Film director R. Balki doesn't think much of film reviews. His new film Ki & Ka (Hers and His) has stirred up the box-office - it is expected to cross the Rs 100-crore mark - and its director doesn't care two hoots about critics who panned it.

"I do not read film reviews," he says simply.

Balki, the man behind such path-bending films as Paa and hits like Cheeni Kum, is in a hyper-excited and ecstatic mood about the success of his film in India and abroad. But he's no woman's libber rooting for a wife as the breadwinner and the husband as the homemaker, which is the storyline of Ki & Ka, starring Kareena Kapoor and Arjun Kapoor.

"I am not a social missionary or anything. I am not trying to make a statement about the men versus women debate. I just made a fun, happy film about two people in love and the choices they make," says Balki candidly during a chat on the sidelines of a women's conference organised by a city magazine in Chennai.

Neither is the film based on vignettes from his own married life with his super-talented wife, Gauri Shinde, the director of English Vinglish. "I don't write or make movies on anything that is part of me," he says. The exception is his fascination for trains, miniature or otherwise, which serve as a striking background set in Ki & Ka.

Balki, short for Balakrishnan, turns out to be an open, relaxed and humble man. There are no airs about this advertising guru, chief executive officer and chairman of Lowe-Lintas. He keeps the conversation intelligently light, and it is tough to get a rise out of him. On critics, he won't say much (on another occasion, he'd said critics were the ones who liked to see a "brown leaf fall for 45 minutes"). And a question on why actor Amitabh Bachchan is a part of all his films is met with a counter-question. "Why is Amitabh such an important part of Indian cinema," he asks.

"Amitabh," he then goes on to explain, "is the finest actor, who is willing to put up with my idiosyncrasies. I don't accommodate him in my films, he accommodates my script." A bit later in the conversation, Balki reveals that when he thinks of a film, he first narrates the story to Bachchan. It is only after the superstar gives his venerable nod that Balki (who writes all his stories) sits down to write the screenplay and dialogue.

Neither is he abashed about how his film Shamitabh - the story of a mute would-be who borrows a failed and drunk actor's deep baritone - flopped miserably, writing it off as miscasting. It starred Bachchan as the drunk, Dhanush as the mute man and Akshara Haasan as an assistant director.

You notice that the director of Paa - a much acclaimed film about a young boy with progeria, a disease in which the body ages unnaturally - likes to downplay his work and stress that all that he is doing is making commercial cinema.

"I am not doing anything extraordinary here. I make aspiration films, about aspirations people secretly have in their lives. I create characters they want to be. I don't want to portray real life; it's so boring," he says.

Fifty-one-year-old Balki loves his hero Kabir's character in Ki & Ka. "He is an absolutely egoless man, almost nirvanic and not fussed about anything," he says. "Writing is about creating people you cannot be," Balki points out.

His films, he adds, are not about imparting a message but about engaging people. "My films are about entertainment, not the bashing-up-25-people kind, but they should engage the audience," he elaborates.

<,>H<,>owever, he strongly believes in "original voices" in filmmaking. "One thing that makes me angry is when people pretend they are making something exceptional. But when I see no originality I feel cheated. A good film is what you do to the best of your ability and is original," he says.

Marathi films, he believes, are among the best in India today. Balki, who spends his free time watching movies from around the world with Shinde, maintains that Marathi cinema is setting benchmarks in all aspects of filmmaking.

"I saw Nana Patekar's Natya Samrat and loved it. It is a film par excellence," he says.

It was another regional film - a 1982 Tamil film called Moondram Pirai, starring Kamal Haasan and Sridevi - that made Balki, a Tamilian who grew up in Bangalore, fall in love with cinema. In the film, remade as Sadma in Hindi a year later, Haasan takes care of a young girl who regresses into childhood after a head injury. He falls in love with her, but she fails to recognise him when she recovers from the injury. "It left a deep impact on me," he says. "It was the ultimate love story."

The passion for cinema prompted Balki - who studied in Christ University in Bangalore and then joined an engineering college in Chennai - to drop out of engineering within two years. In the late 1980s, he responded to an advertisement "Tell us about you" by Mudra and, along with a few others, got selected by the ad agency. "We became the guinea pigs for a training programme in advertising by the agency. Advertising does not require any formal qualification."

Balki sees advertising as a "game" he plays and loves. He has launched several successful campaigns such as Daag Acche Hain for Surf Excel, Havells' ad for fire-proof electric wire, Fair and Lovely, and Idea. He is also responsible for turning around the sagging fortunes of Lintas and bringing it once again to the top slot.

These days, though, he has gradually been distancing himself from the advertising world and admits that he is spending less time in his ad office. "I don't go to office that often. They don't need me anymore, I have set it up and it is in capable hands," he says.

<,>Y<,>et, his love for advertising comes through when he talks about how he "cracks" an ad campaign. He finds it straightforward - like solving a crossword puzzle. And the ads are quite unlike his films, which, he rues, take an excruciatingly long time to make. On celebrities endorsing products, he says that it is a lazy way of making ads but not exactly wrong.

"It is an easy way out for ad agencies. There are millions in India who still believe in celebrities and will follow them," he says. "However, that does not mean that Madhuri Dixit should go to a factory and check the chemical compositions of a product. It is not practical," says Balki, who believes that Maggi - the popular noodles brand - was unfairly targeted and would like to one day make a film called Maggi.

The adman-cum-director attributes the turns in his life to good luck and hard work. "It is luck along with hard work that has brought me here, I am no genius. Hard work is what you do to respect luck," says Balki.

A turning point, however, was his meeting with Bachchan, who starred in his debut film Cheeni Kum (2007), about an older man in love with a young woman. Bachchan, who won a National Award for Paa (2009), also features in Ki & Ka, along with his wife, Jaya Bachchan, in a cameo.

Though Balki is not willing to be seen as delivering a message in Ki & Ka, he does slip in a viewpoint, expressed by Jaya in the film. And Balki does seem to endorse that view when he says, "It requires a lot of guts by the woman to accept a man who wants to be a homemaker and does not want to take part in the rat race. It is women who put pressure on a man to earn well. So, the real hero in the film is the woman."

In the end, it is tough to say which side Balki is on. But, then, that is how he would want it.