Cinemaah

Many Idiots!


Ever since Aamir Khan and 3 Idiots have made it cool to defy parents and do your own thing, idiots are crawling out of the woodwork.

What do the teens in Roshan Abbas’s Always Kabhi Kabhi want? It’s not quite clear, but by the time the interval rolls around after a lot of singing, dancing and making fun of teachers, the four lead characters have a problem, which doesn’t seem earth-shattering to the viewer.

Sameer (Ali Fazal—the only real actor of the lot) can’t communicate with his parents, so when he us caught in a drug raid (and he is stoned), the cops blackmail him.  Aishwarya (Giselle Monteiro) is being pushed into a film career by her mother; Nandini’s (Zoa Morani) parents have to time for her and she suspects she may be pregnant by a guy called Toy Boy (really!). Tariq’s (Satyajeet Dubey) father wants him to go to a top US university.  All this petty griping is happening against rehearsals of Romeo and Juliet for an inter-collegiate drama competition.

To make it look and sound like  ‘young’ film, there is talk of status updates and smses, and songs in hybrid lingo (Undi the condi of my heart? Ouch!) So the teens come to the conclusion that parents are a problem and the only way to communicate is through Shakespeare, because, you see, if Romeo and Juliet had been able to sit across the table and talk to their parents, the story wouldn’t have been tragic.

Shah Rukh Khan’ company produced this, he endorsed it… Groan!  Ticket money down the drain.