The two people who passed away last week symbolised the1970s. Mrinal Gore, the “Paniwali bai” and India’s first superstar, Rajesh Khanna. They exemplified two ends of the 1970s — the basic deprivations that touched many classes to some degree, unlike today’s wide gaps, and its mirror image, the lush illusions and grand delusions of Hindi cinema.

Notwithstanding his brief but unparalleled rule in that time, the obituaries to Rajesh Khanna were perplexing, declaring the end of an era. I had to ask myself, which era would that be and did it seriously end, like, now?u00a0In fact, as my friend R, who was young in the 1970s, snorted in his text message about the many sentimentally ironic ‘zindagi ka safar babumoshai’ Facebook updates said, “Let’s face it, the man we loved died twenty years ago, this was just the shell of his body.”