But the film is not about them. It is about Aarti, who never smiles in the film, unless accompanied by tears and Deepak, who looks perenially confused and cannot understand why every woman he meets, falls in love with him. Aarti’s life is full of tragedies. The first is the train-theft of her purse, which contains her degree certificates – this spells the end of her job-hunting days, since without these certificates no one will give her a job (copy machines don’t exist, obviously). This purse somehow lands up with Deepak who is travelling to Cochin and who then mails it back to her – this starts off a series of letters and they fall in love, without seeing or meeting each other (oh…the power of words). The next tragedy is when Deepak calls her from Cochin, but she can’t hear him because of the background noise from a morcha, and he has to hang up when the meter crosses Rs. 100. Deepak then leaves Cochin for another job in Delhi. The third tragedy is when she comes again to Delhi and keeps bumping into Deepak in highly contrived situations, but doesn’t know who he is and then eventually has to return back to Nainital. The next tragedy occurs when her brother-in-law brings in Salman (the richest businessman in Nainital) as a potential suitor (I would have thought she would have danced to the moon…). The last is when she comes to Delhi to search for Deepak, but just can’t seem to find him. Eventually, Aarti and Deepak do find each other, but even in the final moments of the film, they just can’t smile.

Deepak is too good to be true. A decent, straight-forward, honest man, his only vice is smoking. He would rather marry a jobless woman he has never met or seen, than a beautiful millionairess (Neha) who literally throws herself at him. To compound the characterization problem, Sanjay Kapoor again looks constipated most of the times, reminding us of the “aati nahin, aati nahin……” song from Prem. (Incidentally, Prem played last Sunday on Zee Cinema and it was fun watching Tabu and Sanjay Kapoor making asses of themselves. Tabu of course has learnt her lessons, which Sanjay unfortunately still hasn’t).

The only fun moments are when Sushmita and Salman play their cameos. Sushmita (this is the second consecutive film of hers that I have seen, the first being Biwi No 1) has tremendous screen presence. When she plays the vivacious, fun-person, she lights up each scene with her terrific timing. Salman plays “Salman”, as he always does these days, and he comes up with the best line in the movie after Aarti turns him down, saying “yeh mere hi saath kyon hota hai…” (why does this happen only to me), which is an obvious reference to his losing the girl in Kuch Kuch…

Jackie Shroff has a small guest-appearance (he plays an auto-rickshaw driver) and plays the rough-tough guy with the golden-heart. In fact, the funny part is that this film has no villains or bad guys. Everyone is nice and helpful, which is somewhat of a let-down, especially when Mohnish Behl (Ranjeet, Deepak’s friend from office) and Tej Sapru (Aarti’s brother-in-law) also turn out to be nice guys. For reference, the film also has Johny Lever and Kader Khan, with thankfully short roles and no buffoonery.

Unless you are a confirmed Sanjay Kapoor or Priya Gill fan (and I don’t know of any), this film can be given a safe miss…….unless of course, you are a Sushmita fan (and I know of many) and you don’t want to miss any of her films.