They are still blissed out. Raj Chopra and Simran Singh of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge just completed their 16th romance anniversary at Mumbai’s Maratha Mandir cinema where it has been showing uninterrupted ever since it opened in October 1995.

Although DDLJ’s estimated record box office collections of `125 crore have been outsmashed over the decades by Hum Aapke Hain Kaun!, Om Shanti Om, 3 Idiots, Dabangg and Bodyguard, the Shah Rukh Khan-Kajol love story which peaks on an Eurorail journey, continues to evoke nostalgia-laden oohs-and-aahs. Also, no other Indian film has demonstrated such staying power, attracting a sizeable audience to its daily matinee shows. In terms of longevity, Sholay (1975) is a distant second, clocking in five unpunctuated years at Mumbai’s Minerva auditorium.
And to think that Aditya Chopra’s co-written-and-directed DDLJ could have been an entirely different film altogether, with a communal conflict as the pivot of its plot.
In one of the script drafts of of his debut film, the scion of the Yash Chopra family, then 23, had made the lead pair meet at a railway station when a Hindu-Muslim riot breaks out in Mumbai. The boy-meets-girl situation showed them to be ignorant about each other’s name and religion, till their families enter the picture.
Influenced, subsequently, by Sooraj Barjatya’s Maine Pyaar Kiya, Hollywood’s emotionally delicate Before Sunrise, and his father’s brand of glossy romances, Aditya Chopra aka Adi opted to play safe. Gratifyingly the alternative script did have substance, blending traditional with modern values.
Simran was, in fact, a pretty Parsi girl often seen at the Chopra bungalow dinners. It was no secret that Adi was soft on her but she married someone else. Adi retained her name in the script. His friends would say, “Please don’t ask him about this, he’ll get very upset.” There was a boyish, vulnerable quality about Adi then. He would downsize himself, after the humongous success of DDLJ, shrugging, “It was a fluke. I don’t even know if I ever want to direct a film again.”
It was on a madly rainy afternoon that Adi gave me his first and last interview ever. This was shortly after he had picked up an armful of awards for DDLJ. He was especially proud of the Best Screenplay and Dialogue Awards, because “if the plot can’t hold the audience’s interest after the interval, it collapses”. Somewhere inside him, he was hurt that there had been a fallout with his writing collaborators Javed Sidiqui and Honey Irani. He had particularly doted on Honey ‘Aunty’ with whom he had attempted to regurgitate the Robert Redford-Demi Moore romancer Indecent Proposal. “The very idea of adapting that movie was childish,” he’d blush.
Adi abhorred ostentation. He wore a Cartier watch but only because it was a hand-me-down. He wouldn’t travel for shoots abroad with a clutch of friends in cattle class. Inadvertently perhaps, DDLJ touched on nerve of the Indian diaspora. Imitations followed: a thousand second-generation NRI Dilwales chased their potential dulhanias through Trafalgar Square and for that crucial desi tadka, jetted back to Punjab’s mustard fields to live happily ever after.
Much younger but much wiser, Adi would be my emergency Agony Uncle. Vis-a-vis an actor who would get viciously vengeful about me, he advised, “Your review must say what you truly believe. It doesn’t matter what he or anyone thinks.” The words resonate. Alas, I did not like his second film Mohabbatein and said so. He has never spoken to me again, neither have I.
Since then, Adi has become the crown prince of the Yash Raj studio, his private life has seen tempestuous highs and lows. He has become famously reclusive and arrogant. On the 16th year of DDLJ, though, he must have surely looked back on his life... with affection.