Few filmmakers have understood the emotional messiness of modern relationships quite like Imtiaz Ali. And yet, he says he has little interest in decoding love.
“I was actually talking to my mother while we were on the way to a party to celebrate the success of Main Vaapas Aaunga. She reminded me that growing up I didn’t feel anything. I was like a stone. She said, ‘Ever since you were a child, it was like that,” says the director. Pausing, he adds, “So I don’t look at myself as a romantic.”
It is an inconvenient origin story for a man whose films have made desire their subject: the accidental, improbable connection between Geet and Aditya in Jab We Met (2007), Jordan’s belief that true art and music require a broken heart in Rockstar (2011), Veera’s hunger for freedom in Highway (2014); Ved’s internal crisis in Tamasha (2015). In his recent Main Vaapas Aaunga, love endures across Partition, separation and age. Ali’s characters yearn, break, run away, return, confess, conceal and occasionally arrive at the uncomfortable truth that love is not always about staying together. Perhaps that’s why the filmmaker resists the idea of decoding it: his films have always been more interested in what love does to people rather than in explaining what it is.
“I don’t pursue a certain nuance or a certain feeling on my filmmaking path,” he says. “I’m definitely not trying to discover what love is. I’m definitely not trying to even tell anybody what I think love is, at all. In fact, I find the whole concept of trying to prove what love is quite boring. But there are stories, and when one writes them, one doesn’t know how things just flow from the mind. It just happens.”
That is the first clue to understanding Imtiaz Ali. There is little calculation in the way he approaches either his stories or, it seems, himself. At Esquire India cover shoot, he is similarly unassuming—a gentle presence who nonetheless seems entirely aware of his magnetism. He is game to step outside of his comfort zone, from tossing on a Hermès scarf to trying a trouser silhouette he wouldn’t otherwise wear. There's something else about that gaze too. A faraway quality, an old-world gentleness, a sense that he is perpetually contemplating something just beyond the horizon. It has become synonymous with the director’s presence.
Ali, however, has a less flattering explanation of this. “I was constantly daydreaming as a child in school and was often made to stand outside for drifting away in class. I would inevitably think of some cock-and-bull story back then. I continue to do so but I’m no longer made to stand in the corridor.”
Unassuming, yes. Charming too.
There’s a relaxed vibe about him now that the initial frenzy of the film’s pre- and post-release has died down. Starring Naseeruddin Shah, Vedang Raina, Sharvari and Diljit Dosanjh, Main Vaapas Aaunga struck a chord with audiences, a film about what it means to feel deeply at a time when everything feels so instant and surface-level. The story was born while Ali was spending time in Punjab during and after the making of Amar Singh Chamkila (2024), meeting and interacting with people who had lived through Partition. What stayed with him was not only the enormity of what they had endured, but what they had chosen to remember.
“Many of them suffer from Alzheimer’s and dementia, but they never forgot that girl who came to their father’s shop... they never forgot that tree dotted with beautiful flowers... or the doll they accidentally left behind when they moved from Lahore,” he recalls. What struck him most, though, was the absence of bitterness. "Even upon probing, they mentioned this life-changing experience without any hatred. They just said, 'That was just That was just the face of humanity at that time.’” It stayed with him. “I felt that, while some of them are still with us today, we could make this film and show it to some of them, so that it registers in their psyche: we hear you, sir.”
What emerges from those stories is the durability of love. Through the film’s central characters, Ishar (Keenu) and Jiya, we see how a broken promise and longing can survive into old age. The idea that love can transform a person, even when it doesn’t resolve neatly, is one Ali has explored before, but here it comes through with unusual clarity.
“In Main Vaapas Aaunga, Ishar and Jiya are separated during Partition. But it is not as though it fractured him [Ishar]. It kept him together,” he says.
Ali points to the moment in Love Aaj Kal when Jai approaches Meera on her wedding day, to reassure her that he is fine. They have been apart for a long time, yet something unexpectedly tender emerges during their conversation. “Love [is] so volatile and it is so destructive,” he says. “But the beauty of it in that moment is beyond anything that has happened in their relationship before.”
It is an observation that helps explain why Ali’s films are rarely interested in assigning blame. His characters may hurt one another, misunderstand one another and make poor decisions. But cynicism is rarely the final destination. Even in the wreckage, there is something to be discovered.
“I do feel that love is far more constructive than destructive,” he says. “There is redemption. In what breaks, something more valuable gets revealed.
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He may call himself far from romantic, but today Ali is rooting wholeheartedly for love. His daughter Ida’s engagement has been announced, and he couldn’t be more thrilled. As a father, he’s less interested in dispensing wisdom than in championing her. “I would always be happy in her happiness, for sure. But I also am her friend, so I participate in things as well. I find myself like a cheering leader. Of course I’m there with all my wisdom, but I’m more like a cheering supporter.”
For all the ways relationships have changed, Ali believes the fundamentals of love remain the same. “Every generation feels that they are unique, and they have completely changed the point of view of love,” he says. “But, you know, that is only as unique as the fact that every generation feels it.”
The rules and methods may change, but the nature of love does not. “Of course, the phone and the swipe right and swipe left wasn’t available in our times, but all the other things which are now called breadcrumbing were being done even at that time,” he says.
The technology may be new; the emotional games we play are age-old. The internet recently discovered the “yearning man” but Ali has been writing him for years. Jordan in Rockstar and Ved in Tamasha are men who are not always entirely certain what they are searching for, only that something inside them remains unresolved.
Ali shrugs off the idea that he consciously created the archetype. “If there is some conflict, then there has to be a yearning man,” he says. “That yearning may come through in the people that I write.” It is not limited to his male characters, either. Veera in Highway yearns too. “I think people have that, you know, under their skin.”
And if he were writing Jab We Met today, it would work much the same way: Geet and Aditya would still find each other. “I’m not following the concept of two people falling in love with each other. What I’m following is that there is a certain person feeling a certain way, and someone else who's feeling something else. And that just creates some sort of connection between them," he explains.
His films are filled with people who expose themselves, who speak from a place of vulnerability, who risk humiliation while being in pursuit of love. The irony, of course, is that Ali’s characters often possess an emotional courage that he does not entirely claim for himself. That may be why he’s so attuned to what men still struggle with when it comes to love. “Their ego,” he says. “We are all products of a society where males have been given the superior place. To dethrone oneself from that advantageous position is difficult for a man. Ego still prevails.”
Ali, too, admits to being more guarded than his characters. “I do have the aspiration of not being as guarded as I am. When characters in my films expose their vulnerability, they come from a place of bravery that I ascribe to and aspire towards... I find myself perhaps incapable of,” he says, candidly.
So where do those extraordinary declarations of love come from? Not, apparently, from an unusually eventful personal life. “My lived experiences account for very little, honestly,” he says. “I’ve lived one life, directed and made ten films and written a few more.” Instead, there are the experiences of others, fragments of observation and then letting his imagination do what imagination does best. He recalls knowing a couple who decided to throw a party to celebrate their breakup because the separation was mutual. Somewhere along the way, that idea found its way into Love Aaj Kal. “Half in imagination and half in reality from people [I know],” he says.
It is not hard to see this as the secret of Ali’s cinema: not confession, but absorption. He listens. He observes. He gathers fragments of other lives and allows them to collide with whatever stories are already forming inside his head. And when those stories concern love, they seem to arrive without calculation. This may be why he has no interest in presenting himself as someone who has finally figured it out. Asked whether, after a lifetime of writing about love and longing, he understands it any better now, Ali offers no grand revelation. “Notions have opened up and notions have changed,” he says. “But I don’t know whether it’s for the better or for worse. I would call it a natural progression rather than a necessary improvement.”
What has that progression taught him to value in a relationship? Friendship, it turns out. “Friendship or companionship... I value that a lot,” he says. “Companionship is something which also brings us to ourselves. We feel a certain joy in the presence of somebody. And in the companionship of somebody. So I value that.”
Imtiaz Ali may not experience himself as a romantic. He may even remain guarded, by his own admission. Yet somewhere between the stories he overhears from the people he meets, his own memories and the imagination that once got him thrown out of class, he has developed an extraordinary sensitivity to what people carry beneath the surface.
Perhaps that is what makes his love stories endure.
Credits
Chairperson: Avarna Jain
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Editor and Words by: Rahul Gangwani
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