Love fearlessly

9 years later, on September 6, 2018, a historic day when the Supreme Court delivered a landmark judgment that decriminalized homosexuality, Star Gold ran a campaign celebrating love of all kinds that transcends boundaries – of gender, age, religion and race. In the video, real-life couples faced the camera in defiance of what society might think as the background score swelled around them: “Pyaar kiya toh darna kya”. The message struck home for viewers and the video went viral overnight.

While the video’s championing of love was perfectly timed with the Supreme Court’s verdict, the campaign had been originally conceptualized by Yadav to launch the classic film Mughal-e-Azam in colour. “There is a whole generation that has not seen the movie, they have only heard about it,” Yadav says. “The only thing they draw from the movie is the song.” It’s when Yadav and his team realised that the main theme of the movie – two people who are in love and not allowed to be together – is strikingly relevant even today. “Everybody is not free to love whosoever they want to. That’s how we reached the theme ‘Love is love’,” he explains.

“It was meant for bigger things,” she laughs. There was no better time to communicate the video’s message of facing the world with the power of love. But the team had decided to not just feature same-sex couples. Shot mostly at a fort in Worli Koliwada and partly in Mumbai, the video also features, among others, an inter-faith couple, an elderly couple who found love again in their old age, and an acid attack survivor and her partner. Mostly in black and white, select bold blue details stand out in the video, reflecting the colourisation of Mughal-e-Azam. There was one central unifying factor in the choice of whom to feature, Yadav says. “We asked ourselves who are the people whose love society frowns upon yet they go ahead and face that.” The team was also very clear that they did not want celebrities or actors but real couples with real stories. “These were people who were really in love and that came across,” Yadav explains.

The shoot and post-production took a little over a month to complete, but the most challenging step for the team was the first one – finding couples that would be the ideal participants. Shot during a time when homosexuality was still illegal, several same-sex couples dropped out at the last minute out of fear of repercussions. With others, since they weren’t actors, their daily schedules had to be kept in mind. “Everyone who worked on this project felt for it and believed in it,” Yadav says. And that’s what eventually helped in the search for couples, with everyone on the team going above and beyond to find the perfect people to feature. “We knew it needs to be very stark and simple because the song itself has a lot of grandeur,” Yadav says. “We got exactly what we wanted.”

“Somebody I hadn’t spoken to in months forwarded the video to me,” Yadav laughs. “He didn’t even know I had made it. He just loved it.” The campaign also caught the eye of several media outlets. “Our belief in the video was always there,” says Akash Chandni, part of the marketing team at Star Gold. “But a lot more people were accepting of it when it released, there were barely any negative comments on social media.”

It was the crowning glory for a team that describes it as the most passionate project they’ve worked on at Star but it’s far from the end for the campaign. A movie festival that draws on the same theme of “Love is Love” is in the works. They’re tight-lipped for now but if the past is anything to go by, magic awaits us.