Airport Wala Love in Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na

There is so much happening in the world, in our country, and none of it feels particularly good. So on some days, I have to choose the blanket of nostalgia and memory. Young, everyday-looking actors, in a context not too far from mine, singing old songs and trying to understand the onion of love. Cat funerals, songs that are direct-address odes, Bandra Fort, and bad-quality, neon footage of Marine Drive. And friendship! And that airport wala love.

I return to Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na (2008) because I want to remember a Bombay that felt conducive to romance. A city where you could walk around with your friends, get into sweet, shallow trouble, go to a nightclub, and believe that anything could happen. In an era of cinematic hypermasculinity and daily digital distraction, the film reminds me that the romantic hero was never just about the boy getting the girl. He represented a willingness to be moved by love, to let it interrupt your life magnificently and dramatically.

Cinema's masculinities move in cycles. The angry young man gives way to the chocolate boy, who eventually gives way to another, more aggressive fantasy of masculinity. We tire of one and turn to another, as though the answer to the problem of the Indian man might be found in his next cinematic iteration. But perhaps what we're really hungry for is not a return to the chocolate boy. It's a return to the possibility of romance itself.

In our overpopulated cities, in lives that seem to move endlessly with the scroll of a finger, perhaps all we're wanting is to be held by the hand instead. To be looked at specifically and singularly, and wanted in that way.

"I love this city," Aditi says happily to her friends as she enters a nightclub. "Yahaan kuch bhi ho sakta hain." Here, anything can happen.

At this point in the film, our leading couple has, sweetly and stupidly, decided to set one another up with potential romantic matches. They've spent their college years appearing to be a couple, and now they're determined to prove that they aren't. They know each other too well to recognise what they're doing to each other. Or perhaps they know each other so well that they cannot imagine that the thing they want might already be right there.

And the city Aditi loves, I look around and try to find it. In the city, I look around and try to find Jai, too.

Jai, for whom time seems to slow just before he meets a love. Jai, who can trick his way around a violent confrontation. Jai, whose non-violent streak is so unattractive to Aditi that it becomes a strange and complicated part of the story she tells herself about him. I watch him and feel such a pang of nostalgia. And pain.

Pain for Aditi, who thinks she knows exactly what she wants. Who participates in the painful cycle of desirability, trying to make herself and her best friend available to other people, as though love were something that could be organised into the correct arrangement. She is so close to Jai that she cannot see him, and he is so close to her that he cannot see himself.

I don't want to pretend that this is a perfect film, or that the world it depicts was ever as uncomplicated as it looks in memory. The chocolate boy was never the antidote to every problem with Indian masculinity. But there is something about the film's particular combination of friendship, foolishness, tenderness, and time that I find myself desperately wanting.

Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na is a great medicine for times like these. Times of hyperpolarized world, of terrible Tinder boyfriends, of waking up next to a phone, of wondering every second when it will not be this way anymore. Perhaps the medicine works because the film believes our lives are still capable of surprising us. That love might be sitting right next to us, that we might have misunderstood ourselves entirely, that the thing we have been looking for could arrive without announcing itself.

What we miss and long for, I'm realising, is an airport wala love. A love worth running for. Jumping countries for. Changing your life for. The kind that makes you get out of bed, leave the phone behind, and go somewhere because there is something you need to say to someone. The kind that asks you to participate, rather than watch yourself living.

I feel a bit like we are still waiting for Godot. Waiting for the city to become romantic again, for the men to become tender, governments to truly care, for the world to make room for us to love each other properly. Waiting for the conditions to be right before we allow ourselves to believe that anything can happen. But life keeps happening while we wait. The trains keep moving, the sea keeps glowing neon, our friends keep getting older. Somewhere, someone is standing at an airport, waiting for somebody to arrive. Right? Because they must.

Yahaan kuch bhi ho sakta hain.

I want to believe her. But for now, I think I’ll watch Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na again. For the friendship, the foolishness, the Bombay that was, and the occasional reminder that some things are still worth running like hell for.

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Postscript: This article was written before Imran Khan’s detention for participating in a CJP protest in Mumbai, but the news feels sweetly, almost suspiciously relevant to everything I’ve written here. In an age of complacency, it is nice to see our Jai out there, showing up. And back in jail, no less. Some prophecies, it seems, are simply impossible to escape.