The aliens have truly landed in Bollywood. The unbelievable has happened. Out of the three big ‘A’s that were released last week, it was the Deol family get-together, a rajma and sarson ka saag fare called Apne, that had everything going for it. Patriarch Dharmendra with his two sons, one beefy (Sunny), the other goofy (Bobby), and huge helpings of Punjab where women mind the kitchen and men drip sentiment and testosterone, turned Apne into a languorously told family saga. Entirely devoted to creating a typical Punjab flavour, the first half of Apne may be easily exchanged for a short snooze. However, once daddy, who wants to avenge his honour (he had to retire in shame after a drug charge against him at the international level), finds second son Bobby entering the ring, it gets as exciting as a Mike Tyson punch. And when it climaxes with Sunny Deol’s power-packed fists, Apne is complete paisa vasool.

Yet, Apne had a slow start at the box-office, picking up noticeably only in Deol-territory like Punjab and the North.

Meanwhile, Mahesh and Mukesh Bhatt’s Awarapan was declared out of the race. One would’ve thought that the Bhatts would sneak in the surprise hit, like they did last season with a low-on-hype Gangster. Alas, Awarapan was like a documentary on the Hong Kong-Kowloon skyline with an overdose of Pakistan and religion, but without the support of a credible story. Bhatt-watchers have got used to small-budget, human dramas from this banner. Instead, the Bhatts served a straight, bland dish with no twists or dramatic turns. Think Murder, Kalyug, Gangster. Awarapan is clearly the odd one out, underlining to the Bhatts that a big budget alone is not what their audience wants from them.

With Apne’s restricted appeal and with Awarapan finding it’s not even a contender, it was left to — of all the unlikely people — Himesh Reshammiya to save the day. Sources say that while everybody scoffed at the capped wonder’s audacity to turn actor, HR (the rockstar, as he calls himself) was calmly sending messages to the Apne makers not to compete with him. Since Apne too has his music and Himesh knew that it deserved an audience, he was concerned that the well-made Deol drama would take a beating if it clashed with his superior drawing power. HR was that cocksure of his own appeal!

When Himesh Reshammiya’s Aap Ka Suroor, a weakly scripted narcissist’s journey, got the thumbs down from reviewers everywhere, it seemed like the musician had financed his own doom.

But — rub your eyes with disbelief — Aap Ka Suroor is this year’s biggest hit! It fetched an astounding opening that beat the first-day collections of even Dhoom: 2 and Krrish. They’re now calling it an Aap Ka Suroor wave!

The only person who had predicted this was HR himself. He had told all his people, don’t worry about the opening, my rockstar charisma will fetch an opening that will leave you awestruck. It did.

Aap Ka Suroor is the kind of film that concentrates on selling what-a-nice-guy-HR-is. Although it is essentially a juvenile script (a straight love story-cum-thriller with no surprises), there is some clever marketing out there. Critics have laughed at HR answering queries about his cap, his nasal tenor and his unsmiling visage through a film. But his fans have lapped up precisely all those ‘laughable’ ingredients where HR has judiciously mixed the real with the reel, unabashedly selling the nice-guy theory. He could sell whatever he fancied but the remarkable truth is that the audience has bought it, lock, stock and barrel!

With people like Ram Gopal Varma now looking closely at brand HR, Aap Ka Suroor has succeeded in establishing Himesh’s rockstar status. And to think that nobody but he himself had believed that he could pull it off!

In fact, HR’s belief in himself was so strong that he had assiduously begun to build his image years ago.

More than a decade ago, when nobody had really heard of Himesh Reshammiya, his wife had gone to a well-known slimming centre to knock off a few kilos. A simple Gujju housewife, Himesh had instructed her to go quietly, slim down and pay the clinic well, but never to reveal to anybody that she was his wife!

Yes, Himesh has a wife and a child. But he took care to keep them both under wraps right from those days — it was a question of sculpting the right image. Laugh all you want but Himesh just might turn out to be India’s first Elvis Presley-kind matinee idol, with rock star status. And rock stars are called HR — not Himeshbhai with a Gujjuben by his side!

Bharathi S. Pradhan is managing editor of Movie Mag International