Rahul Desai

In the pre-social media era, Bollywood movies about Bollywood movies were more concerned with the culture of film-making. Be it the spoofy excesses of Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om or the playful curiosity of Zoya Akhtar’s Luck By Chance, the Bombay industry — creative cameos, self-referential dialogue, colourful characters, on-set adventures — was merely a stepping-off point for the stories. However, this genre is very different in the digital age. It’s now concerned with the industry and the average viewer’s perception of it; it’s more alive to the internet than the world we live in. The storytelling rides the coattails of reddit-coded gossip, controversies, self-aware humour, sly potshots and guess-the-celebrity rumours. So the N-word (nepotism) and the M-word (meta) become everything. The problem is that this gimmick is hard to sustain in the long format. Shows like The Fame Game and Showtime stumbled after the winks wore off.

Midway through Rohan Kanawade’s Sabar Bonda (Cactus Pears), the 30-year-old protagonist, Anand, listens to the story of how his parents met. His father, who worked as a driver in Mumbai, was visiting his ancestral village in the 1990s. He came to meet an eligible young woman, but ended up ‘choosing’ her uneducated sister because she cooked well; he arrived as a lonely bachelor and left as a companion. Years later, a heartbroken Anand is back home for grave reasons: his father is no more, and the family is fulfilling the tradition of a 10-day mourning period. Yet there’s a sense of history repeating itself. A young man is visiting with his mother to grieve the passing of his father, but it feels like a family visit to cure the loneliness of a bachelor. The formality of death is indistinguishable from the desires of life. Once the Mumbai-bound Anand rekindles his bond with a childhood friend — also illiterate, also someone who loves to feed — the ritualistic nature of loss conceals a quiet quest for companionship. After all, when a funeral pyre burns, sparks always fly.

In Indian cricket, as in most religions, the tragedies are as mythical as the triumphs. Certain names become adjectives in the lexicon of the game — antonyms to the gods, like cautionary tales mentioned in the same breath as the fairytales. It’s hard to love Sachin Tendulkar without grieving for Vinod Kambli: two sides of the same Bombay-fabled coin. Similarly, it’s hard to worship Virat Kohli without feeling for Unmukt Chand: two sides of the Delhi-swag coin. Chand’s story is almost like an alternate-reality version of Kohli’s — a batting prodigy, a dizzying rise as Under-19 World Cup winning captain and star batsman, a lucrative IPL contract, a Ranji knock to remember, unprecedented brand endorsements for a teenager, and suddenly, a failed transition to senior cricket. He left India at 28 after all doors of an international debut were shut, moved to the USA to play minor-league cricket and work towards a 2024 T20 World Cup spot as an American-Indian player. As someone who’s closely followed his career in the hope of a miraculous resurgence, I’ve often found myself randomly googling “Unmukt Chand” to see what he’s up to. There are no ready answers. The fame-to-anonymity curve is second to none; being forgotten is worse than being notorious (public scrutiny is reserved for those like Prithvi Shaw — whose genius as a 12-year-old unfolded in the 2013 documentary Beyond All Boundaries).

When Indian shows get it right, they become their own genre. They’re used as a point of comparison by creators and viewers: Oh, you mean it’s a wannabe Mirzapur? It’s giving slice-of-life Raat Jawaan Hai energy? They’re Panchayat-coded characters? What, it’s a slow-burning Paatal Lok-meets-Kohrra thriller? But when they get it wrong, you think fondly of the ones that became their own genre. Do You Wanna Partner, for instance, made me appreciate all the titles that ran so that Do You Wanna Partner could crawl: the upscale-and-socially-mobile-NCR entrepreneur drama of Made In Heaven, the middle-class business hustles of Rocket Singh and Band Baaja Baarat, the scammy Delhiness of Khosla Ka Ghosla, even the cross-cultural swag of Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (whose ghost haunts imitations from the production house).

Raam Reddy’s Jugnuma – The Fable opens with a long, unbroken shot. It’s the summer of 1989 in a Northeastern Himalayan town, and Dev (Manoj Bajpayee), a middle-aged and soft-spoken landlord, starts his day by walking to the toolshed in the backyard of his colonial mansion. It looks like an average routine. On the way, he greets his wife Nandini (Priyanka Bose), his playful son Juju (Awan Pookot), his two dogs Jack and Alex, and a couple of locals. The camera follows him into the dark shed, where he straps something onto his body and strolls down a path. He’s wearing what looks like mechanical wings and, before it fully registers, he casually jogs off a cliff edge, flaps those wings and flies into the valley. This is how he surveys the thousands of acres of the orchard estate inherited from his grandfather. It’s pesticide season; his route is wider. I’ve seen many striking movie beginnings, but none like this, where reality nonchalantly collides with fantasy in the same breath. In the next few minutes, we know why.

Baaghi 4 opens with a shot of a truck hurtling into a man driving his car at full speed. The next shot shows him wounded, bloody and suspended upside down in the totaled vehicle on a railway track, with a train heading straight for him. It’s fitting that these are POV (point-of-view) shots where the camera places us in the position of the hero — because watching the rest of this film feels like being hit by a truck and a train, again and again and again. The fourth installment of the Baaghi film franchise suggests that there were three before this one. They were all Hindi remakes of Tamil and Telugu action thrillers, and Baaghi 4 continues the tradition by being heavily inspired from Sasi’s Ainthu Ainthu Ainthu (2013). But it doesn’t matter. Instead, just imagine Devdas as a muscular Animal fanboy, except nobody is sure whether his Paro is real or not. Blood flows rather than booze. Chandramukhi is a Punjabi call girl (Sonam Bajwa) pretending to be a Spanish escort named Olivia. The fictional city of Chandara is composed of St. Xavier’s College Mumbai corridors and bad CGI skies, and there’s a psychotic villain (Sanjay Dutt) who’s a hybrid of Shah Rukh Khan in Darr and Bobby Deol in Animal. And of course, there’s Saurabh Sachdeva as the baddie’s eccentric brother, hamming it up in reaction shots like the action-film equivalent of Rocky’s bestie’s physical subtitling in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani.

If not for movies like Ufff Yeh Siyapaa, I’d be in denial about my age. Denial is not an option when I try to pull out my hair only to be met with a receding hairline. Thanks to the constant face-palming, I also realise that my skin has wrinkles. Thanks to the involuntary sighing and eye-rolling, I realise that yoga might be good for my stamina. Thanks to the inability to keep my eyes on the screen, I realise that my mind needs glasses too. And thanks to the resolute awfulness of a 116-minute silent comedy in 2025, I realise that my life is truly too short.

In the Netflix streaming canon, the film Inspector Zende begins where the series Black Warrant ends. It’s 1986, and deadly “Bikini Killer” Charles Sobhraj escapes Tihar jail after drugging the whole prison on his birthday. The six-episode drama hinted at how he managed to break out. The guards were too busy being the protagonists of their own stories of systemic struggle. Sobhraj, a peripheral figure in his decade there, simply took advantage of their main-character energy. Far away in Bombay, waiting in a milk queue, Inspector Madhukar Zende (Manoj Bajpayee) hears the news bulletin on a radio. By the time the others in the line look at him, he’s already gone — like a middle-class superhero looking for a phone-booth to don his cape. Only here, the booth is his modest family room in a chawl, and his cape is the Bombay police uniform. He expects a call any moment, given that he’s one of the few cops to have previously nabbed the criminal.