibilities. Each day seems to offer another horizon to chase. What makes the montage so affecting is that it never marks the moment things begin to change. He never realises when fulfilment slowly settles into familiarity, when enthusiasm begins to harden into routine. He continues to meet new people, yet moves further from himself. The very city that once seemed to open itself up to him begins to feel smaller with each passing day. What had arrived as freedom slowly takes the shape of a cage.

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Perhaps that is the defining arc of an Ali protagonist. Perhaps, it resonates so deeply because it is also the defining arc of life itself. Perhaps, not necessarily the struggle to attain what we desire, but the reckoning that follows once we do. Perhaps that is the cruellest kind of disillusionment, the moment you realise that what is trapping you is not a place, but the life you once believed would save you. That is why I often find myself thinking about Ali’s characters long after their stories have ended. I think of Ved (Ranbir Kapoor) from Tamasha. I think of Veera (Alia Bhatt) from Highway. They earn the lives they desperately needed, the lives they fought so hard to reclaim. But I cannot help wondering: what happens after that? Are they truly happy? Does the attainment of freedom mark the end of their suffering, or the beginning of a different kind of uncertainty?

Tamasha inspired an entire generation to pursue its calling, to reject lives that felt borrowed and embrace lives that felt their own. But it never quite warned that same generation about the price such a choice demands. The loneliness of choosing differently. The terrifying responsibility of becoming the person you claim you want to be. Ali often rescues his characters from the suffocation of cities. He takes them to mountains, to open roads, to distant horizons. He offers them escape. But again, does he ever warn them that the air at the summit is thinner than they imagined. That freedom, too, can leave you breathless. That liberation carries its own burdens. It is a thought that inevitably brings me back to Rockstar. There is that remarkable moment when Jordan (Ranbir Kapoor), standing at the very peak of the fame he once chased with such desperation, looks around and realises that this cannot be what the journey was for.

It is ultimately love that heals Imtiaz Ali’s characters, much as it does in life

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Perhaps this, more than anything else, is the defining arc of an Ali protagonist. Beyond the existential unravelling. Beyond the confusion of belonging. Beyond the wars his characters wage against expectation, convention, and the versions of themselves they have outgrown. They almost always arrive at the same place. Love. For all the miles his characters travel in search of themselves, it is often in the presence of another person that they finally feel seen. Love becomes the language through which they make sense of their own chaos. It is both the wound and the balm, the thing that undoes them and the thing that gathers them back together. And so I find myself thinking of Ved. Life after Tamasha could not have been easy. Choosing yourself never is. There would have been doubts, setbacks, failures. But somewhere in that imagined future, Tara (Deepika Padukone) would still be there.

Quite similarly, I think of Harry, and naturally, of Sejal (Anushka Sharma) as well. Of Aditya (Shahid Kapoor) and Geet (Kareena Kapoor). Of Jai and Meera (Deepika Padukone). Maybe that is what moves me most about Ali’s cinema. Not the journeys or the self-discovery. But the suggestion that while life may never stop breaking our hearts in small and spectacular ways, love remains the one thing that softens the fall. So, as I sat with my own grief that random Monday afternoon, I found myself returning to a line of thought that felt almost embarrassingly simple: life may have undone me many times over, but perhaps love hasn’t. Perhaps that is why we continue searching for it, not because it saves us from sorrow, but because it gives us someone to turn towards when sorrow inevitably arrives. And maybe that is enough. Maybe, in the end, that is everything.