Nikkhil Advani has a theory about why Chandni Chowk To China refuses to die.

The 2009 film, starring Akshay Kumar as a Delhi cook who becomes a kung fu fighter in China, was not kind to Advani at the box office when it released. Audiences shrugged. Critics were unkind. But in a new interview with Mumbai Mirror, the filmmaker says something odd has been happening lately: young viewers keep asking him to make a sequel.

"The people asking me for a Chandni Chowk sequel today were four years old when it was released," Advani said, laughing through the memory. "They didn't care about narrative structure, they just saw Akshay Kumar fighting a giant potato and somehow it worked for them."

That potato fight, incidentally, has had a long afterlife on the internet, resurfacing every few years as a meme even as the film itself faded from conversation. Advani, who also co-wrote and directed it, seems almost bemused that a generation with zero memory of its theatrical run has decided the film works precisely because it makes no sense.

Whether an actual sequel is in the works, Advani did not say, and nothing in the interview suggests one is being planned. This reads more like a filmmaker noticing an odd cultural afterlife than an announcement.

A family story from 1947

The same conversation took Advani somewhere heavier. He spoke about his family's migration from Sindh just before Partition, in the summer of 1947, when his great-grandfather flew the entire family from Sindh to Mumbai ahead of the region becoming part of Pakistan.

Advani said his grandfather carried a money belt strapped to his waist through that journey, and the cash wasn't the family's own. His grandfather worked for Habib Bank, which was relocating its headquarters to Karachi on instructions from Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and he had been tasked with delivering funds to the bank's Bombay branch. By Advani's account, his grandfather handed over every rupee once he arrived.

It's a detail that sits oddly next to talk of CGI potatoes and kung fu chefs, but that's the shape interviews with Advani tend to take these days. The man who gave Bollywood Kal Ho Naa Ho has spent the last several years building a second career in television, with shows like Rocket Boys, The Empire and this year's The Revolutionaries, alongside earlier work like Airlift and Mrs Chatterjee vs Norway.

Whether the Partition story becomes material for a future project of his own is anyone's guess. For now, it's just a filmmaker looking back, in the same breath he used to talk about a giant vegetable that refused to stop trending.