‘Om Shanti Om’ Was More than Great Meta-Fiction
Behind the camp and insider jokes was Farah Khan’s sincere ode to hope — and to Bollywood’s heart.
There is perhaps no piece of meta-fiction in Hindi cinema as sharp, incisive, and funny as Farah Khan’s 2007 epic, Om Shanti Om. It alludes to decades of Bollywood lore, from Divya Bharti’s untimely death to how Govinda got his name to how Sooraj Barjatya got his tagline for romantic super hit Maine Pyar Kiya. Many have written eulogies to Farah Khan’s wit, which has influenced everything from Aryan Khan’s series, Ba****ds of Bollywood to my college admissions essay (yes, I got in). But few have spoken about arguably what made this film work: its heady earnestness, which taught you to believe that anything — indeed anything — is possible. And that’s exactly why this film is seeing a resurgence of epic proportions in recent years.