An advertisement for a package tour of Europe masquerades as an invitation from Yash Raj Films, wooing potential consumers to travel in a manner only seen in the movies. The iconic picture of Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol, as the characters Raj and Simran from the superhit film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995), invites the consumer to embark on ‘an enchanted journey to Switzerland’. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, with its box-office success premised on a depiction of an image of the desired ‘good life’ of global mobility, consumerist aesthetics, and a reified notion of a timeless India tradition personified by the Non-Resident Indian, is no accidental choice for such promotional material. With its strategic deployment of the star image, the advertisement encourages us to ‘feel like a star when you get photographed as Abhishek Bachchan and Rani Mukherjee’, and even to ‘experience the magic of the same location where Shah Rukh Khan fell in love with Kajol’. The carefully curated stills, from films that depict Indians at home in the world, provide the template for the ones at home to aspire to. This advertisement, with its fusion of the travel brochure and the film-still, shows that in neoliberal India, it is no longer enough to just watch cinema, one has to live it as well.

Following in the film stars’ footsteps, the consumer can live a life just like the movies. Yash Raj Film's (YRF) Enchanted Journey advertisement sheds light on the ways in which the image of the film star, displayed prominently in the advertisement, becomes the locus of the spectator's cinematic desires as well as the consumer's extra-cinematic aspirations. This alignment of cinema's pleasures and consumerist cravings is made possible by the advertisement's careful positioning the star image, bringing together actor and character. In his reading of the sociological implications of the film star, John Ellis notes that the star image, an amalgam of the film text, the persona and the extra-cinematic texts, functions both as an ‘invitation to cinema’, and an ‘impossible paradox’. The star image invites fans to the cinema with the promise of synthesising its various, often contradictory, aspects. The star image, Ellis explains, hinges on the star’s being, at once, both ordinary and extraordinary.