What Imtiaz Ali and Karan Johar Are Really Selling You

So everyone thinks the great Bollywood love story debate is Karan Johar versus Imtiaz Ali. The big fat designer wedding versus the messy backpack romance. The mansion versus the mountain. And the general consensus among people my age is that KJo makes fake plastic love for people who have never felt a real emotion in their lives, and Imtiaz makes the actual stuff. The honest stuff. The love that hurts on the way down.I believed this too. For years. And then I started paying attention to the money.

Because here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud. Both of these men are selling you a fantasy you cannot afford. They are just charging you different emotions for it.

 

Karan Johar love happens in houses that do not exist. The Raichand mansion in K3G has a foyer bigger than most people's entire futures. Everyone enters by helicopter. The sad middle class family that Kajol comes from is "middle class" in the way that a duplex in Chandni Chowk with a joint family of forty smiling people is middle class, which is to say not at all. Nobody in a KJo film has a job that matters to the plot. They have careers the way they have good lighting, as a backdrop. The conflict is never the rent. The conflict is always whether dad will approve, whether the family name survives, whether love can exist inside a tradition this expensive. Love in a KJo film is a luxury good. It comes in chiffon, it comes in slow motion, it comes with a Manish Malhotra wedding at the end as the reward for surviving your own relatives. It is the fantasy of arriving. You climb the mountain you already own and love is waiting at the top in a sherwani.

And then Imtiaz Ali shows up and feels like the complete opposite of all that. No mansions. No weddings shot like ad films. Just trains and mountains and two restless people circling each other across very scenic geography. His love does not happen at the top of the climb, it happens on the road, in transit, in the in-between. It feels real because it is uncomfortable. People in his films are sad in a way KJo characters are structurally not allowed to be. So obviously our whole generation looked at this and went finally, someone gets it.

But look a little closer at who gets to go on these journeys.Geet runs away from home in Jab We Met, except Geet is from a wealthy Bhatinda family and the running away is a tantrum with a return ticket. Ved in Tamasha is a corporate product manager who can afford to fly to Corsica to find himself, which is a sentence that should make you laugh. Even Rockstar, the one where the guy genuinely becomes a starving destroyed artist, starts him off comfortable in Delhi at Stephen's before the suffering becomes aesthetic. The self discovery is bankrolled. You can only find your real self in Europe if someone back home is quietly funding the search. The freedom Imtiaz sells is real, but it has a price tag and the price tag is a safety net you may not have.

So here is the actual difference, and it was never realness versus fakeness. KJo sells the fantasy of arriving. Imtiaz sells the fantasy of escaping. The KJo viewer wants to be richer. The Imtiaz viewer wants to be freer. And both of those wants cost the exact same thing, which is money you do not have. One dresses it up as a wedding and the other dresses it down as a backpack, but a Eurotrip and a destination wedding are funded out of the same account.

Which brings us to why our generation quietly turned on Karan Johar and reclaimed Tamasha and Rockstar like they were our own personal scripture. It is because the mansion fantasy feels tone deaf now. In a job market like this, watching beautiful rich people agonise over family honour in a palace feels like being shown a menu you can't order from. But the Imtiaz fantasy, your soul-crushing corporate job is killing the real you, that does not feel like a fantasy at all. That feels like a documentary. That feels like Monday.

Except here is the joke, and it is on us. We can't afford the escape either. We relate to Ved sitting in his cubicle dying inside, and then we cannot quit our own cubicle, because rent, because EMI, because the safety net Geet had is not the safety net we have. We took the half of Imtiaz that hurts and we will never get to the half that frees you. We are stuck in the part of the movie before the mountain.

So the real difference between Imtiaz Ali and Karan Johar was never honesty versus fakeness. It was simply which class anxiety they each decided to put on screen and charge admission for. One sold us the dream of having arrived. The other sold us the dream of getting out. And both of them, gently, beautifully, in two completely different wardrobes, sold us something we were always going to have to watch from the cheap seats.

And I will not be taking questions at this time.