Highly surprised Rajni keeps a vigil on her mother and finds her as meeting clandestinely with Sheru aka Dharamdaas. Rajni's mother asks her to extract money from Ashok. He threatens Rajni's mother that if he is not paid the demanded money, he will tell this fact to Ashok's father and then Asha won't be able to marry Ashok. A wicked person, who poses himself as a respected businessman, Seth Dharamdaas before the world but actually a criminal, Sheru (Madan Puri) starts blackmailing Rajni's mother on the basis of the fact that Rajni's father has been his accomplice in crimes and presently he is a jailbird. Now comes the twist in the tale which lays the foundation of the utterly different second half of the movie.
And after some romantic and comic incidents in the script, their love story reaches the point where Rajni's mother and Ashok's father agree for their marriage and they get engaged.
But he falls for her charms and instead of revealing his true identity, fakes as a journalist before her. Ashok is very unhappy to read the false reports in the newspapers and approaches Rajni to seek explanation. To save the financially sinking company and her job, she starts pretending to be the sweetheart of Ashok and this rumour becomes the headlines of tabloids. Her employer as well as the colleagues get a wrong impression that she is close to Ashok because she has come to the theatre in his car.
One day, to avoid getting late on her job, she seeks lift from a person Baalam (Om Prakash) who is actually the driver of a wealthy businessman, Ashok (Manoj Kumar). She is fatherless and has been brought up by her mother (Sulochana) alone. Saajan (lover) is the story of a theatre artist, Rajni (Asha Parekh) who comes from a not-so-well-off family.
The complete script of the rom-com aspect of Ghajini is a straightaway lift from a very old Bollywood movie - Saajan (1969. What about its origins ? Well, let me clarify it in this review. Ghajini is not just the action-packed revenge saga, it has a romantic track also which not only forms the basis of the revenge-based main story but also provides relief moments in the movie, showcasing the talent of Asin. The critics and reviewers could correctly trace the origins of the main story of Ghajini to Hollywood movie - Memento (2000) but what about the rom-com track. Murugadoss), casting the same heroine (Asin) and the same villain (Pradeep Rawat) in respective roles. Why to tax your mind for thinking something original when so much stuff is available in the archives to plagiarize and gain unearned success (which the poor original thinkers could not gain) ? Ghajini is a highly successful movie which was first made in Telugu in 2005 with Surya in lead role and then remade in Hindi with Aamir Khan in lead role, by the same director (A. Well, it became a bonanza for the copycats because they could copy the stories of many forgotten old movies and make new movies, putting old wine in new bottle.
Their re-releases stopped with the advent of cable TV and by the end of the nineties, there came a time when people virtually forgot what were the stories of many interesting movies that had come during the bygone era. Later originality took a back-seat and gradually people used to forget about old movies too. That's why several novel ideas used to emerge for making feature films upon them after they were developed into interesting screenplays.
There were specific story departments in the film companies where full time writers worked relentlessly on scripts. During the fifties, sixties and seventies, Bollywood boasted of good script-writers.