WAVES 2025: Kareena Kapoor wants global audience to watch Jab We Met, says ‘it embodies spirit of young Indian girl'
Kareena Kapoor Khan and Shahid Kapoor starrer Jab We Met remains one of the most beloved films, which made us fall in love with romance and celebrated love in its truest form.
(Also read: Jab Steven Spielberg met Kareena Kapoor: 'Are you the girl in famous Indian film about three students?')
Years have passed since the film's release, but the iconic characters of Kareena Kapoor's Geet and Shahid Kapoor's Aditya Kashyap are still etched in the minds and hearts of all Bollywood lovers.
During a panel moderated by filmmaker Karan Johar at the ongoing WAVES 2025, Kareena talked about the film's lasting impact and shared how it captures the essence of a spirited Punjabi girl.
She opened the one film she would like the global audience to watch, saying, "I would say Jab We Met because somewhere it embodies the spirit of a young Indian girl, a young Punjabi girl, and every girl has this spark in her, that dream in her eyes. Also, the freedom to choose what she wanted..she has the right to.. feel love, just as she wanted. I think it connected with everyone for a reason, and I believe it will continue to connect with people worldwide."
The 2007 film, written and directed by Imtiaz Ali, revolves around Aditya Kashyap (Shahid), a heartbroken tycoon who aimlessly boards a train after attending his ex-girlfriend's wedding. On board, he meets Geet Dhillon (Kareena), a spontaneous girl who plans to elope with her lover. He gets pulled into her rollercoaster life and gradually falls in love with her as she shows him a more fulfilling and entertaining way of living.
Geet was a chatterbox, crazy young girl, and Aditya was the opposite. The well-known saying 'Opposites attract' truly worked for the plot. The film's songs were also hits. From Ye Ishq Hai to Mauja Hi Mauja, Tum Se Hi, and Aaoge Jab Tum, each track from 'Jab We Met' weaved magic. Over the years, the film has developed a cult status.
Kareena also mentioned the possibility of working in Hollywood, saying, "I think it just organically did not happen. Films are my passion--they run in my veins. I was born into this family. Times are changing, and you never know. Chasing something has never been a part of my personality, but if it's meant to happen, maybe a Hindi-English film will come along. After all, even Spielberg is watching our movies!"
WAVES 2025 is India's first-of-its-kind international summit dedicated to the audio-visual and entertainment sectors. It brings together over 10,000 delegates, 1,000 creators, 300 companies, and 350 startups, creating a powerful cross-sectoral network. The event encompasses the entire spectrum of media and emerging technologies, from film and OTT to AVGC-XR, comics, AI, and broadcasting. The four-day event began on May 1 and will continue until May 4. (ANI)
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Wilayat Mahal, along with Sakina and Ali Raza, spent over a decade at railway stations – at the Charbagh station in Lucknow, then in the first-class waiting room of New Delhi Railway station – turning waiting rooms into stations of protest or defiance. These waiting rooms became surreal placeholders that screamed both royalty and rootlessness. Before moving to Delhi in the 1970s, Wilayat and her children had stayed for some time in Kashmir in the mid-1960s. Later in Lucknow, Wilayat claimed Chattar Manzil as her ancestral home and demanded restitution for the annexation of Awadh by the British. In a tussle between legitimate or illegitimate claims, personal and public memory, and fundamental rights to a decent life, the reader is drawn into a world where imperial legacies collide with post-colonial neglect, and memory becomes both weapon and wound. Doubly erased The House of Awadh situates Wilayat's story in the realm of the long afterlife of colonial disruption: the abolition of princely states, the dissolution of Privy Purses, the partition of families and identities across India and Pakistan. In this shuffle of geopolitics, personal histories are often erased or never documented – especially those of women who do not fit easily into officially sanctioned narratives. Wilayat Mahal emerges as a figure of protest: a Shia woman who refused state accommodations in Lucknow and instead demanded a return of her kingdom. The web of conflicts and confusions gets thicker. Wilayat's name was not included in the pensions list for the royals and their descendants, an omission both political and symbolic. This detail is crucial not because it debunks her claim, but because it adds texture to it – foregrounding the tangle of kinship, gender, and legitimacy in both pre-colonial and post-colonial India. In this context, it is important to understand Wilayat's social and religious identity. A Shia woman, who claimed direct descent from Hazrat Mahal, but whose actual ancestry, as the book details later, traced her lineage to a certain Zohra, a mu'tah (temporary) wife of Wajid Ali Shah (who had hundreds of wives), opens doors to further controversies. This connection, through the maternal line and via Shia traditions, was doubly removed and scorned in the eyes of the state. As a Shia, and a descendant of Zohra – also a grandchild of Wajid Ali Shah – Wilayat's link to royalty was not easy to accept or validate. Mut'ah marriages, temporary in nature and considered illegal by Sunni orthodoxy, were often dismissed as akin to prostitution. Hazrat Mahal herself had been one such wife (referred to as a concubine), making their roles in resistance even more subversive. The authors' commitment to following every clue – from Zohra's mut'ah lineage to Asafi Kothi in Sheesh Mahal – is exemplary. They excavate not only the ruins of palaces but also the layered wounds of inheritance, belonging, and trauma. Wilayat's story, the authors suggest, is not in the facts but in the 'cracks of memory'. From Lucknow to Kashmir, to Karachi, the authors traverse the complex geographies of a family and its fractured identity. Inayatullah, Wilayat's husband, once the Vice-Chancellor of Lucknow University, migrated to Karachi after Partition with four sons. Wilayat, reportedly the second wife, and her children were looked down upon – again, doubly marginalised for their gender and historical lineage. A trailing shadow Kumar and André's deep dive into the historical context of Awadh – its annexation, the legacy and significant role of Hazrat Mahal in the Revolt of 1857, the dissolution of the princely states, and the fallout of Partition – is as thorough as it is moving. What they achieve is not just a biographical excavation, but a rebalancing of how we perceive madness, protest, and feminine agency in post-colonial India. Wilayat's life, as the authors show, uncannily mirrored that of Hazrat Mahal – not just in resistance but in its tragic arc. Hazrat Mahal, a formidable leader of the 1857 Revolt, had led armies against the British and sent delegations to London to protest the annexation of Awadh by the East India Company. Her mission failed. She died in exile in Kathmandu, and her dreams remained unfulfilled. Wilayat's lifelong protest against the same historical wrong also ended in futility – her claims never fully acknowledged, her requests never quite granted, her memory left to rot along with the ruins of Malcha Mahal. Her fight was less about restoration and more about recognition. This is where the book's most powerful and poignant subtext lies: how women's memories, oral histories, and lived experiences are routinely invalidated only because they don't complement or validate official records. Wilayat's insistence that her family was wronged may never have been fully provable, but it was not a figment of imagination either. There was truth, however fragmentary, in what she claimed. And that truth, this book argues, deserves its place in our historical imagination. The authors let Wilayat's contradictions to breathe: a woman fiercely protective of her identity, who once broke the locks at Sheesh Mahal to reclaim what she said was hers; a woman of noble defiance and psychological fragility, who planted a neem tree at Malcha Mahal as a marker of rootedness in a land that refused to see her as one of their own. 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And in 2017, Prince Ali Raza – also known to some as Cyrus – died alone in its decrepit halls – his demise marking the ultimate end of the family line. During their time at the New Delhi Railway Station and Malcha Mahal, the family was harassed by local boys and goons, highlighting the vulnerability of their situation. The neglect was not just administrative but societal. Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilisation (1961) finds an echo here and, in the book too, in how melancholy and grief were used as tools to discredit and isolate. Wilayat's narrative was alternately romanticised and dehumanised – hailed as a mysterious, melancholic royal one day, dismissed as a delusional imposter the next. The foreign press dubbed her a ' fake queen,' 'mentally ill,' 'fraud' – a treatment reminiscent of Bertha Mason, the so-called madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), whose dissent is pathologised. 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