Dear Karan Johar, your films shatter our dreams, but I can't stop watching them

Dear Karan,

Recently, a love triangle in Kerala led to a murder in Australia. The wife conspired with her sweetheart to murder the husband. She poisoned him with cyanide. This is how love triangles could end in a country like ours. But you always tell a different story: far from the shores of reality.

You make gold of the silver screen. With your latest outing Ae Dil Hai Mushkil round the corner, I can only sense love triangles becoming the absolute rage, and some broken hearts in reality.

Each time your movie is about to release, I can't but wonder whose dreams will be shattered next.

Your movies are dreams that a common man cannot fulfil. Your movies are fantasies that often go waste. You build romance that may not always exist and your love for the rich and famous, for the larger-than-life sort of screenplay, makes us believe that someone somewhere is made for us - someone with a million dollar bucks.

But, dear Karan, you make it so hard for us women to like ordinary men. You brought Rahul into our lives with Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and he became a household name.

Most girls were looking at their guy friends with the twinkle in their eye in search of their own version of the basketball dream. No one found their Rahul. I most definitely did not.

Your movies gave a lot of women the right to hope in the most impossible way. When Imran Khan fell in love in I Hate Luv Stories, you splashed rainbows on our pale, empty canvasses. The dalliance between the Mills and Boon series and your movie became a talking point.

When you established the bond between a mother and her lost son in Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, I was misty-eyed each time Jaya Bachchan ran to the door, or pretty much anywhere in space, sensing her elder son walk in. Mothers have that instinct. Or, do they?

Today, every time I happen to watch K3G, it makes me feel unaccomplished because my toddler has to literally scream at times to get my attention. If the silence lasts longer than five minutes, I run to every door looking for him.

And, when the protagonist in SRK - the boy who studies abroad, shuttles between home and school in choppers, and wears perfectly tailored clothing like he just walked out of the Armani store - finds a loud, not-so-charming, ordinary girl in a chaotic Chandni Chowk, and falls in love with her in the blink of an eye, it feels like my fairytale coming true.

Oddly, Karan, we believe too much in your stories. We are sold on the idea of a frog prince riding a Porsche Cayenne heading to Chandni Chowk in search of a soulmate. Wicked? Bewitching? No, very wicked.

Next came Kal Ho Na Ho, and you made every girl believe that there will be some Mr Right who would come and fix her and her troubled family. And, to add to the woes, SRK and Saif made us believe that you can set two people up for life in six days.

That is a big one for most boys unless you are SRK.

A long dream cut short.

When you put students in a castle-like-school in SOTY. I wondered if my life was an incomprehensible waste, studying as I did in a convent back in the hills, with no access to boys, or brands.

Do schools like that even exist? Can a romance flourish amid board exams? Are we allowed to attend proms in luxurious pompom dresses and wear Jimmy Choos to the dance floor? A dismal no.

What is intriguing is that every movie that you have written, directed and produced, is a reflection of you as a man and your dreams. And that sense of honesty pervades those of us who trust your storytelling.

In a recent conversation with a publishing house, you mentioned that you haven't yet found your own concept of love. "I would imagine that I would be in an amazing love relationship and it should be stormy and romantic and full of drama but I have to live vicariously through my cinema."

Likewise, many of us haven't.

When you translate your unfulfilled desires and passion into movie-making, you strike a chord with people, especially with women like me. Because, somewhere, we are all dreaming your dreams.

You make extramarital affairs and divorces look and sound so appealing. A cakewalk really. Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna and its characters, with all their complications, made falling in love beautiful and falling out of love the solution. Separations and divorces are not so pretty in real life and anything but easy.

In all your gifts to cinema, you have sold dreams that can't come true. While selling them on the silver screen, you have broken many.

-

A movie buff.

Also read - Five things we learnt from Ae Dil Hai Mushkil's teaser