Pappu can't dance, but Pappa knows best

Once upon a time in our movies, parents thundered 'Over my (and your) dead body', when their children fell in love. Now, they have names like Peachy and Pumpkin, and they call their daughter's boyfriend over for dinner, host dance parties, and tease their sons about girlfriends.

The times are changing - but when did celluloid parents get this cool? Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na is the latest 'it' movie for our country's gen next, and it has cool kids with names like Jiggy and Meow who speak in Hindi but switch to English for profound topics like love and loss. It's bursting with hip clothes, discos, convertibles, late night coffees -- and a coffee klatch of super cool parents.

With 30 percent of Indians under 25, the quest for the ultimate urban youth movie with the authentic youth voice is never ending. A few years ago, Rang de Basanti tried to ferret out the angst of the have-it-all generation and to give the rebels, led by Aamir Khan, a cause.

But that was so 2006. Those issues of rootlessness in an age of rising GDP have been dealt with or summarily dismissed. Now comes the JTYJN generation, headed appropriately by Aamir Khan's nephew Imran Khan. The baton has passed; a new generation takes over and brings to the table new, pressing issues:

Can boys and girls ever be best friends, just best friends? (Remember When Harry Met Sally? Of course not, that was in 1989.)

If A loves B and B only has eyes for C, and D loves C, can A and D hook up as a sort of consolation prize?

Can Pappu dance?

Well, Pappu can't dance. As for the other two questions, there are two ways to get the answer. You can sit through all two and a half hours of good-natured Friends-style nothing-much-happens banter of JTYJN (and it is very pleasant, because this story has no real bad guys -- dude, bad guys are so old school, the rising GDP is lifting all boats, don't you know? -- or you could just listen to your parents.

Come again?

Exactly! This new film for the new hip young India has a wickedly regressive message tucked into its ripped jeans, that the kids don't even realise. Pappu can't dance, but Papa knows best.

In the first 15 minutes of the film, the parents tell the kids who loves who; they even try to get the appropriate couples hitched up. But what self-respecting 20-year-old will roll over and let mommy arrange her love marriage?

So they all say 'No, yuck, mom, please, we are just friends.' And then they spend the next two and a half hours proving their parents were right. This to me is the jaw-dropping revelation of JTYJN. Another hallowed construct of the Hindi film is biting the dust.

First the vamp disappeared, since Bipasha Basu could ambidextrously play the lady and the tramp. Now the parents have turned into Pumpkins. Mothers no longer look like Nirupa Roy. They look like Kitu Gidwani and Anooradha Patel. No glycerine tears, no lockets with pictures of separated sons, no emotional blackmail. Widowed moms wear red salwar kameezes and threaten to wring the necks of their dead Rajput husbands.

And the fathers don't twirl mustaches and threaten a horsewhipping. Or say things like 'Bas, it's decided. You are marrying her. I've given my word.' There is an old school macho dad, but he's really a dead man walking and at his manliest, he just smirks and does a jig. Actually come to think of it, everything he predicts also comes to pass. (Even dead dads apparently know better.)

What a whole different world it was when the very same Aamir Khan, who produced this movie to launch his nephew Imran, shot to stardom in Qayamat se Qayamat Tak in 1988. Sure he got to strum a guitar and wear bitty denim shorts and be lovelorn but, damn, he had challenges.

Papa Kehte Hai Bada Naam Karega, he crooned, weighed down by the oppressive burden of parental expectations. In JTYJN, Rats' mom is advising Meow to become a filmmaker because the country needs more intelligent filmmakers. No one seems particularly bothered, at the end of college, about what they will become.

And to be honest, I am not sure what they do become -- one gets a mustache, and one gets a toupee, but passage of time gets mixed up with time pass. And the biggest changes are in hair.

This new parental avatar has meant the end of another hallowed tradition -- the Capulet-Montague doomed love affair. QSQT, despite its contemporary look, was really an old-fashioned star-crossed love story.

In JTYJN, director Abbas Tyrewala has a Herculean task -- how do you keep the plot moving, when everyone from parents to friends are all on the same side? There's no Capulet-Montague, no jealous Iago, even the horse cooperates in mapping the course of true love down the deserted night streets of Mumbai.

My theory is that the parents, who were once the cool young jet set (Kitu Gidwani, Jayant Kripalani etc) have just decided not to grow up. India is taking off, the country is abuzz with energy and optimism and they want a slice of it, because they helped create it for all of us on television twenty years ago.

Now they have stuck themselves in a Neverland of permanent youth. They might be going gray, but dammit if their daughter is going to be Meow, they get to be Pumpkin. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. They are not parents. They are best friends. They read Naomi Wolf, surf the web, and have cocktails.

Interestingly the most alternative rebellious character in the movie, a brooding, ear-pierced, white mouse-petting, night-owl artist type played by Pratiek Babbar, is the one in the group who has no cool nickname. In the world of Rats and Meow and Bomb he just stands out as simple, plain Amit.

And he is the one the parents don't understand, because he never lets them into his room. And he never seems to leave the house either. Why would he? The world outside and the world at home have all merged into a happy-go-lucky fizzy Coca Cola commercial. And he is an outsider in both.

The success of JTYJN in India is being heralded as the youth market finding movies that tell their stories. I think the parents are laughing all the way to the bank. They won. They crossed over the generation gap.

I am just glad that at the end of the movie, when the credits rolled over the happy couple, a self satisfied mommie doesn't show up and roll her eyes and say 'I told you so. Now if you had only listened to me in the first place.'

So now we can all go have a latte at Caf' Coffee Day, yaar. Are you treating, Pumpkin?