{"id":1275,"date":"2016-04-23T02:25:07","date_gmt":"2016-04-23T02:25:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=1275"},"modified":"2026-07-17T14:02:23","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T14:02:23","slug":"dhadkan-suniel-shetty-akshay-kumar-shilpa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=1275","title":{"rendered":"Dhadkan: The Altar at Which Jilted Lovers Pray"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

“T<\/span>um dil ki dhadkan mein, rehte ho, rehte ho\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The <\/span>title track<\/span><\/a> of <\/span>Dhadkan<\/span><\/i>, Bollywood\u2019s answer to <\/span>Wuthering Heights<\/span><\/i>, is the resting place of the jilted lover\u2019s soul. Even 18 years later, it lives on the lips of friends drenched in rum and gham; in the glaucoma-clouded eyes of every man who has ever been dumped.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Suniel Shetty, whose fascination for the no-banyan look broke barriers of fashion and crossed the limits of hyper-masculine displays of chest hair, stormed our non-digital screens with his character of the obsessive, aggressive, and slightly regressive, Dev. Today, his Tinder bio would read \u201cbastard and angry\u201d but he would still wander with pain in his eyes, as if he, like Imtiaz Ali, knows that the essence of love is in it remaining unrequited. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dhadkan<\/span><\/i> is the story of when this conflicted <\/span>non-man-bun<\/span><\/a> version of Suniel comes into contact with \u201cpapa ki pari\u201d Anjali, essayed by a pre-nose-job Shilpa Shetty, who drives sports cars and her lovers up a wall. She belongs to a rich family who have the words \u201cparampara\u201d, \u201cizzat\u201d, and \u201cparvarish\u201d tattooed on their biceps and plastered on their walls. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Daddy and Suitor Dev meet at the Wuthering Heights manor in Greater Kailash, where a war of words ensues and the relationship eventually culminates in tears for papa ki pari and beers for Dev who comes back home to his hammy-motherly figure and yells: \u201cSharaab ka nasha hai mujh mein! Chhod diya maine usse.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

He\u2019s lying, of course. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dev\u2019s undying love for Anjali becomes the central story of his morose existence hereafter. Before we learnt how to swipe right to move on, the jilted lover\u2019s post-dumping life (marked by binge-drinking and stasis) was undergirded by an inordinate longing. <\/span>Dhadkan<\/span><\/i>, the three-hour love triangle of epic proportions that erupted on an overtly dramatic \u201cManmohan Desai on acid\u201d canvas, is an ode to the jilted Heathcliffs of the world. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>

The jilted lover can be a toxic animal. He is overcome with longing for the love he has lost, but mixed in this longing is the dormant desire to emerge again, victorious in some undefined way in the eyes of the object of his affections.<\/blockquote>
After Anjali gets married off to Ram (Akshay Kumar), one of those guys who is pure as the cow Yogi-ji once stroked, her life changes. Ram lives with his stepmother, stepbrother, and stepsister who are painted with the same amount of villainy with which the <\/span>\u201cFrustrated Indian\u201d<\/span><\/a> paints liberals. Anjali is put through layers of agneepariksha, blackmail, and Sasumaa sass, but emerges unscathed because she\u2019s with Maryada AF Ram who she refuses to sleep with. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

They still do all the running around behind trees, but she sings whole songs imagining Dev, while Ram is harping note after note in her praise. Remember, this is a man who has not been allowed to consummate his marriage, but like a true Gandhian, Ram employs methods of peaceful protest which eventually guilt-trip Anjali into falling for and eventually, sleeping with him. At this point, Anjali is so completely enamoured with Ram that if she had Facebook in her life she\u2019d be posting couple pics with captions like \u201cHai love mera lit-lit soniye!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enter Dev 2.0 or DevD (D for Dank, after he\u2019s got money in the bank). <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, this is the heady nineties so not only is our jilted hero back, but he\u2019s now richer than God — and burning with vengeance. In the eternal game of \u201cWho wins the break-up,\u201d Dev takes the sweepstakes with his suave, moneyman act. \u00a0The act goes a little far when he decides to ruin good ol\u2019 Ram forever by buying out everything that he has ever owned, but we root for Dev. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dev is us. Dev is our broken past that we want to thrust into the present. He is the benchmark of \u201cjunoon\u201d with which we scale our demons. He is the shadow that screeches \u201cAaeeeh!\u201d in an unbuttoned shirt from the bottomless pit that is his heart. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Suniel<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, Suniel’s Tinder bio would read \u201cbastard and angry\u201d but he would still wander with pain in his eyes, as if he, like Imtiaz Ali, knows that the essence of love is in it remaining unrequited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Image Credit \/ Venus Movies<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The jilted lover can be a toxic animal. He is overcome with longing for the love he has lost, but mixed in this longing is the dormant desire to emerge again, victorious in some undefined way in the eyes of the object of his affections. When I stood dumped at the tender impressionable age of 14, I decided that I would hit the gym, pick up the guitar, and read Marx like a pro to rub her nose in the dirt. In that fantasy, my pain found refuge. DevD was the <\/span>Shaktimaan<\/span><\/i> of my fantasy and the fantasy of every lover who had ever been dumped. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, 18 years later, Dev is the reason that <\/span>Dhadkan<\/span><\/i> still has a tremendous but low-key fan following over the country. Dev is our Healthcliff and as flawed as he is, we identify with him because what Dharmesh Bront\u00eb does manage to do in this horrendously OTT film, is to capture the pang of separation and the spectre of unrequited love. Because all we dreamt of in our lowest of <\/span>Dhadkan<\/span><\/i> lows was: \u201cMain tumhe bhool jaun aisa ho nahin sakta, tum mujhe bhool jao yeh main hone nahin dunga\u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am not sure if the Dev in all of us is a boon or bane, but I think he\u2019s moved on to spamming Anjali\u2019s \u201cOthers\u201d folder these days to stay sane. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Twenty years after Dhadkan released, Suniel Shetty\u2019s Dev is the reason the film still has a tremendous but low-key fan following over the country.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":1278,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[1589,2163,1124,1896],"class_list":["post-1275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pop-culture","tag-akshay-kumar","tag-dhadkan","tag-shilpa-shetty","tag-suniel-shetty"],"yoast_head":"\nDhadkan: The Altar at Which Jilted Lovers Pray<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Twenty years after Dhadkan released, Suniel Shetty\u2019s Dev is the reason the film still has a tremendous but low-key fan following over the country.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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