Overview
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (New 2020) - Iftikhar Thakur, Zafri Khan, Khushboo
Reviews
5 min readThe Sari and the Sigh: How Kuch Kuch Hota Hai Still Haunts Bollywood
I remember the first time I saw Kuch Kuch Hota Hai in a cramped Mumbai theater in 1998. The air smelled of samosas and hair oil, and the audience—mostly college students and families—gasped in unison when Shah Rukh Khan’s Rahul first laid eyes on Kajol’s Anjali in a sari. It wasn’t just a costume change.
It was a transformation, a visual argument about desire, femininity, and the rules of attraction that Bollywood had been whispering for decades. Twenty-five years later, the film still feels like a time capsule, not just of 1990s fashion (those crop tops! those chokers!) but of a cultural moment when India was caught between tradition and the tantalizing pull of Western modernity.
And yet, for all its gloss and nostalgia, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is a film that can’t quite decide what it wants to be: a love story, a coming-of-age tale, or a cautionary fable about the dangers of growing up.
Karan Johar’s directorial debut is, above all, a film about surfaces. The college sequences are drenched in the kind of high-gloss aesthetic that would later become his signature—bright colors, meticulously styled hair, and a campus that looks like it was plucked straight out of Beverly Hills, 90210. The film’s visual language is aspirational to the point of fantasy, a world where even the basketball court gleams like a runway.
This isn’t realism; it’s a dreamscape, one where friendship and love are performed with the same exaggerated emotion as the film’s iconic musical numbers. And yet, for all its artificiality, there’s something oddly moving about the way Johar uses these surfaces to tell a story about emotional depth. The shift from the vibrant, chaotic energy of the college years to the softer, more muted tones of the film’s second half mirrors Rahul’s journey from carefree youth to a man burdened by loss and regret.
Buzz & Rumors
Public reportsThe other Kuch Kuch Hota Hai is a Lahore stage night.
Search the title and the internet will shove Shah Rukh Khan at you. This listing is the other one. TMDB logs a Punjabi title dated 4 February 2020 in Pakistan, original language Punjabi, a two-minute runtime, and an overview that is just a YouTube billing line: "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (New 2020) - Iftikhar Thakur, Zafri Khan, Khushboo." No director, no cast page, no trailer. latestnetflix.com's take is that A Lahore contributor uploaded a poster and a name that already belonged to someone else.
A borrowed chorus on a live tape.
The circulating recording is not two minutes. Hi-Tech Stage Dramas put up a 2-hour-3-minute Punjabi comedy on 11 October 2019, sold as a 2019 brand-new stage drama and "New 2020." It has sat there with about 1.8 million views. That is the object. Pakistani commercial theatre has been nicking Bollywood song titles for decades. Zafri Khan's Wikipedia theatre list even includes a play called Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, no year attached, sitting next to other Lahore staples. The 1998 Karan Johar film is still the search-engine magnet. This tape is what you get when a catalog is sloppy. , ,
The three names on the poster.
Iftikhar Thakur, born Iftikhar Ahmed in Mian Channu in 1958, came up through Punjabi stage after jobs in the police, a tyre shop, and driving trucks in New York. He took the surname from a landlord character. In 2019 Dawn printed him on the Pride of Performance list as Iftikhar Ahmad Thakar of Punjab, in the same arts batch as Reema Khan. Zafri Khan, a Faisalabad-born slapstick comic and former tailor, is the other half of the usual Lahore double act. He later turned up in Indian Punjabi cinema as Advocate Bilal Randhawa in Chal Mera Putt 2. Khushboo is the dancer-actress billed in the title line, the third name that sells a night of jugats and dance numbers. The three of them have been clipped and re-clipped on YouTube for years. A 2022 re-upload still uses the same names. , , ,
After the hall closed.
Hi-Tech Music Ltd claims worldwide rights on the old OK CD Corner and Tip Top Video catalogue. The stage circuit lives on those channels now. Commenters on the 2019 upload argue about repeated punches and which comic is actually carrying the night. That is the gossip. Not a secret recast of Rahul and Anjali. A two-hour Lahore tape wearing a borrowed chorus, filed as a two-minute movie, still circulating because the title is too famous to ignore. If you came looking for college uniforms and "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai" the ballad, you are in the wrong hall. ,
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.