I'm a 90s kid.
I grew up on films full of romance, laughter and music that lived on for years. We had simpler tunes. The lyrics were easier. Even the jhankaar beats had a character to them (you can hear it as you read this!). Songs you could hum after hearing them once. Dialogues that could be repeated to laughter at family functions.
It felt like the whole country had fun at the movies - together!
Yes, a lot of those films were silly. Terrible scripts. Questionable logic. And the classism & sexism of the time showed up again and again in the same stock characters.
But there was something about the Bollywood hero of that era that I still miss.
He was mostly clean-shaven and groomed. He could dance without looking like he was warming up for a fight. He could fall in love without destroying a building first. He didn't need guns and bullet wounds. He could be kind to the woman he loved, treat her gently and as an equal, and still be a man.
And the women had real, expressive faces and personalities. Each one looked different. I could tell them apart - just by listening to them, or looking at their eyes.
There was a softness and tenderness to both the men and the women on screen. The men could cry. The women could shoulder them.
To be fair, the heroine would then spend an entire song dancing in a chiffon sari on a snowy mountain while the hero stood next to her in a jacket. Nobody ever thought to give her one. We didn't question it. The 90s Bollywood universe had its own laws of physics and thermodynamics.
But then, slowly, the hero changed.
He got bigger, tougher, angrier. The clean-shaven romantic lead was pushed off the screen by the bearded, sweaty action machine. Now every film seems to need blood, explosions, slow-motion entries, and enough testosterone to make Andrew Tate look understated.
Some part of me understands why these films work. Audiences seem to love them. Filmmakers should be free to tell the stories they want to tell, and I will always defend that.
I just don't connect with them.
Sometimes I wonder which came first. Did our films change because we changed? Or did we change a little because our films did?
I think about this more than most people, because I head two schools. I spend my days around hundreds of children who are still deciding what a hero looks like.
Cinema shows us the world we live in. It also hands us our heroes, and with them our ideas of love, of what a man should be, of beauty and success. For a child, that second part matters more. I suspect it works both ways.
What I do know is that my idea of a hero was shaped by a different kind of man. He could fight when he had to, and he could also sing. He could be charming without reminding you every five minutes how dangerous he was. And sometimes his best weapon was a really good song.
Maybe this is just what getting older looks like. Every generation looks at the next one and thinks, "When did this become normal?" Someone who is 20 today will probably read this in 20 years and wonder what on earth I was going on about.
But somewhere between Govinda in a flashy outfit, Aamir in a red oversized sweater, Salman in suspenders and Shah Rukh playing a mandolin in a sarson ka khet, that hero stayed with me and shaped the man I am today.
Every morning I watch hundreds of children walk into the schools I run. They're growing up on a different hero. He's louder. He bleeds more. He wins by hurting people, and they cheer, because that's the hero they've been given.
I don't blame them. I just wish they could meet the one I grew up with. The one who could have thrown the punch, chose to sing instead.
I still miss him. I think they would have liked him too.
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The future of Indian Cinema 💥💥💥