There are films that we watch and like, and there are films that we watch and return to, again and again, almost reluctantly, as if something within them has been unfinished in us. Mohabbatein, for me, has always lived in that second category. It is not a film I have ever declared as a favorite. It is not a film I have spoken about with devotion. It is a film that existed on the periphery of my love for Shah Rukh Khan, present yet slightly distant, familiar yet strangely incomplete.
One reason for this distance has always been its structure. Mohabbatein is a film that carries many hearts within it. Many stories, many young faces, many loves twirling around one central figure. Shah Rukh is the core, the gravitational pull, the quiet sun toward which everything moves. Yet he is not everywhere. He is not omnipresent in the way I want him to be. There are stretches where he seems to step aside, allowing other romances to bloom and falter in their own innocence. Some of these youthful romances, especially one of them, I always found awkward. Almost uncomfortable. Even as a child, something in me recoiled from its tone. I used to feel a certain unease. A certain eeks. That instinct has stayed.
And yet, Mohabbatein has always had music that settles into the blood. Songs like open windows. And it has Shah Rukh and Aishwarya together, two of my most loved stars. Only to separate them before we have even truly held them. Megha is gone before the story begins. And that early loss leaves an ache that the film keeps returning to. It is a film built on reminiscence.
This time, I returned to Mohabbatein differently. I skipped the arcs I have never cared for. I went straight to the quiet center. I watched every scene with Shah Rukh. Every scene between him and Amitabh Bachchan. Every moment with Aishwarya. And in doing so, something unlocked itself. Something I had never given this film enough time to make clear.
I had always thought the story was a duel. Raj Aryan and Narayan Shankar. Warmth and severity. Music and silence. Love and discipline. The eternal cinema conflict. And I had always dismissed Raj Aryan as a character who romanticises recklessly, who encourages love without context, who asks students to devote themselves to affection rather than future. It felt too easy. Too unreal. Too dreamy.
Until I watched the scene.
The scene near the end, when Raj Aryan stands in Narayan Shankar’s house. Narayan believes he has won. That discipline has triumphed over affection. That structure has defeated rebellion. That he has eliminated the music and laughter that Raj brought back into the lives of the young men of Gurukul. He speaks with the certainty of someone who has never allowed himself to feel the weight of loss.
And then Raj speaks.
He does not raise his voice. He does not challenge. He simply tells him the truth. That it is not Raj who has been defeated. It is Narayan Shankar. Because Narayan lost his daughter years ago, and still stands before her photograph with a garland as though grief is a monument to protect and maintain. Raj tells him that he has now lost him also. Lost him not as an adversary but as a son. Because Raj had come back not out of stubbornness and not out of vengeance, but out of love. The love he held for Megha did not harden him. It did not make him bitter. It made him gentle. It made him capable of wanting to soften the life of the man who once stood between them.
This is the part that moved me more than anything else. Raj does not blame Narayan for Megha’s death. He does not carry resentment. He came to fill the reticence that had swallowed Narayan’s life after she was gone. He came to give back whatever warmth could still be given. Not for himself. Not for closure. But because love continues to act, even after the story appears to have ended.
And then he speaks of Megha.
He says that Megha always believed that she was incomplete without her father. But why did he never see that Megha was also incomplete without Raj. And then comes the line that carries the entire soul of the film:
I do not have any photograph of Megha. I see her everywhere. She is within me. She has never left me.
He does not hold onto a memento. He does not prove her existence the way humans try to prove anything. He says instead that he sees her wherever there is love. Wherever there is joy. Wherever something breathes softly in the heart. And in that moment, for the very first time, I understood him.
His love was not personal. Not physical. Not sentimental. It was not about having shared a life. It was about continuing to live because her presence had dissolved into the world itself. His love had crossed into the formless.
This is not romantic love in the ordinary sense. This is love that has let go of form. It has moved beyond memory and into existence. It has become breath. Presence. A quiet companion in the spaces between moments.
In that single scene, the film stopped being about authority and defiance. It became a story about two men who were both broken by the same woman’s absence. One froze his love into discipline. The other expanded his love into life.
And only one learned how to live with loss without losing love.
We speak of divine love as something we direct toward the unseen. Toward something in the air, in the sky, in the quiet. Raj’s love for Megha lived in that same field. He did not need her photograph because she existed without form. And if love truly is everywhere, then the beloved is everywhere. Within us. Around us. In every moment where the heart opens even slightly.
Of course Raj Aryan belongs to the lineage of his other great loves on screen, where the woman is not only cherished but revered. Shah Rukh has always portrayed love as devotion, not necessarily desire. In so many of his characters he has spoken to the woman he loves as if she is not merely human but sacred. Godlike. Or, God. Not an object of affection but a presence of grace. In Mohabbatein he does not say this explicitly. He does not call Megha divine. Yet everything in the way he carries her suggests that she has become something like the sacred to him. He sees her without needing to see her. He feels her without needing to touch her. He believes in her without needing proof. The way someone believes in God. An unseen presence that does not need form or photograph or memory. She is everywhere because she is within him. And this is perhaps the quiet essence of Shah Rukh’s most enduring characters. He does not love to possess. He loves to elevate. To place the beloved where faith lives. To love as one might pray.
When he tells Narayan Shankar that he came to show him his daughter ‘not the daughter he lost, but the daughter who is still living quietly inside every moment of happiness and warmth in the world’ the film stopped being a love story.
It became a prayer.
A reminder that love is not possession. Love is not holding. Love is not having. Love is not keeping.
Love is seeing.
Love is remembering without effort.
Love is not diminished by departure.
It grows.
This time, Mohabbatein was not a film of rivalries. It was a film about how some loves do not end when the world says they should. They continue as breath. As awareness. As tenderness that does not vanish.
And when I saw that, truly saw that, I realized I had been wrong about this film all along.
It was never about the youth. Or the music academy. Or even the conflict.
It was about a man who loved a woman so purely that her absence did not become emptiness.
It became presence.
Everywhere.
World of Shubhika 
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