I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard from a friend that ‘When my parents got married, they didn’t have money. They weren’t well off. My father just about managed to make enough for my mother to make ends meet. But they stuck it out together, they had fun, they went for movies, they ate out, things only had to get better. I guess it was their love that made it happen for them.’ It always makes me think about how constant this phenomenon used to be, considering I’ve heard this from so many of my friends who are now spread all over the world and anywhere between 22-35 years old, and also that the same thing transpired between my parents too.

It may seem like a coincidence, but this very period - the 70s and 80s - was also the golden era for Indian Cinema. Who can forget Hrishida’s films. Thoughtful, personal, simple, hugely entertaining cinema. At the same time, the country was filled with 20-somethings who were busy with their personal struggles to survive, capitalism had not happened yet. Indulgence was housewives buying bars of Lux bought from people returning from Dubai. These folks fighting their personal battles and struggling to survive understood what it took to be alive. And the cinema of those times reflected the socio-economic state of the country.

Draw a comparison to current day and age. The middle class has eaten into the lower and upper income groups, resulting in a bludgeoning and larger than ever before middle class that’s only getting larger. Capitalism has set in and how, bars of Lux can be bought off the shelf and are now sent to housewives in Bangladesh and Bhutan. The receiver has become the sender. Indulgence now is a day spa treatment that costs 5 figures. And I may even be flamed for this, but the parameters for getting married and staying married to someone, have changed. Marriages now are increasingly happening when both parties are successful individuals with stable careers, making their monies, driving their cars, easily being able to afford a home and having secured their futures with meticulous savings and investment planning. In fact, in most cases, the existence of all these elements are the VERY deciding factor for the marriage in the first place. We now want everything easier and we get it too. My father never ceases to tell me that he waited 12 months before he got allotment of his first ride – a scooter. Now pretty much anyone can walk into a showroom and drive out with one. And if you think about it you will realize, that somewhere because of not getting things easily and having to struggle that extra bit and fight for it, I think our parents understood and appreciated the value and importance of these things better than we ever will.

I’ve always believed that trends in cinema are a reflection of the socio-economic state of a country. Look at our cinema today. ‘Dhoom2’ is 2006’s biggest hit, followed by ‘Don’ and ‘Krishh.’ And all 3 films are hardly examples of cinema. They’re an arrangement of glossy visuals of good-looking people who are presented doing shallow, meaningless, mindless things for no apparent reason. They don’t think. And the fact that they’re such huge hits can only mean one thing. The audience doesn’t want to think either. We want our entertainment easy. Please don’t make us think. Show us our favourite stars wearing glamorous clothes cavorting in exotic foreign locations and we’ll come to watch again and again. Show us people wearing simple export surplus clothes and fighting intense personal battles in their suburban Bombay homes and we won’t.

On Friday, I was reading the movie reviews in newspapers. Parzania won rave reviews and accolades. And Salaam E Ishq was trashed. I haven’t watched Parzania yet, having promised a friend that I would take her for it, but I’ve watched SEI, and even without watching the former I can safely say that it will be about a trillion times a better film than the latter. But three guesses which film has made more money and is a bigger box office hit.

Which brings me to my answer to another thing that my friends ask me. “Why can’t we make an ‘Arth’, or ‘Ardhsatya’, or ‘Khoobsurat’, or ‘Pyaasa’, or ‘Chupke Chupke’ or even a ‘Saagar’ today?”

It’s because we’re not like our parents.