The Indian society is also more conservative and I question how the character of Tina could have gotten away with walking around wearing what she was wearing without being harassed even if she wasn’t walking around alone in the streets.
The inappropriate miniskirt to show Tina as more in touch with her femininity just seems misogynistic though even (or especially) from a conservative perspective.
KUCH KUCH HOTA HAI TINA MOVIE
Anjali is just a tomboy because she’s a failure and doesn’t know who she is even though she was perfectly happy throughout the movie until she fell in love with the main character and suddenly “realized” how unhappy she was, until she grows up and dons a sari. I know the character is supposed to be rebellious and modern but she’s not that rebellious she’s traditional and homely with just enough education and rebellion to not seem too old fashioned next to tomboy Anjali but a more truer form of progressiveness “the correct way”. I mean the top I could see if she was wearing a sari. For better or for worse, the film has grown to become my best friend and you know what someone great once said? Pyaar dosti hai.She seems to wearing nude nylon stockings but how much difference do they really make? No one, not even in the west wears a miniskirt and a sleeveless crop top with heels to school but I imagine in india schools are a lot more conservative and have uniforms. The world around us continues to spin, our tastes evolve, we learn to love and hate new things, but Kuch Kuch Hota Hai stays. There’s a familiarity that the film carries within itself, a familiarity that is reminiscent of an enduring friendship. On your worst days, you can fall back on ‘Koi Mil Gaya’ and watch Rahul and Anjali wish on a shooting star, as you sigh at how oblivious they are to what awaits them. The humour, the delightful music and the iconic dialogues make Kuch Kuch Hota Hai the equivalent of a warm hug. Karan Johar wanted to make a point about friendship and love, he wanted us to re-examine our definitions of what it meant to love someone and if it was possible for that love to endure, despite circumstances beyond our control. You can’t help but smile at the world this film builds, at its cloying sentimentality that eventually grows on you. It has a way of drawing you into its bizarre world of unrealistic colleges, kooky characters and its single-minded devotion to … fun. Any rational person would know better than to call Kuch Kuch Hota Hai one of their favourite films of all time.Īnd yet here I am, declaring my love for my life-long guilty pleasure.įor all its glaring shortcomings and its general disregard for subtlety, it is also the ultimate Bollywood experience. It’s not a great film and it’s perhaps inadvertently propagated an endless number of stereotypes about who the ‘right kind of girl’ is and why she deserves a happy ending. Rahul is selfish, Tina is more of an idea than an actual person and Anjali … Anjali should have just known better. We all know how problematic the film is with its stereotypical gender roles and the uncritical lens through which it looks at marriage and love. But nostalgia is tricky, nostalgia pushes you to build defences for things you shouldn’t be defending, it makes you passionately break down Rahul’s irrational behaviour in an attempt to create some form of meaning. As someone who’s harboured a life-long love for all kinds of cinema, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai fails miserably when analysed critically. What makes it so special? I ask myself this question every time I decide to re-watch it.