The only flop remake of Nuvvostanante Nenoddantana was in Hindi

Viewed from any angle, it is an enigma. The issue is why would a reputed film production house christen one of its ventures ' Ramaiya Vastavaiya' when it was launching the scion of the owner, packing in an impressive team with a reputed director and an upcoming heroine?

The title, apart from a faint rhythmic lilt does not convey anything. For the new gen, it would mean providing an explanation of it being part of a song's lyrics from the 1955 black-and-white classic ' Shree 420'. Frankly, how would it have added to the buzz, a compulsory need, when a debutante is to be launched is another query which is unanswered.

So, a 24-year-old Girish Kumar Taurani is placed alongside a 27-year-old Shruti Haasan, the dancer-turned-director Prabhu Deva is redeployed to Hindiise his Telugu original 'Nuvvostanante Nenoddantana', (a great success of 2005 remade into eight languages, an all-India record till date) and the film is released in 2013, eight years after the first version made waves.

Except for one Atif Aslam song ' Jeene Laga Hoon' which he sang along with Shreya Ghoshal, which is repeated on music channels and is continued to be watched on YouTube, none remembers anything about the film. Extremely wooden and expressionless, the hero's performance was expectedly ripped apart while Shruti continued her 'bad luck' tag into this film too.

No wonder, this remains the only major flop in the long list of remakes it saw. The Punjabi film 'Tera Mera Ki Rishta' released in 2009 based on the Telugu version was the costliest ever made in that language which saw foreign shooting in locales like Switzerland. It also helped that it had stars like Jimmy Sheirgill and Kulraj Randhawa, who were big names there.

The Hindi version had Sonu Sood, a reasonable performer and Randhir Kapoor, quite easily long past his quirky and whacky image to add weight to the newcomers, but it did not work. Hence, it earned the dubious distinction of adding itself to the long list of flops, belying the funda that remakes are safe bets for everyone involved.