Apni parivarmala

ko todkar aaj tak

koi khush nahi rah paya hai.

So speaketh the righteous brother to his sister who, in a Kaikeyi moment, made the cardinal mistake of ousting the angelic stepson and wife from the family mansion. By then, you are either rolling your eyes or wiping your tears.

Hum Saath-Saath Hain (hyphenated to stress the message), Sooraj Barjatya’s third release after monster BO winners Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) and Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! (1994), hit the screens in November 1999 with a sanskaari overload that polarised viewers. One either loved it or laughed at it. No fence-sitting.

So our virtuous Ramkishan (Alok Nath as pious papa) and vivacious Mamta (Reema Lagoo as mom who channels her inner step-mom to save the film from dying of a sugar overdose) live in a mansion with Vivek (Mohnish Behl as Ramkishan’s saintly son from his first marriage, with a disabled hand, if you wanted more proof of his halo), Prem (Salman Khan is the shy, Mother Teresa-loving son born to Ramkishan and Mamta) and Vinod (Saif Ali Khan sparkles as the naughty youngest son, the film’s most lovable character). All’s well, Vivek gets hitched to Sadhna (Tabu has exactly 1.5 lines of dialogue as the rich girl from abroad who digs the whole sanskaari schmoozle), Prem exchanges blushes with Preeti (a doctor with nothing to do except wear pretty salwar kameezes and look after a pregnant Sadhna), Vinod flirts unabashedly with Sapna (a bubbly Karisma Kapoor, the other most likeable character after Vinod). Loads of songs (Raamlakshman composes Hindi cinema’s arguably most hilarious honeymoon number, ABCD) and a family honeymoon in village Rampur later, calamity strikes. Sapna’s greedy

dad (Sadashiv Amrapurkar, looking appropriately slimy) and Mamta’s gang of girls (Kunika, Jayshree T. and Kalpana Iyer play the smoking, card-playing, club-hopping home-wreckers) team up to poison her against Vivek and Sadhna. Banish them to Rampur, they whisper, in a modern-day spin on the Ramayan.

This is a Barjatya movie, so there’s no Ravana and no war. Prem, in his Bharat avatar, gets passive-aggressive with his mother to reform her. Soon, she’s cooing at her new grandson and smiling in two more weddings.

Like in other Barjatya films, extended families and friends eat, play and pray together. Token good Muslim characters, including Shakti Kapoor’s Anwar Sheikh, add to the diversity. But in Barjatya’s third film, parables and stereotypes take over nuance, characterisation and narrative. Of course, as a crash course in sanskaar, the film’s an all-time classic.