Not black nor white, grey is in

Gone are the days when the villain stood for all that was bad and the hero was the epitome of all that is good In Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani the utterly selfseeking Bunny Ranbir Kapoor comes and goes as he wishes regardless of how his selfish manoeuvres hurt those around him In Policegiri Deputy Commissioner of Police DCP Rudra Sanjay Dutt admits proudly that he is both a cop and a goon ldquoEk pe ek freerdquo Buy one get one free he says It is almost as if Bollywood has subverted the cult of the traditional hero to suit the perverse purposes of present times Sanjay Dutt in Policegiri Interestingly Dutt is currently in jail just as he was in 1993 when Khalnaayak in which he played the psychotic title character was released Subhash Ghai who directed Khalnaayak says ldquoThe antihero has always been loved by the audience Whether it was Ashok Kumar in Kismet Sunil Dutt in Mujhe Jeene Do Shatrughan Singh in my film Kalicharan or Sanjay Dutt in Khalnaayakrdquo u00a0Conflicted Neil Nitin Mukesh in Shortcut Romeo Lost idealism This is not the way heroes used to be in our films They were idealistic and would stand up for the truth even at the cost of their lives In Hrishikesh Mukherjeersquos Satyakam the idealistic eponymous hero Dharmendra chooses to perish for his principles rather than compromise them Fortyfour years later in his latest release Yamla Pagla Deewana 2 Dharmendra plays an imposter who declares his own son impotent to ward off the unwanted attentions of a poor girl ldquoItrsquos a sign of changing timesrdquo says Dharmendra ldquoValues have changed If Satyakam was to be made today the hero would have to be portrayed in a different light No one would accept a rigidly idealistic hero any more A more sinister less noble hero is the need of the hourrdquo SRK effect Filmmaker Sanjay Gupta blames the changing mores on the quality of roles being essayed by topnotch actors ldquoThe concept of onscreen badness was redefined ever since Mr Amitabh Bachchan made the antihero so cool in Deewaar Trishul Agneepath and Shakti Sanjay Dutt in Khalnaayak Shah Rukh Khan in Baazigar and Darr totally nailed the Gabbar Singhs and the Shaakaals of yorerdquo Gulshan Grover who has played the bad man ad nauseam in the past agrees with Gupta ldquoThis movement of villainy towards heroes started when Shah Rukh Khan accepted the Best Villainrsquos award Every major hero saw box office potential in crossing over from good to bad Later the award was renamed as lsquoBest Actor In Negative Rolersquo So villainy was redefinedrdquo He predicts that this will soon be the era of the lsquoDirty Herorsquo Says Grover ldquoThe hero is now going to become greyer but not a fullon antihero like earlier on It will be more like the Dirty Hero a male version of what Vidya Balan plays in films such as The Dirty Picturerdquo Conflicted men Neil Nitin Mukesh who has played both antihero and villainous characters feels that the hero of today and the future ldquois a man conflicted and divided by the changing morality prevalent in our societyrdquo Says Mukesh ldquoWhen you play a Mogambo or a Gabbar you are comfortably on the wrong side of the line of morality Nowadays the conventional villain is extinct We have leading men playing grey and black characters In my new film Shortcut Romeo my character is a man who takes shortcuts to get rich yet he has a softer romantic side In Saat Khoon Maaf he played one of the seven husbands of Sussanna the husband had to be savagely mean to his wife And the cause for his meanness had to come out in the sequence where I rip off my fake leg Here the audience realizes that the husbandrsquos violent sadistic streak originates from his inadequacy and frustrationrdquo Antiheroine Ghai believes that there is a fine distinction between the villain of yore and the antihero today ldquoThe antihero is a rebel with a cause and always appreciated by the audience And why just the hero Even the heroine is embracing shades of grey in her personality Aishwarya Rai in my Taal was pristine But the heroine in my new film Kanchi is rebellious defiant and aggressiverdquo The antiheroine is in fact also gaining credence in Hindi cinema In the new entertaining comedy Fukrey Richa Chadha plays a gangster named Bholi Punjaban Laughs Richa ldquoI don39t know whether being bad is good for my career I did the role in Fukrey because I loved my character It was by far the most important female part in Fukreyrdquo Chadha admits she wouldnrsquot have done it if it wasnrsquot for producers Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani ldquoThey make classy films and they ensured that my character came out strong but not cheesy I had played a dramatic emotional role in Gangs Of Wasseypur I needed to do something more grey and yet enjoyablerdquo Vipul Shah has an entirely different take on the debate Shah whose film Force brought more applause for the villain Vidyut Jamwal than it did for the hero John Abraham feels that at the end of the day a role good or bad is a role ldquoWhy associate actorsrsquo images with characters The role has to be performed well Our cinema needs to grow beyond the actorsrsquo images In the West the line between villain and hero has blurred It is only actors playing roles negative or positive We need to get there fastrdquou00a0 Hero or villain Some of the best antiheroes on screen