How Life in A Metro turned coincidences in love into the language of real love!

Life In A Metro wasn’t just a revolution in showing love onscreen, it made us fall in love with love itself with all its messy shades. Here’s a reminder of how it became exactly that!

In 2007, Ishaan taught us look at the world differently with kindness. It was also the same year when nine adults taught us that love isn’t always grand or perfect; sometimes it’s messy, inconvenient, even painful but still full of hope. And strangely enough, both of these films now have spiritual sequels in 2025. Almost like the universe is nudging us to revisit how we felt then. Because all it took was some rain in Mumbai to introduce us to Monty (Irrfan Khan), Shruti (Konkona Sen Sharma), Shikha (Shilpa Shetty), Akash (Shiney Ahuja), Ranjeet (Kay Kay Menon), Neha (Kangana Ranaut), Rahul (Sharman Joshi), Shivani (Nafisa Ali), and Amol (Dharmendra) - people who were just living their everyday lives until a chain of coincidences tangled them together.

Shruti was searching for love in a partner and ends up meeting Monty, who, on the surface, felt wrong for her. Her sister, Shikha, was stuck in a loveless marriage with Ranjeet and finds something stirring in her when she meets Akash, a theatre artist working just near her dance teacher, Amma’s residence. Shivani, Shikha’s Amma, is quietly waiting for her long-lost love Amol, after receiving a letter from him decades later. Somewhere else in the city, Rahul is renting out his apartment by the hour to survive, while trying to ask out Neha, his crush since forever. 

It’s the kind of story we love - strangers bumping into each other, lives colliding, love blooming out of nowhere. That idea that your life could change with one unexpected encounter - it's what films often romanticize. And maybe that’s why it works; we want to believe in that kind of magic. But then comes the reality check. The beautiful chaos of coincidences starts to fall apart. Shikha stays out late with Akash and returns home to find her daughter sick with high fever. The consequences of choices start to show up and the mess begins to unravel. Rahul finds out Neha is sleeping with Ranjeet who is cheating on his wife. Shikha, who finds out her husband’s cheating, chooses to once again explore her feelings for Akash, only unable to go through spending a night with him. Shruti learns that the man she thought might be “the one” is only using her to escape his truth that he’s gay. 

As the cards seem to fall and the trickle down effect continues, an overwhelmed Neha tries to end her life, only to be saved by Rahul, who’s hurt but still silently in love with her. And Shruti, heartbroken and bitter from learning her brother-in-law’s truth with her roommate, finds unexpected comfort in Monty, the very man she once mocked for being “too much.” And as Monty teaches her to let go of the hurt, open up and let people in, that lost faith and hope in love reignites. So when Rahul lets go of his dream to build his father’s restaurant, only for Neha’s sake, the twenty something year old carrying so much hurt for so long, starts to believe she can be loved again. But not all stories end in joy. Shivani and Amol, who finally run away together after decades of waiting, are struck by life’s cruel timing as Shivani dies in an ambulance, stuck in Mumbai’s traffic. The irony of mortality cutting short what they waited a lifetime for.

That’s when Shruti and Shikha realise that life is too short to not go after what’s real. Shruti runs to tell Monty how she feels, only for Monty to chase her down instead on a horse no less. Neha, too, runs to confess her love to Rahul. And they all end up at a local train station finally saying the things they were too scared to say. And then there’s Shikha, who wants to go with Akash, she really does. But sometimes love means staying back and letting responsibility triumph, even if it hurts. After all, not all happy endings are written in the lovers' meeting and living happily ever after! 

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Anurag Basu's Life in a Metro didn't just show us the dreamy side of love. He gave us love that’s bruised, complicated, and full of detours. A kind of love that gets lost in traffic, finds itself in casual meeting at bus stands, whispers itself at train stations, and is sometimes never spoken at all. He captured the strange electricity of co-incidences, the possibility that someone might walk into your life and change it completely. And he did all this in the middle of Mumbai where the rain is the backdrop of that first meeting, traffic is the backdrop of heartbreak, and music flows not just in the background but right through the soul. The band that appears throughout the film wasn’t just a stylistic choice, it was the film’s emotional narrator. As if every moment had its own anthem, just like how we wish real life came with its own score. That’s why the songs didn’t just work, they spoke. And Pritam, through them, became the voice of feelings many of us didn’t have words for.

It’s strange how nine adult lives intersected with each other, only to come together and teach us what love truly means. People often think love is all about that one accidental meeting, that one magical moment. But in reality, it’s written in the choices we make. Shruti met Monty long ago, but only after letting go of her judgment did she realise that love can also mean falling for someone who doesn’t seem suitable at first. The same goes for Neha, who comes to understand that she doesn’t have to settle for the love she thinks she deserves, especially when someone better has been waiting for her all along. And though Shikha couldn’t take that same leap, choosing her marriage over her love, letting go became a beautiful, bittersweet moment in time. Maybe in another life, in another universe, she chooses Akash instead of the self-obsessed, toxic Ranjeet.

If only Shikha was in 2025 and not in 2007 maybe the outcome would have been different. Or maybe not because a married woman letting go of her family and chosing to love someone else is still a cause for raised eyebrows! That's probably why, even two decades later, Metro In Dino is here, exploring and digging deep whether you fall in love once or throughout life for it to work. Because in the end, if Life in A Metro made us believe in love again, not the fairy-tale kind but the real kind that falls apart, that’s born out of loneliness, one that surprises you, one you have to fight for and sometimes, the one that doesn’t last but still changes you, then its spiritual sequel is here not just for the nostalgia - maybe it’s a reminder that love doesn’t happen once; you have to keep choosing it. Keep bumping into it again and again, just like life, just like cinema. Like Sitaare Zameen Par recently did for Taare Zameen Par, carrying its spirit. 

Metro In Dino releases in cinemas tomorrow. Maybe it’s time we fall in love with love once again!

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