It’s Aditya Chopra’s birthday and I almost missed it!  Just like he probably prefers.  Definitely not a guy who likes to be the center of attention.  With that in mind, I will celebrate by letting his work speak for itself.

17 reasons I love you! The same as the age you were when you workedo n your first film.

1. While your mother Pam Aunty insisted you at least finish college, you spent every break and free moment on film sets, until your father finally let you work as an official Assistant Director on Lamhe, supposedly letting you create the trailer all by yourself, at age 18. And it’s brilliant, right?  The first of many brilliant Aditya Chopra trailers.

 

2. After college, you were allowed to join the crew for the whole of Darr!  You were the assistant director, the editor, the cameraman, and the guy in charge of keeping Shahrukh Khan company while he stayed up all night.  And at the end of it, you had a stone-cold classic trailer, and a lifelong friendship.

 

3. Darr was your proving ground, your father let you come up with the idea and promised to produce your next film.  Your first concept was a big multi-hero saga, but it was too large an idea for a first film.  So instead, you sat down and came up with a small love story.  It would show the east meeting the west, a traditional Indian girl falling for a western boy.  The first thought was to make it a true co-production, cast someone like Tom Cruise as the male lead.  But that wasn’t possible, so you made it into an even more complex statement about what makes an Indian boy “Indian”.

 

4. Because it was a first film, the older cast was a little nervous about working with you.  Shahrukh and Kajol were your friends and trusted you, Anupum Kehr was one of your father’s best friends, had known you most of your life.  But Amrish Puri didn’t trust your instincts.  Until he challenged you on the first day of filming to explain your directions, and you revealed your precise exact planning for every second of screentime.  From then on, you trusted him completely.

 

4. It may have been your vision, but you took a moment to honor your father with a sampling from one of his early films in the middle of yours.  And you didn’t just use the song, you perfectly evoked the mood, an older couple who still loved each other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36ORyMkyVtE

 

5. After DDLJ came out and proved to be the biggest hit anyone had ever seen, your father rewarded you by making you producer on his next film.  And trusting your instincts and letting you help with the dialogue and script as well.

 

6. You took the profits from your father’s film, and your film, and folded them into your next production.  That big multi-starrer you’d been planning, that you finally had the money to do right.  And that would be an absolutely guaranteed hit, one that justified opening your own distribution wing, and DVD production house.

 

7.  Now that you had your own studio, your own distribution company, your own DVD company, your own post-production studios, before age 30, you moved onto the next step of your plan, releasing multiple films written and directed by others, but under your supervision which gave them that distinctive “Yash Raj” house style.  Stars, settings, songs, saris.

 

8. Like your father before you, you were also something of a star-maker.  Not just Shahrukh Khan, but Abhishek Bachchan, Vivek Oboroi, even Ranbir Kapoor, all had the biggest hits of their careers when they handed their persona over to you.

 

9.  Of course, it wasn’t all easy.  After 5 years of hit pe hit, you hit a bit of a dry spell.  Honestly, I don’t know why the formula stopped working, I still liked all those flops from 2007.  Well, except for Ta Ra Rum Pum.

 

10.  Really, even Ta Ra Rum Pum had some great songs!  Which is smart, you probably broke even on the soundtrack sales alone.

 

11.  There was one hit in 2007, Chak De India, the only one which broke the Yash Raj formula.  Which also revealed that it was just a formula that seemed to work for a while, not the only kind of thing you are able to produce.  This is a very different film, with one star, no dances, and no romance, and it hit a chord.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-IDnmBZSfU

 

12. The flops of 2007 convinced you to come out from behind the curtain, and come back to write, direct, and produce your own work.  Which was, naturally, brilliant.  And also extremely profitable, more than making up for the loses of the year before.  And it managed to maintain the songs and the stars, but add in a little bit more heart and grit underneath to appeal to the new audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xhbp3AV0sg

 

13.  Rab Ne not only brought you out of retirement, it also pointed you in a new direction for the studio.  If it is now making its own movies, its own soundtracks, its own DVDs and prints, why not make its own stars as well?  Anushka was the first, Ranveer the second.

 

14. After Ranveer came Arjun Kapoor and Sushant Singh Rajput, gambles that ultimately paid off and gave you more loyal in house stars.

 

15. And now here we are today, you have a whole stable of regular Yash Raj stars.  More importantly, you have a stable of Yash Raj directors. Like Vijay Krishna Acharya, who failed with his first film (Tashan), but hit it big with his second (Dhoom 3)

 

16.  Looking to the future doesn’t mean you forget the past.  You took the time to meticulously produce your father’s last film, an old school traditional love story.

 

17. You looked to your own past as well, going back to your original hit and recutting and re-imagining it.  Now, I watch a lot of remixes, and a lot of fanvids, and this is the best one I’ve ever seen.