Sajan, Pasand Apni Apni and the Ghajini Connection
iView Author: A. Singh (Fremont, USA)
Email: Withheld
Sajan, Pasand Apni Apni and the Ghajini Connection
Here’s a short filmi story for you. The hero is a rich industrialist or son of a rich industrialist. The heroine is from a middleclass family and works in some sort of troupe, company or group where most of the co-workers around her are females and her manager is an eccentric fellow who remains annoyed with her most of time. The heroine keeps screwing stuff up or turns up late or may be the manager just hates her and believes that she is a good for nothing. Until one day…!
That day, a rumor starts spreading that our heroine is dating the rich industrialist hero. Hearing the rumor, the manager instead of being mad at her starts flattering her and everybody around her starts giving her extra importance. Our heroine is happy at receiving the extra attention and stops trying to diffuse the rumor. The rich hero comes to know and decide to investigate. He goes to meet the heroine in a disguise. With me, so far?
The hero meets heroine and falls head over heels in love with her. The heroine doesn’t know the true identify of the hero and treats him only as a friend. Finally, her lies catch up with her. The manager and her co-workers beg her to invite the rich guy as a chief guest to a party or function and heroine decides to take her friend (who is the hero in disguise, remember) posing as the rich guy. Someone in the party asks for a big donation and our hero signs the check immediately, giving scares to the heroine that the con has gone too far.
Those of you who are thinking, why I am retelling the love story in first half of Ghajini, you are wrong. There were two other Hindi movies based on the exact same plot – Sajan and Pasand Apni Apni. See, we all thought Ghajini would be a copy of Memento and Amir Khan and A.R. Murugadoss proved us wrong. Of course, they copied the character with short term memory loss, the idea of using Polaroid pictures and tattoos and back story of revenge for the murder of girlfriend, but that’s about it. Rest of the movie in no way was copied from Memento; you have to give them that. On the other hand, a big and very important part of the story was rehashed from old Hindi films. I am sure A.R. Murugadoss didn’t copy Hindi films to write his script. Heck, he doesn’t even know Hindi. I can bet that there were old Tamil movies before or after Sajan or Pasand Apni Apni which had the exact same plot. That’s what A.R. Murugadoss lifted.
Anyway this post is not a review of Ghajini. It’s about Sajan and Pasand Apni Apni. It’s an attempt to recapture my nostalgia about these films that I watched on DD about 15-20 years back and thoroughly enjoyed back then.
Sajan (1969)
There was a Salman Khan movie called Saajan which became a huge hit. But no, I am not referring to that. Sajan came out in 1969 and was a typical 1960s type Ash Parekh movie, with nice locales, great Md. Raffee songs and great music. I remember watching it on DD on Sundays at 5:45 pm. The first half of the film is exactly what I described earlier and what Ghajini lifted and rehashed. This time, Manoj Kumar plays the son of a rich industrialist. Asha Parekh, with eye lashes and all, is the middle class girl who works in a dance school. I still remember the crisp clear print on a black & white TV. I was so engrossed in film back then that I felt really helpless when electricity went out. I still remember the exact moment when power went out. It was when Ash Parekh was about to find out the true the identity of Manoj Kumar. I still remember the cheesy but super hit Lata song “Sajan Sajn Pukaroon Galiyon mein….”.
As you can see the song starts with Asha describing her fictitious romance to Manoj Kumar who is posing as a journalist. As a viewer then, I was thoroughly confused how she can imagine in such vivid details and why she keeps sees Manoj Kumar in her imagination when she doesn’t know that he is the guy she is talking about. Anyway, I was really na'¯ve back then, used to get lost in watching movie and used to take everything taking place in the story very seriously.
The film had some great music by Laxmi-Pyare and Lata and Raffee gave their top quality voices.
Manoj Kumar did his bit but it was a typical Asha Parekh film. I wasn’t born in the 60’s and wasn’t grown enough for 70s. But to me, it seems Asha Parekh was the first true female superstar. Every film of her revolves around her and it doesn’t really matter who the male actor is opposite her. So many big male actors such as Dharmendra, Shammi Kapoor, Rajendra Kumar and even Rajesh Khanna in his prime played second fiddle roles in her films. I never liked Asha Pareksh. To me she didn’t represent ethereal beauty like Madhubala or Waheeda Rehman or didn’t seem to have acting prowess like Meenakumari, Nutan or Nargis. Yet, she seems far more dominant in her films than any of these leading actresses.
Anyway, back to Sajan, the second half of the film is a murder mystery where 3 different people claim to be the murderer. Iftikhar plays the quintessential Hindi film inspector who investigates the case in typical filmi style by taking the finger prints of the accused in some creative ways. It all appeared so ridiculous the second time when I saw the film, but first time on DD this was master piece stuff for me. My innocent mind just loved the detailing of it and went along the suspense. IMDB lists Shatrughan Sinha in the role of a Hawaldar, but I have no memory of seeing him.
Pasand Apni Apni.(1983)
Unlike Sajan, PAA was a small budget Basu Chatterjee film. The film stars Mithun Chakraborty in his prime and Rati Agnihotri. I saw PAA on DD as well. We were happy to see PAA listed in the newspaper in the DD programs section. We were just happy to see a Mithunda movie being shown on DD. It was a big deal that the movie of a then current hot favorite Mithun Da was being shown.
Today I think Mithun Da was very likeable in this role. But back then, we were disappointed in seeing him in this role where he doesn’t get to wear fancy cloths, or doesn’t get to fight villains. I received a similar shock when I first watched Amitabh Bachchan in Manzil. In PAA, Mithun Da wears a Kurta Pajama, almost half the time in the movie. There are no big bhari bhurkam dialogues for him here, no disco dance songs and he even sports a moustache, if I remember correctly. Towards the end, the front row viewer in me felt much better when Mithun Da comes back in expensive cloths and looks like a hero. How stupid I was back then! Even the heroine Ms. Agnihotri appears in her plane jane avatar in the film, not that I ever found her glamorous anyway.
PAA is a small and simple fill in typical Basu Chatterjee style. The plot is what I already described multiple times so far. Rich dude, poor middle class girl, misunderstanding, rumor, greedy manager, hero meets heroine, falls in love, goes along in the pretend game, party, chief guest, donation, real cheque gets issued, secret is out. Unlike Sajan and Ghajini, there is no second plot or subplot in PAA. PAA remains restricted to the plot and develops that in a kind of romantic comedy film. Once the identity of the rich hero is out in the open, heroine becomes upset with him for lying (yes, that’s true, she is the one accusing the hero of lying). The hero follows the heroine through a network of bus routes to prove to her that he is serious about her and doesn’t mind the status gap between the two.
I don’t know the box office result for PAA but I can guess that it might not have been a hit in cinema halls. Unlike Sajan and Ghajini, PAA didn’t add unnecessary masala to the simple plot of a love story that is woven around a small confusion and has the heart of Cinderella. I guess that’s the difference between a big budget blockbuster and a small budget feel good film. As you can see I enjoyed both of them.
As for Ghajini, I am glad I watched it on a pirated DVD.
Tags: aamir khan, Ghajini, murgadoss
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Nice one! You are here after a long gap, try writing more!
down with piracy
“Unlike Sajan and Ghajini, PAA didn’t add unnecessary masala to the simple plot of a love story”
Whether masala is unnecessary or not depends on the one eating …I luv my masala ..so do many others, it seems!!
the romantic part of gazini is almost similar to pasand apni apni.pasand apni apni is a classic and mithun da performed very nicely.he is playing a character of rich buisnessman and he portrait this character very elegantly.his way of talking,walking.very nice.i strongly recommend everyone to see this movie if anyone hasnt seen yet.basu da’s classic.