Team FC
Jab We Met is like a spiritual successor of DDLJ. Aditya (Shahid Kapoor) and Geet (Kareena Kapoor Khan) are multiplex-era incarnations of Raj and Simran, but their arcs are more… existential.
Dev D was not only Anurag Kashyap's reimagining of Sarat Chandra's classic text, it was also everything a certain kind of Bollywood film isn't supposed to be, the kind of film that DDLJ is emblematic of.
The first segment of LSD is a cautionary tale of what happens when naive, impressionable couples follow DDLJ as their guidebook. It gives every tenet of the film a reality check by setting the story in one of the most brutal parts of North India, where the aspiring director, Rahul (Anshuman Jha), is making a diploma film called Mehendi Laga Ke Rakhna.
If Yash Raj and the (now defunct) Phantom Films had a lovechild, it might have been something like Luv Shuv Tey Chicken Khurana. The director Sameer Sharma worked in a number of films as an assistant director before he made this film, and his first as an A.D. was DDLJ.
Trip with friends. On a train. To snowcapped mountains. Like Simran, Naina (Deepika Padukone) is the last minute entry in the group. Her parents need more convincing. The trip will liberate her in some way.
Rohit Shetty might seem far away from the Yash Raj sensibilities of the 90s, but he successfully incorporates the DDLJ story into his own brand of filmmaking.
A reworking of DDLJ, with more agency for the female lead, and like Jab We Met, more rooted. Unlike Simran's one-last-trip-before-marriage to Europe, Kaavya (Alia Bhatt) goes to Delhi from her home in Punjab, to buy her wedding lehenga.
Film references abound in Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga, the first mainstream Hindi film on a lesbian love story. In the clever subversion of the title that alludes to the RD Burman song from 1942: A Love Story.
Like DDLJ, the hand stretched out from the train sequence comes once in the beginning, and once in the end. Kartik (Ayushmann Khurana) is going to Aman's (Jitendra Kumar) family home, in Allahabad, where he will have to win over his father (Gajraj Rao).
I had a friend in school who had bought a mandolin just so that he could play "Tujhe Dekha Toh Hai Yeh Jaana Sanam"—it's the only tune I've ever heard him play.