Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara

Most of us are lucky enough to have one set of friends (usually from school), among whom the grownup business doesn’t hold much sway. With them, you are always juvenile – your jokes, reminiscing about school incidents – and your laugh is unfettered and unabashed. Doesn’t matter if you are not in regular touch anymore – you may as well be meeting after years – but it takes you just 5 minutes to find that old frequency and start from where you left off. Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is a cinematic ode to those friendships

It has three friends, on a three-week vacation to Spain as a sort of bachelor trip, after one of them, Kabir (Abhay Deol), is engaged to be married. The trip was a pact the three had made in their schooldays, where all three will pick one adventure sport each and the other two have to do it. And yes – this backstory about the trip is totally lame and unrealistic – but the movie gets much better if you decide to just ignore this wee bit

Once the premise is laid out, the movie moves to firmer ground as the equations between the three friends is slowly revealed. Arjun’s (Hrithik Roshan) fixation with making money (he is investment banker, of course) clashes strongly with Imraan’s (Farhan Akhtar) tomfoolery while Kabir plays the mediator between the two. Soon they bump into the movie’s fourth cog – Laila (the luminous Katrina Kaif) – the diving instructor, who exhorts Arjun to see the world apart from money. After all, what if you don’t live till forty, she reasons ?

And this is the second unrealistic bit in the movie – as Hrithik starts seeing all the colors in the world after his first deep sea dive. But it does the movie good as Hrithik finally lets his hair down and soon all three friends are at their chummy best. The first half of them movie with Katrina is also the most enjoyable part as Imraan finds himself a Spanish chick and there is bagwati of course.

But just like its predecessor Dil Chahta Hai, everyone has his inner demons to combat and we are introduced to their conflicts one by one. Hrithik’s was the first, but Imraan’s baggage is the heaviest and Kabir’s is the one most unwilling to confront it. But each sport in turn, leads to each one of them come to face with their issues and resolve them – culminating in the final climatic bull run

But it is the juvenile tomfoolery between the trio that warms your heart. From bagwati to their petty one-upmanship to impress Laila, Hrithik, Farhan and Abhay strike the right chord in us. Sure, comparisions to Dil Chahta Hai are inevitable. But slight similarities is characters aside (Aamir-Farhan, Saif-Abhay, Akshaye-Hrithik), Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara is an endearing light hearted movie which has its own story to tell and will definitely succeed in making you smile

If nothing else, then at least for Farhan, Hrithik and Abhay reproducing the old Doordarshan just-before-the-Sunday-1pm-movie music