Crorepatis, kal aur aaj

Old Hindi cinema had an impressive line-up of billionaires (but let's adjust for inflation and allow them to be mere crorepatis). For the purposes of a short column, one may divide them into two categories: the bad guys and the good guys. The former were Bond-style villains, living in lavish dens with spiky walls, quicksand pits, and floors that would part to reveal a shark tank into which an inefficient minion or the hero's beleaguered father could be dipped. The other types of crorepatis were decent - or relatively decent - people. They wore their wealth lightly, called their grown-up daughters "baby" and were good to the unprivileged in the patronising way that people who have never known true hardship can afford to be. In Yash Chopra's Waqt, a poor driver walks into a high-society party to ask his employer if he can use the car to take his mother to the hospital. The boss looks solicitous, says "haan haan, bilkul" and gets back to his socialising. It's done matter-of-factly, despite the fact that the character isn't a good guy in the overall scheme of things. (He has bigger fish to fry, but he can be nice at a micro-level.)

What both sets of wealthy people had in common was their residences: the mansions of the Good could be as vulgarly opulent as the villains' lairs (minus the shark tanks). In Manmohan Desai's Parvarish, an underappreciated classic of commercial cinema, Kishen (Vinod Khanna) is a smuggler. This was the get-rich-quick profession of the time, but what is perplexing is that he already lives (with his honest policeman dad) in an eye-poppingly fancy house. In a confrontation where the father pulls out his gun and shoots about randomly while the wayward son ducks behind a sofa, one worries more for the well-being of the velvety furniture than for the characters.

In fact, there are hundreds of films where the decor interfered with the playing out of real emotion. Take the scene in the Kapoor family's ego project about generational conflict, Kal, Aaj aur Kal, where Prithviraj Kapoor as the "yesterday" and Randhir Kapoor as the "tomorrow" have their big spat while Raj Kapoor watches despairingly. It's a grandly tragic moment in its conception, and various dramatic things are happening at the level of the music, the camerawork and the facial expressions, but who notices? You gape instead at the interior design - the enormous bifurcated staircase, the endless halls - and muse that it would be worth not getting along with your family if you could live in a house like this.

It was a wonder then that some of these films actually featured youngsters trying to break out of stifling wealth. In the enjoyable but ideologically muddled Asli-Naqli, Dev Anand is a spoilt rich boy who sulks when his grandfather ticks him off, and then sets out to discover How the Other Half Lives. His adventures are shown as fun and games, though; there is no real sense of danger, no accrual of responsibility. The story amounts to an idealising of both rich and poor, with the suggestion that they are each more or less content in their respective places.

Bachchan's angry young Vijay (in Zanjeer and Deewar) would have snarled at such a notion. In the 1970s, he became a symbol for the unprivileged person working his way up in the world by operating outside the law if necessary: Vijay's progression from footpath boy to millionaire is strikingly summed up in the shot where he looks up at a skyscraper his mother toiled on, having bought it for her. But such were the moral imperatives of this cinema that even while you sympathised with him at an individual level, the film couldn't let him go unpunished.

Today, things are more amoral, and perhaps more pragmatic. Recent films depict a social landscape where everything is up for grabs - for instance, Special 26 ends with the conmen played by Akshay Kumar and Anupam Kher settling down in West Asia, having got away with their heists, and the film encourages us to cheer for them. The message is clear: it is okay to be crooked if you do it with enough panache, and the ends do justify the means. "Be a billionaire. Accha hai." Even the genteel villains of 1970s films might have cringed at the thought.

Jai Arjun Singh is a Delhi-based writer
jaiarjun@gmail.com