18 Years Of 'Om Shanti Om': How Farah Khan and SRK Taught An Entire Film Industry to Laugh at Itself

On a clamorous Diwali weekend in 2007, choreographer-turned-director Farah Khan’s second film opened its eyes: kicking, laughing, drooling, dreaming, and playing with its umbilical cord as if it were a toy. Most movies release, but Om Shanti Om was born.

All at once, it contained the innocence of a toddler, the irreverence of a teenager and the affection of an adult. In a decade where Hindi cinema expanded its vocabulary of storytelling, Om Shanti Om became a Bollywood-sized ode to the alphabets that defined the language. An entire film industry was taught to laugh at itself. Just like that, a sense of humour was bestowed upon a country that was getting serious about its post-liberalisation status.

For every landscape-altering filmmaker like Farhan Akhtar, Dibakar Banerjee, Sriram Raghavan, Vishal Bhardwaj or Anurag Kashyap — the ones who carved cinema out of life — there appeared a landscape-nourishing director like Karan Johar or Farah Khan to balance the scales and carve life out of cinema. Khan’s imprint was just as significant as the auteurs and the geeks. She became an essential bridge between storytelling and entertainment; between why we created and where we escaped.

From the Inside Out

Like its Shah Rukh Khan-shaped protagonist, Om Shanti Om passed but never died. Its prescience remains alive to the world we live in today. Years before “nepotism” entered the showbiz lexicon as a swear-word, along came the storyline of a talented outsider being erased by a producer only to return as a nepo-baby who goes on to avenge the tragedy of said outsider. It was a harsh truth softened by the onslaught of vintage silver-screen tropes. Om Shanti Om also became a viral spoof before memes, social media, online skits and TVF parodies changed the grammar of satire. Word of mouth spread through actual words and talking mouths.

The unfiltered gags (the Quickgun Murugun and Filmfare-award bits remain cultural moments), amateur mimicry (my favourite: young Sooraj Barjatya getting a brainwave for Maine Pyaar Kiya), the Red Chillies VFX tricks (AI has nothing on Deepika Padukone dancing with CGI images of Sunil Dutt and Rajesh Khanna in “Dhoom Tana”), and those countless cameos in the title song were widely shared, discussed and ‘liked’ in a pre-smartphone era. In a way, it revived the craft of remembering the history of cinema without forgetting the future of storytelling. It was like simultaneously seeing an unserious film and a live ceremony packed with fourth-wall-breaking performances.

As a film student in 2007, I had walked out of Om Shanti Om with a perspective that went beyond the joy of the viewing experience. There was a truckload of admiration for all the hands that crafted the gloss — not least because assistant directors played a key role in the scheduling of Khan’s all-access vision, and because the end-credits montage humanised the logistical hell by ‘revealing’ crew members through superstar-coded jigs. A prelude to the Luck by Chance opening salvo, it not only legitimised the profession but also deconstructed magic, as if to say: the hats producing the rabbits didn’t make themselves. Nothing about these gimmicks felt dishonest; they seamlessly blended into the style of a film that expected us to notice the strings and yet surrender to the puppeteering.

 
The ghost of Om Shanti Om reverberated down through the generations — of stories, characters, people and places — that followed. For starters, it reframed cinephilia as an extension of being. The high-brow exclusivity of art appreciation was punctured by a movie about movies for those who grew up consuming movies without realising it. It cut across masses and classes, fans and connoisseurs, writers and watchers without any biases.

In the early years, Om Shanti Om lived on through a few spiritual descendants: films and makers that were unabashed about their love for the business and stories that nurtured them. Luck by Chance, 3 Idiots, Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, Barfi!, Bombay Velvet, Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania and several others became the trees that sprouted from the leaves of the Om Shanti Om notebook. It felt fitting that Red Chillies Entertainment went on to back Kaamyaab, a lovely little film in which Sanjay Mishra plays a washed-up character artist, and a thematic sibling of Shah Rukh Khan’s Om Prakash Makhija.

Another aspect that stands out is the film’s freewheeling transitions between over-the-top comedy and retro emotions — a switch that most contemporary movies struggle to pull off. The gravity of a revenge saga is laced with the levity of a film-making satire, not the other way around: the dard (pain) is laced with the disco.

Coming Full Circle

In this age of self-referential fatigue, overdoses of meta jokes, and stories mined from previous stories, the legacy of Om Shanti Om often emerges like past-life flashbacks of an authentic and more passionate time. These were simple pleasures before nostalgia became an algorithm-driven tool: enjoy the film while enjoying your relationship with films. The stories told reflected the creators’ personalities as well as their unvarnished commercial heritage. Dozens of Hindi titles try to replicate the “Farah Khan template” today only to desensitise the audience to the concept of celebrity instead. To put it in Om Shanti Om terminology, most of them come across as derivative superstar Om Kapoor before he discovers who he really is. The gaze of the film itself mirrors the playful gaze of junior artist Om Prakash Makhija towards the industry and the ethereal actress he loves.

I think of this film and miss it every time I spot plastic pretenders and keyword-driven homages — a bit like how Kirron Kher’s Bela dramatically misses her dead son. And then I think of the timing of this column. It took 30 years for an arrogant Om Kapoor to realise that the humble Om Prakash Makhija was reborn as him — that his identity as a superstar’s son stems from the spirit of a brave outsider. It’s sort of lyrical that, almost 20 years later, Om Shanti Om has been reincarnated as Ba***ds of Bollywood, a boyish send-up of Bollywood directed by the son of the superstar who played Om. Aryan Khan’s series came to life in September; much of its humour, tone, gags and irreverence unfurl as edgy updates of the Farah Khan classic. The popularity of Ba***ds is inherited from the film: a wistful view of how the digital generation might have reacted to something as delightfully kooky as Om Shanti Om.

Perhaps it’s telling that the show’s big twist debunks our notion of a new-age love story to reveal a ‘family’ secret (the newcomer hero and nepo-kid heroine learn that they have the same father) that’s best described as: Main Hoon Na meets Om Shanti Om. In other words, the successor to the 2007 film almost confesses that modern Hindi cinema is a farce and a genetically mutated front for old-fashioned Bollywood templates — the past cannot be escaped, no matter how far it runs. At some level, watching the show feels like watching Om Kapoor ‘transform’ on stage and wonder where his heartfelt acceptance speech is coming from. It’s the new reclaiming the old.

Until 2025 the movie was such a trendsetter that it felt unresolved, like a king without heirs. But I can’t think of a better full-circle line than this: Om Shanti Om is complete at last. It’s a rebirth like no other. Closure is a dish best served warm. After all, you cannot touch the son without dealing with the father.