90's Era of Bollywood

 

Was the 1990s kitsch or pop? Pure cringe-fest or plain, unadulterated nostalgia? It doesn’t matter if you look at the 90s as awful or awesome because the impact (for better or for worse) of that decade is so deep-rooted within us – especially the 30-somethings reading this – that we remain very much a product of that decade even though many world cinema-exposed cineastes and urban sophiscates now seem to be in utter denial about the 90s. Did it even exist? Yes, it did. Yes, before Netflix, there were the video parlours (early training ground for filmmakers as varied as Anurag Kashyap and Madhur Bhandarkar). Yes, we could tell our Nadeem-Shravans from Jatin-Lalits and Mahesh Bhatts from David Dhawans (no right-minded 90s guy can ever confuse Mahesh Bhatt’s cinema with David Dhawan’s). Yes, Doordarshan was a bestseller and we flocked to that one family in the building that owned a TV set for our weekly fix (in our case, we were that family unfortunately). Yes, we waited for weeks to catch movies of our favourite stars, in many cases pre-booking it by physically paying a visit to the theater. Yes, there once existed the ubiquitous Munna/Pakya-type black marketer (refer to Aamir Khan in Rangeela) outside Maratha Mandir, Minerva, Geeta, Gaiety-Galaxy and Chandan among others.

Yes, there were no cell phones and only landlines with their heart patient-killing ring tones. And yes, there was the fashion, as epitomised by larger-than-life hits such as Hum Aapke Hain Koun…! and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. The rich kids went designer post Kuch Kuch Hota Hai while those enjoying the thug life, one supposes, found solace in the candy-coloured Rangeela. Thousands of diehard Salman Khan and Madhuri Dixit fans emulated the wedding look of Hum Aapke Hain Koun. some compulsively wearing it as a uniform. The Khans emerged as the romantic stars of the 90s but the decade equally belonged to action stars like Akshay, Ajay Devgn, Sanjay Dutt, Sunny Deol and Suniel Shetty. Of the heroines, Karisma Kapoor, Madhuri Dixit, Raveena Tandon, Kajol, Rani Mukerji, Manisha Koirala and Shilpa Shetty commanded large followings. Govinda was a special breed, with his own cottage industry of the silly and the slapstick. The modern Bollywood seems different. New star kids with less potential of acting. Remake scripts from the 90's ruining every classic. I'll always prefer the OG Bollywood. How about you?