The YRK Unified Film Universe Theory

The genius of Yash Chopra as a filmmaker can not be denied. The impeccable taste shown in his classic films like Deewar, Kabhi Kabhi, Kala Patthar and Lamhe show a deep understanding of the complex nature of human relationships and the depth of our emotions. But, his real genius comes from his Magnum Opus, his final, greatest work — the Yash-Rahul-Khan Unified Film Universe.

The YRK Universe tells the story of a troubled young boy — Rahul — and his battle with mental illness over the course of a troubled life. His attempts at belonging anywhere only seem to repel others from him, and many times end with him getting physically attacked. Like a modern-day, multi-film Mera Naam Joker, Rahul continues from one stage in life to the next, looking for love, and a place to call home.

Over the course of what conservative scholars call a Four film saga, and many independent researchers count as many as Nine total films, Rahul’s mental illness goes from a ‘simple’ mania to repeated fugue states, linked with elaborate delusions of grandeur. The cause of this could have been a simple mood disorder that went undiagnosed for many years, thus resulting in emotional and physical trauma that triggered psychotic mental incidents like fugue and schizoid delusions.

Rahul’s story is told over the course of Four Primary Source films, Two Secondary Sources, and Three Tertiary Source films. Each individual film, while being a complete, neatly tied-up ‘bollywood’ story, hides the larger narrative of this epic saga.

The films directed by Yash Chopra himself form the core emotional story of Rahul from beginning to end, are labelled in red and form the Canon. Two films directed by Aditya Chopra form the Appendix — linking stories that add to the larger picture and fill holes, but reveal little about Rahul’s emotional journey. Lastly, and most controversial, are the Apocryphal Mohabbatein, Chak De! India and Fan episodes, that can only be explained as extended delusions that Rahul had while under professional care.

A short summary of the YRK cycle, without going into the intricacies, is listed below:

DARR: The story begins with RAHUL MEHRA in college, reaching the end of puberty where his latent mental issues begin to manifest. Rahul was raised by a distant father who was away on active naval duty for most of his childhood. Possibly Rahul would remind the father of his dead mother, who passed after a troubled fight with schizophrenia, making the father keep a distance from Rahul in the few years following the mother’s death. But still, Rahul’s father cared for him much too much, and sheltered him from the world as best he could — until it was time for Rahul to attend college.

Mingling with people his own age for the first time, Rahul develops strong feelings for his classmate KIRAN. Unsure and unaware of the best way to express those feelings, he begins to stalk her. This ends badly for him, as his awkward and misunderstood attempts to woo Kiran (which include carving his name into his chest) and express his feelings over the course of her courtship and marriage to a marine commando. Rahul antagonizes the marine commando not just for competing with him for Kiran’s feelings, but also his father, his commanding officer.

What Rahul thinks was a ‘love affair’ ends with him getting attacked and receiving frontal lobe damage. Remember this pattern of infatuation, obsession, and physical assault, because it appears frequently throughout his life.

Rahul’s father, disgraced, and realizing that for the sake of his own career he had neglected the special needs of his only child, he quits the Indian Navy and moves abroad with him to avoid the scandal.

DDLJ-1: Rahul and his father relocate in England, where no one knows him as the Navy Brat Stalker, and change their name to MALHOTRA. Rahul (now RAJ, one of his aliases. We will however refer to him as Rahul for the sake of clarity) has a hard time coping, especially after his brain injury. Because of the injury, and his own guilt, Rahul’s father indulges him a lot, to go as far as to set him up in a small flat in London (with a full-time minder, who Rahul believes is his flatmate) so that Rahul can live out his fantasy of being a busker / handyman / waiter who can survive in London by doing only that.

JTHJ-1: While shoveling snow outside a church, Rahul meets MEERA a beautiful, rich, London socialite heiress who will obviously not fall in love with a handyman / waiter at first sight. Rahul’s delusions lead him to believe that it was her parents who stopped her from loving him, and in the process of stalking her, he has a road accident that pushes him into a fugue state. Rahul’s father, guilty and ashamed at his horrible parenting skills, sends him on a rail-tour of Europe to keep him away from London while he does damage control. His father realizes that Rahul can only enjoy the few, fleeting joys of life because the true, lasting happiness of meaningful relationships is something he can never have.

DDLJ-2: On his trip (accompanied by full time, trained professional minders and nurses whom Rahul believed were his friends) he meets SIMRAN, another NRI who, like him, comes from overprotective households and doesn’t have even a hint of an English accent. Simran also seems to have Rahul’s manic tendencies (both like to sing to themselves when alone, while performing largely flailing dance moves) and the two decide that they are in love.

Simran’s father has better sense than that, and sends Simran home to the village of his birth in Punjab, where she can be away from Rahul’s influence and be under the caring, watchful eye of his extended family.

Meanwhile, Rahul, deep in an extended manic episode, reaches Punjab. His father accompanies him, still feeling guilty enough to let Rahul have his fantasies as long as he doesn’t get hurt. In this case, Rahul does get hurt, hurt very badly. Beaten to a pulp, Rahul is put on a train to go back to Amritsar from where he can take a flight back to London with his father.

However, as Rahul boards the train, leaning out of the door, hand reaching out to take Simran’s hand, Simran’s father realizes the reality of Rahul’s situation — he really is quite mentally ill. He tells Simran to go to him, so she can keep an eye on him till Amritsar, where the proper authorities will be waiting to take him off the train and get him the help he needs.

Simran gets off the train at Amritsar and marries the perfectly nice man his father had introduced her to, settles down and raises a nice, if somewhat simple, child.

RNBJ: The heat has NOT died down in London, and Rahul and his father, never leave Amritsar. It does not have any bad memories for Rahul, and is a much calmer, slower city to live in, one without any intense triggers for Rahul’s psychoses. Somewhere in the jumble of his head Rahul realizes how the two times he fell in love, he got his ass handed to him in fights with big burly boyfriends. After treatment, Rahul emerges from a fugue state in another identity, mild-mannered government employee ‘Suri’.

Rahul’s father spent whatever money he had left in rehabilitation therapy for Rahul, that left him somewhat subdued and repressed, but at least functional in society. Rahul’s father dies happy, knowing that Rahul now has a stable, unstimulating government job in Punjab, a house to live in, and nothing around him that might trigger one of his episodes.

Some years after his father’s death, Rahul finds himself in a situation where his match is arranged with the daughter of a former professor (a professor of Psychology, who had done studies on him while he was institutionalized.)

The marriage, and being in close contact with an attractive young woman after so many years trigger something inside Rahul — after many years, and despite the oversight of the part-time minder that Rahul’s father had hired to keep an eye on him, Rahul goes on a full manic episode, and joins dance classes to stalk / interact with his new wife.

His wife, of course, instantly sees through the ‘act’ and flees back home, away from the creepy man with two personalities, becoming a prime example of the problem with impromptu deathbed arranged marriages.

DTPH: Without his wife to hold him back, Rahul remodels the huge house his father bought him and makes it into a dance studio to live out the foolish delusion he is currently lost in. Still in the throes of mania, he puts together a dance troupe and decides to hold a dance concert without a producer, script, or even a theme — only the idea of an elusive girl who waits for true love to find her. This would be the first big revelation of what Rahul has been looking for all his life, and only in finding expression through dance and music could he stop his stalker-tendencies and interact with women in normal ways.

But while he is much more functional than he was in college, he is still suffering very much. He has a mentally abusive relationship with NISHA, which might be a result of him finding ways to push away the few people that genuinely care about him, like his father, while he himself chases after people who don’t care for him, being the only kind of relationship he understands.

In the end, he pushes away NISHA, the one person who cared for him, for POOJA, an amateur dancer who performs in his musical as a last-minute replacement, after which she marries her big, burly boyfriend and lives her life.

Rahul, of course, cannot bear this rejection and enters a fugue state again, leaving NISHA standing there looking like an idiot for being in love with a literal madman.

JTHJ-2: Rahul emerges from this final fugue state in Kashmir, honestly believing that he is in the Indian Army. Of course, since the army has a basic psych requirement for all new recruits that would have rejected Rahul instantly, he is basically just a guy riding around the Kashmiri countryside in partial uniform, not following the facial hair requirements, leaving and entering active field zones whenever the fuck he feels like. The actual bomb squad likes having a human shield around, so they humour Rahul whenever he wants to come in to ‘defuse’ a bomb, but it’s mostly them telling him what exactly to do from a safe distance hoping he doesn’t blow himself up.

Being alone for these extended periods allow Rahul to live in even longer extended delusions, even ones including MEERA from London, who is by now divorced from her first husband and living with a new partner, having forgotten that snow shoveling handyman from that one time at church.

Rahul’s fantasies allow him to spend whole days and weeks just living in camps by the side of the road, driving alone in and out disputed territory wearing military colours surviving only with what can be called the luck of fools, writing gibberish poetry in notebooks and dreaming about his imaginary lovers…

VE-ZA: In one of these elaborate fantasies, Rahul rescues beautiful heiress and social worker ZAARA from an overturned cross-border bus. Of course, they fall in love soon after, but because of the complications that exist only in Rahul’s head, the two cannot be together.

In an attempt to reach the imaginary Zaara, Rahul is captured by Pakistani forces. Seeing his Indian uniform they arrest him as an enemy combatant, but since the Indian Army cannot come up with records of him ever actually being in the Indian Army, the Pakistani army charges him with espionage and throws him in prison.

This is the end of Rahul’s story, locked up forever, retreating deeper and deeper into his delusions, slowly losing his mind…

But in his mind, he is a soldier, a poet, a moviestar, a teacher, a mysterious hero with a lifetime of heartbreak in his eyes but not a care for his life in his heart…

In his mind, he is a disgraced Hockey player who coaches a team of misfits to world cup gold through the sheer power of inspirational speeches…

In his mind, he is a music teacher that incites his students to live life to the fullest and stand up to grumpy authority figures…

In his mind, ZAARA still waits for him, growing old in age but only stronger in love, and together they spend their end-years together, in lush Pindu Punjab, feeding each other makke di roti and sarson da saag harvested from the same fields of mustard where he first lost his innocence to SIMRAN…

In his mind, he rides his bike up and down from Batalik to Udhampur, defusing bombs with poetry and brooding looks…

MEERA comes to him arms outstretched even as he defuses bombs left and right without a care for his life, ready to accept him for who he is, however he is, ready to give him the only thing that Rahul ever wanted — Love.

In his mind, he lives all these lives and more, while rotting away in prison as just another forgotten stateless person. He escapes into the prison of his mind to live out his last years, but if only he could have escaped the prison… that was his life.

The End

Key

Canon

DARR — Darr, 1993

DTPH — Dil To Pagal Hai, 1997

VE-ZA — Veer-Zaara, 2004

JTHJ — Jab Tak Hai Jaan, 2012

Appendix

DDLJ — Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge, 1995

RNBJ — Rab Ne Bana di Jodi, 2008

Apocrypha

MBTN — Mohabbatein, 2000. A delusional fantasy where Rahul imagines himself as a music teacher in a boarding boys’ college in a part of India that looks exactly like an English castle. Mostly used by him to come to terms with his strict father before he quit his job and relocated them to England to devote himself to Rahul’s care.

CHDI — Chak De! India, 2007. A fantasy where Rahul is the disgraced hockey team captain that trains India’s women’s team to win the hockey world cup. Thought to represent the early years in prison when his mind was trying to make up for all the people he let down in his downward spiral into mental illness by being an inspiration sports cliche.

FAN — Fan, 2015. A delusion in his later years in life (while in the Pakistani prison) that showed the degradation of his therapy and recovery as his stalker tendencies returned in an otherwise uneventful fantasy about being a movie star. Also showed the degradation of his mental health as not much effort was put into making the later half of this fantasy believable.