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It was Hrithik’s year once again with Dhoom 2 in which he plays a dishy thief, zipping around global hot-spots conducting heists and swinging with Aishwarya Rai in that banger of a song – ‘Dhoom Macha Le Dhoom’ — that is so back with Zohran Mamdani, new mayor of NYC, making it a loud and proud statement at his oath-taking ceremony.
With his streaked hair, bronzed face and athletic moves, Hrithik never looked better. And he followed that up with Krissh, in which he plays a caped superhero, a sequel to Koi Mil Gaya, both directed by Rakesh Roshan. The ladies in the film included Rekha and Priyanka Chopra, and the vfx, for which Hollywood technicians were hired, was startlingly good for a Hindi movie.
It was Shah Rukh Khan’s year too, with two very different films. In Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna, both he and his director, Karan Johar, went down a path they would never tread again, the former playing a man who two-times his wife, and the latter stamping betrayal all over the plot. If the film had done better than it did — though it appears to have scraped into the top ten highest grossers for 2006 — it would have re-written the rules of romance. But SRK as a cad, getting into bed with another man’s wife, was not something the audience was ready for then. And I doubt whether it would fly even today.
In Farhan Akhtar’s Don, a remake of Amitabh Bachchan’s rollicking film of the same name, SRK plays the titular character with style and swag, but there are no surprises in the film. Kareena comes on for a cameo, stepping in for Helen in the original, and Priyanka Chopra takes Zeenat Aman’s place as Roma, the ‘junglee billi’ who embarks on a love-hate relationship with this cool criminal, which rolls over into the sequel Don 2.
It was also the year when Saif broke out of his urban-cool image with a radical 360 degree swivel: his foul-mouthed, paan-stained, black-hearted character in Omkara, Vishal Bharadwaj’s star-heavy re-telling of Othello, gave the this star-actor his best role till date. The film’s language was consistently salty, causing much uproar amongst the faint-hearted, but to hear Saif throw the ‘ch’ word around as if he had always done it, sitting alongside the brilliant Deepak Dobriyal, was a thing.
The film whose success was a surprise, was, for its time, a brave experiment. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Rang De Basanti had a group of college-goers finding purpose and clarity after a pilot friend’s death in a MIG crash. The script picked on real-life crashes of these fighter jets, and the climax, which I still find the weakest part of the film, focussed on calling out the corruption among politicians and arms dealers.
The film’s ensemble — Sharman Joshi, Sidhharth, Kunal Kapoor, Soha Ali Khan, R Madhavan, Atul Kulkarni — danced around in their masti ki pathshala, drawing parallels with real-life krantikaris of the freedom struggle, headed by an in-form Aamir Khan. And ARR’s music became a catchy anthem, which never gets old.
RDB was that rare film whose impact was felt outside the theatres; justice for Jessica — the girl shot dead at a swish Delhi bar by a drunk-on-power politician’s son — can be linked directly to the candle-lit vigils of citizens, all fired up the patriotic bunch in the film.
It was also the year Dibakar Banerjee arrived in Bollywood with Khosla Ka Ghosla, which tapped into the anxieties of middle class India — a home of their own — via the specificity of West Delhi manners and mores. Its unlikely hero was a middle-aged man played by Anupam Kher who is up against Boman Irani’s shifty-eyed landshark who goes by the name of Asthana. The latter was a total hoot, with that immortal line — aap party ho ya broker?
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