Karan Johar gets a firing every day. Every day, once in the morning and once in the evening, no matter which part of the world he is in, Johar talks to friend, mentor and colleague, Aditya Chopra. And every day, Chopra fires him. "There will be something that I've said or done or not done that isn't okay," says a smiling Johar. "He just doesn't take me seriously as a filmmaker."

It's easy to dismiss Johar. He looks barely out of college, talks in a permanently petulant singsong voice and is always impeccably dressed. Unlike Chopra and Sooraj Barjatya, the other trendsetting directors of the 1990s, Johar is always accessible. He speaks to the press (sometimes too much), attends enough parties to be a page three glamdoll and even does photo-shoots so that magazines feature his best profile.

But shift focus to his work to get his professional profile. His office window is filled with a slew of awards he picked up in 1998 for his debut film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (KKHH). The buzz on his second film, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham (K3G), is so hot that trade pundits, poker-faced and reticent at the biggest releases, are already calling it a hit. "There are no two ways about it," says Film Information's Komal Nahta, "this film is going to shatter the box office."

BOX-OFFICE ELIXIR: Johar's films are a mix of romance and family values; on the sets of KKHH (below); (above) Bachchan, Jaya and Khan in a still from K3G

K3G, releasing on December 14, is the closest Bollywood has ever come to a sureshot winner. The film is a smorgasbord of stars. Johar has managed the casting coup of the decade-it is the first time ever that superstars of three generations, Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan, will be seen on screen together. The heroines, Jaya Bachchan, Kajol and Kariena Kapoor, are equally big.

The star power has been accentuated by lavish production values. Johar's Yash Chopraesque penchant for rich people, gorgeous costumes and grand locations went into overdrive in K3G. He went, in his own words, "demented spending money". "Everything was tacky," says art director Sharmishta Roy, "and everything had to be brilliant." So the diamantes are Swarovski, the Jamevar shawls genuine, the chandeliers custom-made and the dancers, 50 svelte blondes imported from London. Father and producer Yash Johar had originally budgeted the film at Rs 25 crore but when the first song, a Karva Chauth number, came in at Rs 3 crore, he gave up. Yash won't comment on what the final costs are but industry sources put it at Rs 40 crore plus. At 29, Johar has created the most expensive film in the history of Indian cinema.

The dazzle will get the audiences into theatres but what will keep them in their seats, Johar is hoping, is his script. Johar is a three-hankie director. He weeps copiously in movies and likes it when his audience does the same. His cinema combines the romance and style of Yash Chopra with the family values of Barjatya and the emotions of Raj Kapoor. So his characters may wear Tommy Hilfiger but his dialogue and screenplay are aiming for gut-level melodrama. "He makes wonderful Hindi movies," says Khan, emphasising the "Hindi". "He has such a flair for writing small moments."

K3G is the story of the youngest scion of a rich industrialist family reuniting his estranged father and brother. The tag line: it's all about loving your parents. "Family, friendship and forgiveness", is how Dr Rachel Dwyer, film academic at the University of London, sums up the formula. The recipe has worked repeatedly in the last decade and Johar is banking on it once more.

At work, the young director is obsessive and demanding but rarely raises his voice. "You hardly see him or hear him," says Bachchan, "because everything is so well planned. When he narrated the script to me, he sang the songs and even told me what the publicity would look like. After 30 years of unplanned filmmaking, Johar was a pleasant surprise." K3G, despite six stars and 18 sets, was completed in nine months.

The surprise is that Johar should be making films at all. Though his father has been in the business since 1951, Johar grew up as a podgy, snobby South Bombay kid with his nose firmly upturned at Bollywood. He was dabbling in his father's import-export business, learning French and planning to go to Paris for further studies. "It was anything but film." That changed in the summer of 1984, when he became friends with Chopra, his "lifeline," who saw in Johar what no one had noticed before: a Hindi movie sensibility. Chopra made Johar his sounding board and then asked him to assist him on his debut film, Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (DDLJ).

Chopra wasn't the only one to spot Johar's innate talent. On the outdoor schedule of DDLJ, Khan, an insomniac, would make Johar sit up all night with him. "I thought I knew a lot about films," says Khan, "but he knew at least 75 times more." Over coffee in Gstaad, Khan suggested that Johar make a film and said that he was willing to star in it. The night before shooting for KKHH started, Johar's mother, Hiroo, came into his room and hesitantly asked if he knew how to look through the camera and frame a shot. "He was such an introverted pallu-ke-peeche child that I couldn't believe he was going to make a movie," says Hiroo.

The shy child has metamorphosed into a director with craft and clout. The only problem now is the follow-up act. Johar wants very much to be known as a versatile director. But K3G is the same wine in a better bottle. Clearly, Johar has opted for safety over innovation. "The pressure to outdo KKHH weighed heavily on him," says choreographer Farah Khan who has done the songs in both films. "K3G seems to me more designed and less spontaneous than KKHH."

But Johar calls these films his "baby steps". "Just being in films was such a shock to my system so, of course, I will start with what I'm more comfortable with. Breaking ground will happen. I'm walking now but I'll run later. And when I do run, rest assured, that I will run all over the place." Let us see.