Now I think Bollywood is reaching its stage of equilibrium and over the years has subdued its instinct of personifying campus life. From the early 80s to now, three generations of Bollywood have left disturbing traces of anything in the name of art.
From the eighties till, before the beginning of 21st century every movie with college relevance would have the below:
Every college scene in any movie always had these bunch of not necessarily pretty women but women, mind you women in college with raunchy dressing playing basket ball, dribbling with both hands, cheering the college macho some of them with two plats and soda bottle glasses all of this to make that one heroine look super beautiful. Right, so many women and then there’s this one stud in college playing the guitar in a way that would make jimmy Hendrix cry in his grave, the nice guy who stands against the injustice and tyranny of ragging and other on campus social evils. Such good men on campus have inspired hair styles over generations from colossal side locks to puffed hair and mullets, to spiked hair this trend keeps changing. However what doesn’t change is this stud’s inevitable eloping with the college queen as they fight all odds together, battle family disputes all for love. The worst comes when the supposed hero just breaks out dancing (when he could say the same thing) to proclaim love and hate, and keeps dancing around the campus to lure this one supermodel in college, throughout 80% of the song she’s not interested and towards the end when she can take it no more submits to the will of the hunk.
Then what follows is the pursuit of legalising this hard earned relationship, they never do it alone of course there are always these loyal friends who live and die just to see this couple elope, damn!!! What in hell is wrong with these guys? We don’t know but the director thinks so.
Dil Chahta Hai is to be credited with being the pioneer of reformation which normalised college life depiction to humanly acceptable limits. I’m sure every actor pushing forties today looks back at all those college hunk roles he’s played in the mid nineties and smiles to himself thinking, ‘those were the days’.
Nevertheless personally I would want to see more movies based on how prominent people lived their college life, Hollywood flicks like Beautiful mind; Pirates of the Silicon Valley in many ways bring out some amount of insight into the younger days of people who have given something to society. Most of our college movies are dedicated to uniting couples, what happens next? They procreate and so that way the contribute their bit to the second largest population and second largest English speaking nation. High Five!
