Komal Nahta

The verdict is out: The collections of Chori Chori Chupke Chupke are falling faster than share prices do on the stock market.

And a number of theories are being propounded to explain why the superhyped film failed to appeal to the public. A look at some of the plausible reasons:

* The film offers very little for the youth and the masses. Among the women, the response is divided -- 50 per cent like the film while the other 50 per cent find the theme of surrogate motherhood too avant garde for comfort.

* Abbas Mustan are specialists of thrillers and snazzy, stylish films. An out-and-out family drama isn't their cup of tea. The script, with its glaring loopholes, bears testimony to their lack of expertise at handling such fares.

* For such a delicate and serious subject, the screenplay writers should have been extra careful. But the impression one gets is that the writing is the biggest stumbling block. At the end of the film, when Preity Zinta gets neither Salman Khan nor their baby, the audience feels she has been wronged. The writers might argue that it was meant to be that way -- the audience sympathy was supposed to go to Preity Zinta.

But here's the catch: While it is all very proper that the audience sympathy must go to Preity, the audience feels that Salman Khan and Rani Mukerji have 'used' Preity for their gain. When the film ends, the public feels that Salman and Rani have 'cheated' Preity. And we're talking of Salman and Rani, who are the film's hero and heroine.

* Yet another theory has it that there's no build-up to Rani's insistence that her husband Salman sire a child through another woman. There's just one scene between her and her grandfather-in-law Amrish Puri, which makes her suggest the extreme and completely unusual step to her hubby.

* The writers' and directors' recourse to the easy way out of difficult situations is evident in the gode-bharai scene in which Preity Zinta poses as Salman's wife. To hide her identity, she is shown sitting through the function in a ghunghat.

Barring that scene, Salman's family is shown as being very modern and progressive. Salman's wife is shown wearing jeans and T-shirts, too. Would such a family let the wife sit in a ghunghat through the function, even while posing for photographs?

Even if the obvious answer is 'no', the writers/directors did not cook up a plausible reason to justify this. And this ghunghat is very important because, but for it, the secret pact between Salman, Rani and Preity would have been exposed.

Treating such an important link in the drama so carelessly or casually with what is known as recourse to cinematic liberties, doesn't quite work when we talk of an enlightened audience and very important or sensitive scenes.

* There's another theory which says that the audience expects the secret pact to be exposed in front of the family in the climax. In place of the expectation of a melodramatic climax, the audience gets a rather tame and convenient mini climax.

The film, despite the above theories, has managed to do very well so far in good cinemas in Bombay, Maharashtra and U P. However, it must be mentioned that a big drop was noticed in U P on the eighth day of its release.