Happy Kajol’s Birthday! I know not everyone loves her here, but MOST of us do. And she has a very strong camera charisma which lets her get away with really interesting roles most actresses couldn’t pull off. Also, when she turns it on, she can really really act (My Name is Khan, she kills). Most of all, she can be FUNNY. I’m pretty sure I’ve already “remade” these two films, but I have new concepts this time!
Kajol has been doing films regularly for a few years now, but nothing really Big. I think my favorite role of hers was in VIP2 where she played the super powerful antagonist industrialist. She’s had some really interesting “Mother” roles, but I don’t actually think that’s where her strength lies. She needs more to do than JUST being a mother, she needs to be funny and sexy and a little bit amoral.
Christmas in Connecticut Remake, Kajol is a Career Woman Faking Being Perfect Wife and Mother
The original is already a delightful rom-com, and I think expanding it and moving it to India and everything could make it even better. The heroine is a successful writer of a “happy homemaker” type column. She pretends to be a happy wife and mother of 3 kids, but really is a single woman living in the city. And then her publishers agree to a publicity stunt where she will host a Hero Soldier at her house. She has to find a fake house, a fake baby, and bring her friend who can actually cook to do all the cooking. And then of course she and the soldier fall in love which is even more complicated because he thinks she is married and a happy homemaker, and in reality she is a fun single girl who is falling for him too.
Think how much better this would be in modern day India with Kajol! She’s the star of a satellite TV channel doing a cooking show in her “home” kitchen, telling adorable stories about her family and so on. But in reality, she was a struggling actress who showed up for an audition and lied about her background, and has kept that lie up for years. She lives in a highrise apartment and goes clubbing with her young nieces and shows up for work hungover. She steals stories from her married sisters to use in her show and is so grateful she doesn’t have their lives. She uses recipes from her gay best friend, he was a struggling chef and now he runs the successful restaurant based on her show and gets all the royalties from the cookbooks he ghostwrites for her. She lives with a funny housekeeper, an elderly lady who nags her for not picking up after herself and wakes her up at noon just in time for the filming and clearly loves her and they have a very family type relationship.
Meanwhile, Sidharth Malhotra is a Hero Cop who was injured in a massive shoot out while breaking up a human trafficking ring. He was stuck in the hospital for weeks and became addicted to watching Kajol’s show. It was the perfect life he always dreamed of, after being raised in an orphanage and spending adulthood dedicated to his job. He writes a fan letter, which is recieved by a studio exec who hands it off to the PR department and by the time Kajol returns from her “sick leave” which was really spent having a crazy bachelorette party in Thailand with her niece to discover it’s all been arranged, Sidharth is going to have a Dream Week at her house with the family life he always wanted, the first photo shoot promo is scheduled for that afternoon.
Kajol shows up a little hungover and drowsy for the photoshoot, grabs Sidharth (not knowing he is the hero cop) and begs him for coffee. Then asks him to help her stand up since she partied a little too hard the night before, compliments his muscles, and complains about honoring yet another Cop, like corruption in the police department doesn’t even exist. Naturally, Sidharth is charmed. Kajol finally learns who he really is, and almost sinks through the floor in embarrassment, but Sid charmingly grabs her arm and asks if she can help him stand up since it’s his first photo shoot. She comes home and starts babbling to her maid (Farida Jalal) and her friend (Jimmy Shergill) about this dreamy cop, they remind her she is supposed to be married, she says it is fine she will never see him again, and then the studio calls to tell her the photoshoot went so well, he is going to come stay at her house for a week starting tomorrow.
Sid is in the same boat, he goes home from the photoshoot and keeps seeing Kajol everywhere (song!). But tells himself “forget her, she’s married, a fantasy is one thing but reality is out of the question”. Only to get a call from his boss telling him the police department needs him to go stay at Kajol’s house for a week as part of their PR.
Kajol does a quick plan. She will use her sister’s house because the whole family is at her niece’s destination wedding. Jimmy Shergill will play her husband and secretly do the cooking. Farida will be her beloved mother-in-law. All the kids will be conveniently “on school trips”. Sid also has a quick plan, he begs his best friend to come with him and act as a control to keep him from ever being alone with Kajol.
And then of course it keeps going wrong. Sid’s friend (Vikrant Massay maybe?) falls in love with Jimmy Shergill and vice versa, Farida goes a little power crazy playing the Revered Mother-in-Law and making Kajol clean up after her for once, and one of Kajol’s nieces shows up 9 months pregnant, planning to hide at the empty house while the rest of the family is gone. Sid and Kajol inevitably fall in love, but he leaves her because he doesn’t want to break up her “family”. It all comes to a head in the final live broadcast from the house, where Jimmy and Vikrant have had a huge fight because Vikrant wants him to stop living a lie (that is, because he thinks Jimmy is married to Kajol), the niece has to be blocked by houseplants all the time so she can play Kajol’s teenage (virginal) daughter, and has left the night before after he and Kajol had sex the night. In the middle of it, the niece goes in to labor. And Kajol decides it is more important to look after her “real” family than to keep pretending about having a “fake” family. So Kajol gives a big speech about how this IS her family, just not the family she pretended it was. This is Jimmy, her best friend, and his boyfriend Vikrant. This is Farida, her housekeeper, who has been more of a mother to her than any mother-in-law ever was to a daughter-in-law. And this is her niece, who she loves very much and who is about to give birth to a baby that Kajol will love just as much. Of course Sid sees this at the airport where he is waiting for his plane, rushes to the hospital, and arrives just in time to see Kajol holding her new grandniece. She apologizes to him for not being what he thinks she is, and Sid says that isn’t true, he thought she was a woman who would never let her family down, and she’s proven that is who she is after all.
Happy epilogue, the studio dumped Kajol’s show (of course) but she is more popular than ever on her own youtube channel, she and Jimmy and Farida host together and they have recipes that are good for hungover mornings, and housekeeping tips for getting rid of take out boxes and stuff like that. Plus occasional guest appearances from her niece giving “tips for the busy single mother”. Sid is now living with Kajol and Farida and occasionally is spotted in her videos in the background shirtless.
Major and the Minor But With Pretending to Be Old Instead of Young
This has of course already been remade as “Half Ticket”. In order to get the half fare on the train, our lead pretends to be a child. And then ends up trapped in a web of increasingly complicated lies, including another child who recognizes the fakery, and falling in love with a nice person who is being kind to the “child”. But what if it was the same story but with senior rates instead???
Kajol is living her life in Delhi, and everything is good. She has an office job she likes, a nice apartment, a supportive group of friends, everything. She still has to deal with her Mom (Kirron Kher) calling and nagging her to come back home to Shimla, even though it’s been 15 years since she left her husband and got a divorce and started her life over. And then in one day, it all falls apart. Her company goes bankrupt and she loses her job, and then comes home to discover those eviction notices she kept throwing away have come to pass, her landlord has brought in construction workers and put all her belongings in storage, and auto-debited from her bank the cost of everything. What with her last paycheck bouncing, and this autodebit, her account is cleared out. She calls her mother to ask her to wire funds, her mother refuses unless she uses them to come home, and to be sure she sends EXACTLY the cost of a train ticket to Shimla and no more.
Kajol’s friends have all left the country on a getaway trip, she plans to hide in Shimla until they get back then borrow money from them to start her life again. But in the meantime, she cannot afford full fare train ticket because the rates changed and her mother thinks she is lying. In desperation, she decides to try for a Senior rate. A quick grey wig, glasses, and a cotton sari, and she is ready to go.
At the station, she sees and slightly ogles handsome army office Ajay Devgan, which catches his attention so he nicely helps her to her seat and puts her bag up (which lets her check out his backside). Everything seems fine until the ticket collector catches her tacking her wig off and sniffs out the con. She runs from him and ends up hiding in Ajay’s compartment (he is in charge of a whole troop of men traveling in their own car). Ajay automatically takes her side against the “mean” ticket collector, and she spins a whole story about an abusive family and how she is on the run and the ticket collector has been paid off by her sons. And then the train breaks down.
Ajay insists, against all her protests, that he can’t let this poor old lady struggle by herself. He organizes her to travel with the troop back to their army housing near Shimla, telling her not to worry, she can stay with his fiancee’s family on base. The family consists of a very upright and stuck in the mud father Anupam Kher, his spinster older sister Farida Jalal, and the fiancee Tabu (widow and daughter of successful army officers). The first night, Kajol tries to escape and is caught by Farida who says she wasn’t fooled for a minute. But she wants Kajol to stay, and will keep her secret and help her escape if Kajol helps Farida break up the engagement. Farida can see that Tabu is the wrong woman for Ajay, she will try to make him a Success and they will both be miserable. They are only engaged because it seems like the logical thing to do, not because they are in love. Tabu should be marrying her friend from college, a successful businessman, but she can’t bring herself to marry out of the army. Better all around if the engagement is broken.
Farida and Kajol do a whole series of schemes to get Tabu and Ajay separated, which involves Ajay and Kajol spending a lot of time together. She falls more and more in love and she sees, and he falls more and more into “I’ve never felt so comfortable talking to someone before, so happy in someone’s company”. Finally, with Farida’s encouragement, Kajol admits that she has fallen in love with Ajay and she’s going to put it all on the line, makes a date to meet him late at night and plans to show up as her own beautiful self and confess her feelings. Only, Tabu figures it out and is there in Ajay’s place. She tells Kajol that her plan has failed, and a car is waiting to take her home to her mother’s. Tabu and Ajay will be married because that is what makes sense.
Kajol sadly goes home and cries and realizes how empty her life is now without Ajay and so on. Meanwhile, back on base, Farida and Anupam give Tabu a talking to. They convince her that she isn’t being unfaithful to her father or her dead husband if she marries out of the army. And that her friend Akshaye is clearly the perfect person for her, she needs to leave the army and try a new adventure. Tabu realizes they are right, and then goes to break her engagement with Ajay, and encourages him to go talk to that nice older lady Kajol and get her help figuring out what to do next. And Tabu just happens to have a car waiting outside to take him to her.
Kajol is shocked when Ajay shows up at her mother’s house and quickly throws a scarf over her hair to pretend she is old. But Ajay had already given Kirron Kher a ride home and heard the whole story about her whacky daughter who pretended to be an old lady for a train ticket. He goes along with the gag and pretends that he has suddenly discovered a deep attraction for older women, the older the better, can she please talk about her sore legs some more? And her heart medication? Kajol begins to get alarmed that he won’t be attracted to her when she is her real age and also that he is kind of a loon, until Ajay grabs her and kisses her and pulls off her wig and reveals that he knows everything and wants to marry her.
Happy ending, Kajol being her young sexy self and dancing around on army base getting all the soldiers who ignored her when she was “old” to take a second look.
