by Subhash K Jha

It's been a long painful period of drought. After Kal Ho Na Ho and the bitter break with Karan Johar's Dharma Productions nothing seemed to go right for Nikhil Advani.

Project after project including a desi version of Louisa Alcott's Little Women seemed to be going awry.

Only when Salman Khan agreed to back Nikhil's next project that things began to fall in place for the ostracized director.

And now Nikhil Advani is all set to make his next film. A segmented love story about various love affairs running concurrently in the plot, a la Richard Curtis' Love Actually, Nikhil film goes by the quaint and deceptively old-world title of Salaam-E-Ishq.

Though the title harks back to the 1978 chart-buster from the Amitabh Bachchan-Rekha starrer Muqaddar Ka Sikandar , Salaam-e-Ishq will be a fiercely contemporary take on relationships and mores.

Salman Khan - Priyanka Chopra, Anil Kapoor-Juhi Chawla, Sohail Khan-Perizaad Zorabian, Akshaye Khanna-Ayesha Takia, and Govinda and South African actress Shanon Esra have been penciled into for what promises to be a fresh take on that puzzle known as love.

But the most surprising pair in the film would be cool-dude John Abraham and the classic Indian beauty Vidya Balan. The combination is already being talked-about as a cool synthesis of the West and the best.