Remembering the Titans !!!

I remember the time when i saw Dhoom 2 and Hrithik and Ash play the "gorgilicous" team of baddies in it. As the suave baddie Mr. A, Roshan Jr. does all things a hero is supposed to do - sing, dance, lip lock and get a happy ending. He also gets ample scope to reveal his toned and tanned body. In one scene of the movie, where the Jr. B and Jr. R get involved in the quintessential good vs evil fist fight, the girl accompanying me to the movie screamed out "Kill him Hrithik!" That blurred the line for hero vs villain for me totally.
Agreed, that The King Khan himself had played the baddie in a spate of mid 90s hits. But remember what happened to those characters? They stammered, they got beaten up and they eventually died. A very different scenario from the new Dhoom and Don movies I'd say where the bad guy walks off with the loot and lot. That's when I figured that Abhishek, with his leather jacket and rugged countenance, could never kill the baddie. Coz the baddy had died years ago. Yes, ladies and gentleman, whether you accept it or not, the Hindi movie bad guy has died a silent death and it's time I pay my homage.
I've been adding a dose of Hindi movies to my diet since the age of eight. I grew up watching the likes of Amjad Khan, Amrish Puri, Shakti Kapoor and Sadashiv Amrapurkar. Things were so different then. Like Ranjeet. If he was there he would try to molest a girl and if he would try to molest a girl he would get the crap beaten out of him by the hero. Ranjeet was in some ways the predecessor of Dhoom's Mr. A. I guess he somehow convinced his producers to give him a chance to flaunt his muscular body. Ranjeet always had a few buttons of his shirt open and when he tried to molest the gori in a gory moment, he would open a few more buttons. Too bad he didn't get a chance to sing and dance ala Mr. A. I miss you Ranjeet uncle.
Then there was Shetty. Aah, what a character he was. My mother, who's a phenomenal resource on B tier characters of A tier movies, gave me so much information on the subject. If Dharmendra was in the movie, Shetty had to be there too. And if Shetty was in the movie, then he had to be killed by getting hit with an iron object (varying from rods, to chains, to drums ...) on the head. Years before the Shilpas and Sunils brought the Shetty name movie fame, this bald and dutiful villain had done his part quietly (literally, coz he hardly ever spoke any words) in many a hit. We will always miss him.
The villains in eighties and even the early nineties had another trait. They had an evil family and friend circle as well. These days the few villains we have are too much in love with hogging abundant screen time (of the little time they get, that is). The old school villains were all family men. In my early visits to the cinemas, nothing thrilled me as much as an evil Kader Khan tormenting a village that had Jitendra as an "officer" (I loved how he never had a designation other than being officer sahaab) having equally evil conversations with his evil but dumb scion Shakti Kapur and the dedicated munimji Asrani. There was always a moment when Shakti Kapur tried to mimic the same moves on the heroine that Jitendra tried (oh, some moves they were) and would get beaten up black and two shades of blue in the process. That would lead to Kader Khan sending his "men with sticks" to pick up the girl, her blind father, polio struck brother and a motley of other characters from the village of Stereotypepur. Innovative torture techniques like hanging the brother upside down and the getting the heroine to dance under a home made waterfall were then employed. And then there was the icing moment, just before the officer sahab's entry, where Kader Khan would try to force the heroine to marry Shakti Kapoor. Oh where have those movies gone Dinu Chacha?
Sadashiv Amprapurkar was a "family villain" too (unless we are talking of Sadak). However bad Mr. Amprapurkar was he always allowed his college going son to do whatever he wanted (it was sad that all the son wanted to do was to tease girls sitting on his motorbike). There are countless movies where the son is the one that brings the hero and villain against each other. That's what would then bring the "home minister" into the equation too. Oh, where have those movies gone?And if there is one thing that I miss most abt the villains of yesteryears - it's their names. When did we start naming our bad guys Raj, Rahul and Aryan (aka Mr. A). What happened to Gabbar, Mogambo, Dang, Dong, Raka, Zabisco, Zulmi Singh and the likes? What happened to their trademark gestures. Be it Gabbar's tobacco chewing laughter, or Mogambo getting khush, or Gulshan Grover adding a "bad man" at the end of every sentence. Why did we kill these characters? Is it just me or does anybody else feel sad when they see Gulshan Grover playing the honest brother in a movie now? Come on! That guy used to be every brothers nightmare. What have we done to him??
So this is my appeal to all you kind readers. Bring back the baddies. Bring them back with captions like "badder and better than ever before". Coz we all know, that as cool and suave Roshan junior might be - he can never pull of a "Arre o samba, kitney admi thhe?".
P.S. I'm almost tempted to make the next post a list of 20 ultimate Hindi movie villain cliches. Lesse.