A style of their own

...and thus, I just finished watching Andaz Apna Apna for the twelfth time.

Amazingly enough, it still managed to make me laugh. Which is when I realized that I had to blog about it.

What is it about this movie, a flop when it was released way back in 1994, which has since gone on to become a beloved cult classic, that pulls me back time and again?

Well for one, the director Rajkumar Santoshi had made this movie at the time when he was at the peak of his art, having already made Ghayal and Damini, two heavy-duty Hindi potboilers, still popular today.

Andaz Apna Apna was an out and out comedy. Unlike other Hindi movies of the time, which used comedy as an ingredient along with parts of romance, tragedy and action (typically termed masala movies), here was a movie which was packed with comedic material from start to end. And what material it turned out to be!

The amazing part of this movie is that even after multiple viewings there will always be a particular joke or a throwaway line which we discover, just like discovering a particularly good piece of prose in a book undetected in previous readings.

The jokes are hurled at us at a breakneck speed, and even though some of them do fall flat, most of them do hit the mark. Till today!

Speaking of "mark", the most brilliantly funny piece of farce I have seen till today, is the scene where Amar (i.e. Aamir Khan) draws a mark on the face of Ramgopal Bajaj (played brilliantly by Paresh Rawal) to distinguish him from Teja (Paresh Rawal again) in the eyes of Teja's bumbling henchmen, Robert and Bhalla. The very fact that someone actually conceptualised this scene speaks volumes of human creativity and inventiveness. In my eyes, no Hollywood movie has ever come up with a scene more funny.

And then there is the evergreen character of Crimemaster Gogo, a brilliant riff on the arch-villian Mogambo from Mr. India. In fact, he is introduced as Mogambo ka bhatija (nephew). Played by Shakti Kapoor, everything about the character is funny, from the costumes he dons, to the modus operandi he uses to rob his victims, to the one-liners he spouts. "Aaya huun, kuchh toh loot ke jayega".

As for the plot ... there is no plot. Basically, the story is about two rascals, Amar and Prem who go to Ooty to marry the daughter of the billionaire industrialist Ramgopal Bajaj, Raveena (or Karishma) who has returned to India from the USA to find a groom for herself. But the evil mastermind Teja, RamGopal Bajaj's evil twin brother has his eyes on the family fortune ...

The movie is so wonderfully amazing, that even Salman Khan (who plays Prem) is funny, a feat that he has never again managed to achieve in any movie after that. Aamir Khan is endearing as the cocky Amar, who always tries to stay one step ahead of the slightly dim witted Prem, but ends up ... but that is something you need to watch.

Me and my friends in Hexaware, Siddhesh and Prakash have been and will be die-hard fans of the movie. We spent countless lunch breaks endlessly spouting the hilarious one-liners in the movies (mostly from Teja) applying them to all sorts of day to day situations.

I could go on and on about this movie. It is one of my favourite films and THE best comedy of all time. If you haven't watched this movie, do watch it ASAP. If you don't understand Hindi, get a friend to translate.

Believe you me, there are few better ways to spend two and a half hours on a Sunday afternoon.