And witless. Until he stumbles on a presumably senile old lady (Zohra Sehgal, wasted in a role she will have a tough time living down) to adopt him, he sleeps in the open with a soccer ball for a pillow. Trouble is, the soccer ball is round (big surprise, that), and keeps rolling away, causing the poor fellow to crack his head on the unfeeling stone and wake up to see Rani's painted face leering down at him.

If only he had friends, they would have advised him to let half the air out of the ball to keep it from rolling away, but never mind that.

He is a good-looking boy, Ranbir Kapoor is, and his most striking feature is the cleft in his chin. You get a good view of that feature, because the camera zooms up close, very close, a good bit of the time. In fact, the camera gets so close, and his face is consequently so magnified, that to your fevered imagination that cleft seems to be the size of a bathtub in a luxury resort.

You've got to love the boy, for more reasons than one. There is the bowler hat and, on occasion, the borrowed umbrella that brings home to you, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, that the Raj Kapoor legacy has found its latest torchbearer (In case you missed that message, one of the buildings sports an outsize neon sign that says, with touching simplicity, 'RK'). There is the endearing earnestness with which he mouths the silliest dialogues ever penned, often struggling to be heard against the background music.

A brief segue about the music, which at its best is needlessly loud and at its worst, unbearably cacophonous. At times it so loud, it measures a good 7.0 on the Richter scale. The theatre shakes under that unrelenting assault -- though on second thoughts, those tremors could have been caused by Dostoevsky turning over, and over, and over in his grave, poor fellow.

Never mind that, let's continue with the reasons why you should love the latest roll-out from the Kapoor khandaan. There is his toned bod, and the cute butt you almost see when he uses the flimsy towel around his waist like a matador's cape. My spies tell me audiences in the US can actually see the whole butt and nothing but the butt -- a circumstance that earns this film the dubious distinction of being India's first to merit a PG rating. (I wish we had the PG rating here - my parents, always concerned for my well-being, would have guided me away -- far away -- from this movie.)

Continuing the list of reasons to like Ranbir, there is the faux Hrithik Roshan dancing style where you throw your hands and legs about like you don't want them anymore, and the random fits of epilepsy that make his lady love laugh and the rest of us cry.

To be serious for a minute, it would be terribly unfair to judge this boy on the basis of this film; he deserves a better litmus test than a hackneyed script, inept dialogues, and a director who let his incompetent evil twin take over the helm can provide. Also read: Ranbir Kapoor: I'm a bit scared

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