Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sadness, Sometimes Deleted Scene
I have a bone to pick with Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham. Okay, okay, I know. If we start picking bones with the movies of that era, there is a whole skeleton of bones that we can pick. I mean, this movie has its racist, misogynistic, and fatphobic moments.
This film, however, defines my childhood. Its soundtrack is the music of my school days, back when we used to have cassettes and played them on our two-in-ones*. Its dialogues remind me of evenings during summer vacations when Filmfare Awards would air on TV and the director, Karan Johar would do his all-too-famous bits.
Recently I came across a deleted scene on Instagram. I quickly went on YouTube and typed Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham deleted scenes. There is a whole bunch of them, folks. Of the eight that I watched, there is one scene I cannot believe got deleted. That’s the itch in my brain I want to write about.
If you aren’t familiar, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham, or K3G, is a 2001 Hindi-language film, directed by Karan Johar. This film is a whopping 3 hours and 30 minutes long. That might sound intimidating but, trust me, the more you watch it, the shorter it feels.
The story follows the rich and privileged Raichand family that lives in a castle bigger than my apartment complex. The adopted, older son of the family, Rahul Raichand (Shah Rukh Khan) falls in love with Anjali Sharma (Kajol), a poor woman from Chandni Chowk, and marries her without informing his family.
Yashvardhan Raichand (Amitabh Bachchan), the strict patriarch of the family and Rahul’s father, disowns him for marrying someone from outside their “community.” Rahul and Anjali move to London along with Anjali’s sister, Pooja (Kareena Kapoor Khan), and Rahul’s helper, Sayeeda Daijaan or “DJ.” (Farida Jalal).
Ten years later, Rahul’s younger brother, Rohan Raichand (Hrithik Roshan) decides to reconcile the family. Will he, the biological child to the Raichand khandaan* and the heir to their wealth, be able to reunite his family and make his long-suffering mother, Nandini Raichand (Jaya Bachchan) smile once more?
The film’s name translates to Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sadness, and that’s what the movie is about. It’s about a huge family, their relatives, friends, neighbours, lovers, children, grandparents, house helps, and college roommates working through a life where there is happiness in sadness and sadness in happiness.
Over the years, I have developed a love for this movie that I can’t fully explain. A lot of things about it don’t actually work. It’s painfully melodramatic, the characters are sometimes caricatures, and the storylines are unbelievably privileged.
Yet, somehow, I can’t get enough of it. I miss the characters each time I finish the movie, and I get excited to meet them again when it airs on TV. It is incredible how so many characters and so many storylines running over 10 years were handled so crisply. In a lot of ways, K3G is Karan Johar’s magnum opus.
When I was younger, the movie mainly appealed to me for its songs. You are my Soniya had a chokehold on the kids of my generation. I realise now that this movie is more than just about the colours, the campy clothes, and the ridiculous jokes.
Perhaps my favourite storyline is Rahul and Anjali’s shift to London. Anjali seems to desperately hold on to her “Indian values.” We see her singing Hindu bhajans and worship songs, much to her husband’s irritation. She sings patriotic songs about the rivers and the mountains of India in a language her son barely speaks. She mocks her perfectly nice white neighbour, Mrs Sprightly, with an over-the-top fake British accent that makes me cringe every time.
Then there is Pooja. Let’s just say K3G gave us our very own Mean Girl in Pooja. Pooja transforms from the oily-haired Chandni Chowk girl to a confident and sexy woman, Poo. (Yeah, that’s what they call her. It’s supposed to be cool. Don’t ask.)
Think what you may of her, but Poo championed for women my age everything feminine that is so easily ridiculed and sidelined. She embodied it with incredible confidence. Her introduction is flawless: Against the backdrop of It’s Raining Men, Poo picks her startlingly pink outfit, applies lipgloss, dances on a pink and lavender bed, pouts, and then coos this iconic line at the mirror, “You have no right to look this beautiful. Not fair!”
There is another scene that has become a meme on the internet. Kareena as Poo is seen rating the men who line up to go to prom with her. It’s sassy and honestly a bit offensive, but the beauty of it lies in the unabashed campiness.
Poo was Stereotypical Barbie before our Barbie era. Poo was the original gaslight, girlboss, gatekeep pioneer, and her girl math always girl mathed like no one else’s did.
Both Anjali and Poo are fascinating to me. I find that the ways in which they live their lives are sharp and smart attempts at belonging to a country they never thought they’d end up in.
When Poo finally meets Rohan after 10 years, we see her drop her façade for a few minutes. She explains how her family looks happy and upbeat on the outside, but the closer you get, the more sadness there is.
I have always wondered about that line. I have often cracked jokes about how, despite having been disinherited, Rahul’s house in London is just as palatial as his house in India. This is where the deleted scene comes in.
We see the family land in London 10 years ago, a little frightened at the prospect of having to start life anew. We see Rahul applying for jobs. We see a pregnant Anjali goofing around with Rahul and Daijaan at the supermarket. We see a different normalcy return to their lives, despite the sadness they carry. All of this is superimposed over Pooja and Rohan’s reunion.
This was such an important scene. That moment of reconciliation with Rohan is joyful but also tinged with pain. It’s like all the years of loneliness in her family weigh down on Pooja’s shoulders: All the years that Rohan does not know about and Pooja can’t possibly get him to fully understand.
Johar says in an interview that people told him this intercut added too much to the sequence. There were already 2 other scenes with Rohan and Pooja that preceded and followed this one and so a choice was made to delete it. I disagree that it added too much. And so do many, many commenters on YouTube, who ask why this was deleted.
Johar talks about how a filmmaker is often overindulgent when they shoot for a movie. They pull scenes straight out of the part of themselves that wants to create something magical. But then, an editor has to, um, knock some sense into them, and suggest what works and what doesn’t, often for the sake of the film’s length.
I am a writer and an editor, and I truly resonate with this. As I write, I often hear the editor in me scream, cut that out. As an editor, I feel guilty suggesting we cut something out, because who is to say what works and what doesn’t?
A scene that doesn’t impact me today might touch my heart tomorrow. I have honestly seen it happen in my own writing. The audience on Instagram and YouTube today seems to be unanimous in their verdict that this deleted scene was crucial and they’d have watched the movie even if it were 5 hours long.
I wonder if that’s something we can say only in hindsight. Now that K3G is a classic, we can’t get enough. But I imagine Johar and his team, at the time, sitting in the cutting room trying to bring this enormous, grand idea into existence. They’d have had to make some decisions on the spot. They did not yet have a generation that grew up on this film’s songs to guide their instincts. They did not yet have the confidence or the knowledge that people would want more.
The idea that the story we finally get is based on some nick-of-the-moment decisions is so fascinating to me. These decisions are so heavily based on the lore that precedes us, isn’t it? The Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham we want can only exist if the Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham we have already existed.
*Khandaan is a Hindi word that means “family.” Somehow the word khandaan feels bigger and more extravagant, as if it includes, by default, extended families, spouses, kids, spouses’ extended families, kids’ spouses, you get the drill.
*Two-in-ones were combination radio and cassette player systems, and honestly, where’s the petition to bring them back?
If you want to take a look at the other 7 deleted scenes from this movie, here is the YouTube playlist.
I do not own any of the images used in this essay. All images used here belong to Dharma Productions, and I have used the images solely for commentary on and review of movies.
If you enjoy my writing, do consider supporting my work via my Buy Me A Coffee page. You can click on the Give a Tip button below. Thank you so much. Happy reading!
