Karan Johar leans across and declares he has "finished" the sumptuous "trilogy of tears" that has made him Bollywood's most bankable film director.
Kuch Kuch Hota Hai ("Something Happens"), Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham ("Sometime Happiness, Sometime Sadness") and Kal Ho Naa Ho ("Whether Tomorrow Comes or Not") are also the three most popular Indian-origin films in the US and UK, home to millions of expatriate
Indians. The UK's busiest cinema is a multiplex near London that screens only Bollywood films. "They are beautiful to watch - even with subtitles," says Clare Wise, director of overseas projects at the UK Film Council.
In the five years since he directed his first film, aged 26, Johar has emerged as a kingmaker in Bollywood. His mix of romanticism, vigorous song and dance and basic story-telling has produced a feast for the heart, if not for the minds of the Indian diaspora
in Brooklyn and Birmingham, as well as Bihar. "My cinema sensibilities travel. I make films for every Indian everywhere."
And non-Indians. At the Berlin Film Festival last week ("It's just a Bollywood day out for the foreigners", says Johar), the main Indian attraction were films by Johar. And recently in Mumbai Johar spent an evening with Harvey Weinstein, the boss of Miramax
film studio. "Hollywood is interested, but the only thing we've exchanged is a handshake, not a cheque. I would like to take an Indian film to Hollywood rather than be taken over by Hollywood."
Johar is a master of that most pulsating Indian art form - song and dance. In his latest film, Kal Ho Naa Ho, which he wrote but whose direction he handed over to Nikhil Advani, Johar's musical collaborators have spiced up the classic song "Pretty Woman" by
Roy Orbison, turned it into an even more rhythmic Bhangra (the music of northern Indian farmers celebrating harvest) and set it in prosperous New York.
If that seems bizarre, just hear Johar out. He argues that Bollywood films are films with songs, not musicals in the old Hollywood tradition when, say, a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers song was a device to take the story forward.
"In our films we stop a situation and celebrate with a song. We celebrate sorrow, joy, anything with songs. It is perfectly normal. But the song does not move the narrative. The west just does not get it when a song can simply be sung out of nowhere. Nobody
in a reality setting [in the west] would do this. But we do."
At the end of a song, actors perform the next scene, which has not moved ahead in any obvious way despite the interruption of a fantastically choreographed song involving dozens of performers and possibly also the battlefield of the India-Pakistan border, the
Swiss Alps, Fifth Avenue or Buckingham Palace as a backdrop. "The west may see this as kitsch, or surreal. But for us it is normal," says Johar.
Johar's mastery of this form is ironic. Many believed a more open India with wider funding opportunities would produce a new generation of "crossover" films focusing on minority Indian issues for non-Indian audiences as well as the diaspora. The fact that this
new wave has not only failed to take root but has also been beaten to the lucrative outside world by a traditional form of cinema is particularly galling.
"Johar's cinema presents a retrograde homogenised India", says Dev Benegal, a Mumbai-based director of such crossover films. He is particularly disappointed because Johar has the loyal audiences and the big budgets to be a risk-taker. "What we get is saccharine
Indian pride and an outdated view of family, women and relationships. It is based on a notion of a transnational Indian that is designed to appeal to the diaspora. It's regressive."
Johar is unrepentant. "My cinema is what I want life to be. I am not bothered about the type of Indian I portray. Yes, I do take out the details [of life]; but I rely on my characters' emotional stability to hold the film. This is what connects with millions
of people. Whether this is right or wrong is someone else's decision." He continues: "What is crossover?" Laagan, directed and starring Aamir Khan, may have won an Oscar nomination two years ago but its crossover status is questionable given its obscure colonial
content (cricket and the British empire). "And if an Indian wants to make a musical crossover they will have to do it 'their' way and risk losing a large Indian audience overseas."
There are examples of crossover successes - but the other way round. The films of US-based Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding) and the British-Asian filmmaker Gurinder Chada (Bend it Like Beckham) revealed diaspora foibles with sensibility and humour that pleased audiences
in India and the west. The truth, as Johar insinuates, is that India may not yet possess crossover artists. "Even our self-consciously new-wave films have not attracted foreigners. Perhaps they will in a decade when the art-cinema audience settles down."
Which means that for the moment the overseas market seems likely to remain the territory of traditional Bollywood. Veteran filmmaker Yash Chopra has remarked how a single London screening earns more than a week's showing in the Indian heartlands. Ultimately
this can have a bearing on a film's content, as well as its economics.
Johar identifies "simple non-resident Indians who do not even understand Hindi yet see my films" as rich in story material. "When I travel, I feel the pathos of someone who has left their homeland." This emotion only emerged in the 1980s as immigrants found
their voice. Their sense of homesickness and a conservative, sentimentalised nationalism gave filmmakers a new theme - and foreign currency revenues. Johar is notably effective in extracting every teardrop of expatriates' "emotional graft": at a private school
in England in Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, a proud and tearful mother admires her award-winning son to the sound of the Indian national anthem.
"This industry works on faith, emotion and trust," says Johar, who after his first film attracted Bollywood's finest to his next with barely a reading of the script. "Amitabh uncle [the lugubrious superstar and family friend, Amitabh Bachchan] would have agreed
even if I had gone as my father's son."
Johar's reference to "uncle Amitabh" is a hint of his lineage. The son of a film producer, Johar grew up embarrassed by his father's links with the world of filmmaking. The young Johar went to the cinema with his maid rather than with the school friends from
whom he concealed his father's job. The truth came out when, as a teenager before he went to college to study business management, one of his father's films was a national hit.
Johar's precocious filmmaking talent became apparent as he hung around the film-sets of his childhood friend, filmmaker Aditya Chopra. "I was a bouncing board for ideas." Three successful films later, Johar is ready for something new. He is reluctant to
reveal the direction, which he says is still embryonic. "But I want to challenge myself with something different. So I am reading a lot. I've not researched before because my characters are all from my world. Now I must," he says, clasping a document that
starts, intriguingly, with the words "India and Pakistan".
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