It was at actor Vani Tripathi Tikoo’s character Sheetal’s engagement that she asks her fiancé about Raj (Shah Rukh Khan) and Priya’s (Rani Mukerji) married life. From this point on, the love story pans out as a flashback.

“I’d never played a central character before. That’s one reason why the film is very special to me,” says Tikoo, who felt at “home” on the set. “It was my second film with (director) Aziz Mirza and SRK,” the actor, who debuted with Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (2000), continues, “Except Rani, I had worked with most of the actors before or we had done theatre.”

SRK, who was also the producer, treated the unit like family, she says. “He’d ask, ‘How are you doing? Do you need something? Did you eat? Did you get enough sleep?’ He would say, ‘This is the least I can do’. It is this bond and compassion that made the film so special,” says Tikoo, who is grateful for how Chalte Chalte shaped her career.

“It [also] helped shape my life. The film was so realistic [in its approach] about relationships and married couples in urban cities who are aspirational,” says the actor-turned-politician, who hopes “somebody thinks of making a sequel to it”.

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Meghna Malik may have had just a cameo in the Shah Rukh Khan and Rani Mukerji-starrer Chalte Chalte, but the film will always hold a special place in her heart.

“It was just a year-and-a-half since my life as an actor started in Mumbai. Chalte Chalte was my second film and it had Shah Rukh Khan. At the time, girls were crazy about his charisma,” recounts Malik, who was “amazed by Khan’s humility”. “He never made us feel like we were around a superstar,” she says about what she calls a “dream project”.

As the film clocks 20 years of release, Malik recalls having shot a scene on the terrace of SRK’s residence in Mumbai, Mannat. “I was excited to go inside a superstar’s house. I still remember the interiors... There was a spiral staircase that had SRK’s pictures along the wall. It was lovely that he invited us home and we got to shoot there,” she tells us.

Malik goes on to reminisce about another memorable scene she shot for: “It was a scene with Rani — a ramp walk. We shot the whole night, until 4 am. But, it was edited out [of the final cut]. We were like, ‘Humne poori raat woh scene shoot kiya, woh toh hai hi nahi!’ I think I even tripped in that scene because I had not slept the whole night.”