There's talk, everywhere, about the tenth anniversary of Lagaan , a film whose success, as seen from today, seemed predestined – our two biggest obsessions, cricket and cinema, in one patriotic package; how could it miss? – but whose prospects, in 2001, were uncertain to say the least. Till the film hit screens and our jaws dropped with shock that this was what was being attempted, no one knew anything about it.
We did not yet have pervasive entertainment coverage by the national media then – or to be more precise, pervasive Bollywood coverage; ten years on, the national media continues to be unaware that there are thriving film industries outside Bollywood – and there were no breaking-news reports about how this foreign actor had been flown down or how that sand-soaked location had been scoped out. No one seemed especially interested in what a director named Ashutosh Gowariker was up to after Pehla Nasha and Baazi .
Perhaps the problem was also that this was an Aamir Khan movie, and the media was busy heralding the superstardom of Shah Rukh Khan, who was the blue-eyed boy of the Yash Raj faction, having delivered hits in the form of
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Then
But something made Aamir single out, for his 2001 slate, an attempt at a Hollywood-style epic by Ashutosh Gowariker, a filmmaker still struggling to make a name for himself, and a very un-Hindi-film-like Hindi film by Farhan Akhtar, a filmmaker who'd never ever made a film.
It's a gamble that's catapulted him to the top, to an envious position where he's now regarded as not only a stupendous box-office draw but also a steady guarantor of quality mainstream cinema. That's the true legacy of
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As for Dil Chahta Hai , it ended up redefining Hindi cinema. (I'd also think it has lasted better and that its influence is more readily visible around us today.) It's not surprising that, after this annus mirabilis , Aamir took entire years off, resurfacing only in 2005, in Mangal Pandey: The Rising . He could have retired and still found a place in the pantheon.