If there’s any genre that has been done to death in Bollywood, that’s romance.

The funda of a Bollywood romance is simple: A girl meets boy. Either one of them is poor and they belong to a different caste. They elope, they realise their mistake and they win over their parents. Something of that sort. But Pahlaj Nihalani’s Khushboo is nothing of that sort and yet it’s a romance.

“There have been so many films made on romance that you can hardly make something that will be very different,” said actress Avantikka, adding, “We can only change the treatment with the theme and try to omit the stereotyped things the previous films on romance have shown the audiences. Khushboo is one such film.”

So.What’s the storyline of the film?

“It has a very simple story. It’s about a South Indian boy going to work in Chandigarh and some chance meetings with a Punjabi girl, who is living in a joint family that has 35 members. They fall in love,” said actor Rishi Rehan. The later part of the film talk about coincidences. “It is about how destiny brings them together each time and they feel a strange attraction to each other. The film has no fighting sequences, no elopement, and no class conflicts,” Rehan added.

But isn’t this a chance meeting kind of similar to the plot of Hum Tum?

“Well Hum Tum stressed it for too long but in Khushboo, love just happens after few meetings and Khushboo is not a film about destiny, it is about the relationship that this boy and girl share, how they fall in love with each other and finally win over the heart of the girls’ parents,” Rehan added. Bollywood films have always typecast people of different castes. Khushboo deals with South Indian and Punjabi characters.

Has it been able to avoid that?

“I feel there is no typecasting in Khushboo though we deal with characters that are South Indians and Punjabis,” said Avantikka, adding, “To bring the feel of these two cultures, obviously we have to show something that we associate these people with but we do not do it in a caricature or a cartoonish way. It’s very subtle.”