There are some films that you watch, enjoy and eventually forget. And then there are films that somehow stay with you. Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna is one of them.
Released on August 11, 2006, Karan Johar’s ambitious, complicated and, at the time, rather controversial take on love and marriage is now 20 years old. And here we are wondering… how has it been two decades already? It still feels like yesterday that we were humming “Mitwa”, obsessing over New York, arguing about Dev and Maya, and wondering whether Rishi and Rhea deserved better.
But here’s a little piece of KANK trivia that makes the nostalgia even more interesting: Abhishek Bachchan’s Rishi Talwar wasn’t originally meant to be his.
When Karan Johar was putting together the cast, he had a rather
different actor in mind for Rishi. Ajay Devgn was his initial choice for the role, while Saif Ali Khan was also considered. Both actors, however, had prior commitments to Vishal Bhardwaj’s Omkara and eventually did not take up the film.
And that’s where Abhishek entered the picture. Karan had been impressed by Abhishek’s work in Yuva, and eventually saw him as the right person to bring Rishi to life. The rest, of course, is Bollywood history. Abhishek’s Rishi became the warm, hopelessly romantic man who loved Maya with everything he had, even when the marriage he thought was perfect was slowly falling apart.
Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna was never really a conventional Bollywood romance. It had Shah Rukh Khan playing a bitter, emotionally frustrated man who had lost his passion for football after an accident. Rani Mukerji’s Maya was not the bubbly heroine audiences were used to seeing. Preity Zinta’s Rhea was ambitious and fiercely independent, while Abhishek’s Rishi was the seemingly perfect husband whose marriage was anything but perfect.
And then there was Amitabh Bachchan’s Samarjit Talwar — or, as everyone remembers him, Sexy Sam.
The film was messy, dramatic, glamorous, emotional and occasionally outrageous. It was also very, very 2000s. The giant New York houses, the designer clothes, the snowy streets, the songs that practically became characters themselves. No wonder audiences had strong feelings about it.
Two decades later, even Karan Johar has looked back at the film with a mixture of affection and self-criticism. On its 20th anniversary, he acknowledged that the film was “over-bloated”, while still standing by the emotional core that inspired it. He has also recalled just how angry some viewers were when they first saw it..
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