Karan Johar bought his first designer jacket the way most 27-year-olds do after their first hit. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai had just landed, he had money in his pocket for the first time, and he walked into a Burberry store and picked the only jacket that actually fit him. In his own words, from what he called his "mega plus size days."

He thought he looked sharp. His father did not agree.

Sharing the memory on Instagram on Saturday, Yash Johar's birth anniversary, Karan wrote that his father looked at him "perplexed" and asked, "Beta... Yeh kya hai?" Told it was Burberry, Yash Johar didn't miss a beat. "Beta yeh Burberry nahi... Bahut buri hai," he said. Karan says he was shattered for about five seconds and then burst out laughing. That's the whole story, really. A rich kid, an expensive jacket, and a father who found the pun funnier than the fabric.

But the post wasn't built for one joke. Karan used it to sketch out the full shape of Yash Johar, the Dharma Productions founder who backed his son's ambitions to a degree that occasionally bordered on delusion. Karan recalled his father insisting he had hero potential, urging him to take up horse riding, brushing off his weight as "puppy fat" that would vanish on its own. His mother, by his account, offered the correction his father never would: "Son you cannot be in front of the camera and certainly not on a horse."

The harder part of the tribute

The post turns serious toward the end, and Karan doesn't soften it. He recounts a conversation after one of his father's chemotherapy sessions, where Yash Johar told him he didn't want to leave his wife and son but felt he was going to. He asked Karan for a promise: that success would mean nothing without kindness, and that Karan would look after his mother the way Yash Johar had.

What follows in Karan's account is the decline itself, described in fragments rather than a full sentence, the kind of writing that reads like someone still not entirely able to finish that thought more than two decades on. Yash Johar died on June 26, 2004, at 74. He'd founded Dharma Productions in 1976 and gone on to produce Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Kal Ho Naa Ho, Dostana and Agneepath among others, a run that his son has spent the years since both extending and reshaping.

Karan closed the post the way he tends to close these ones, calling his father his god and saying he prays to him daily. He didn't attach it to any film news or Dharma announcement, and there's no indication he plans to. Some tributes are just that. This one lands on September 6 every year, and it'll land again next year, jacket joke and all.