Film: 'Teree Sang'; Cast: Ruslaan Mumtaz, Sheena Shahabadi; Director: Satish Kaushik; Rating: ***

This is Raj Kapoor's 'Bobby' with furtive sex and a baby thrown in for good measure. Otherwise the boy-meets-girl formula never seemed more homage-bound. Soft to the touch, but underpinned by a strong message on sex and the single parent, 'Teree Sang' is a sweet and likable spin on premature parenthood.

The prim 'n' propah Rajat Kapoor and Neena Gupta, playing the debutante Sheena Shahabadi's stiff-upper-lipped parents, could well be the painfully-young Rishi Kapoor's parents in 'Bobby'-Pran and Sonia Sahni -- with their social airs and graces borrowed from a tacky soap on Page 3 mores.

Sonia Sahni had dropped her pallu to show her disdain for motherhood. Neena Gupta doesn't seem sure of what to drop.

Neena's daughter Mahi's upper-class upbringing doesn't stop her from befriending the simple boy from Old Delhi. They meet, chat, flirt and... well, go all the way. And we don't mean that in any geopolitical sense, though director Satish Kaushik's film does travel that extra distance both emotionally and geographically.

Ruslaan Mumtaz, last seen in 'Mera Pehla Pehla Pyaar', is endearing and sincere as the boy-next-door who kind of forgets that making love quite frequently means making a baby.

The whole episode where the callow couple discover that they are thrust with unwanted parenthood is awkward and selfconscious, kind of in-sync with the young protagonists' personalities. They don't know any better. Providentially, the film does.

Once they take off into the scenic hills to play mummy-daddy far from prying eyes, the film assumes the quaint colours of a 'Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak' with the couple's disarming innocence adding a lemony lustre of harmony to the otherwise-predictable Romeo-meets-Juliet-in-the-maternity-ward tale of juvenile slip-ups and slip-ins.