Tun Tun & Mukri Inc
The Films' Division news reel
The crackle of the black-and-white reel seemed like the visual equivalent of fizzing soda, but Indira Gandhi dancing with tribals from the North-East did reassure one that India was your country and that all Indians were your brothers and sisters.
The 'Please Stand Up for the National Anthem' of late has probably replaced this obligatory tribute to Films Division, but the FD newsreel was essential to the cinema-going experience of yore. Never mind if Devendra Khandelwal has tortured us doubly with his insufferable 'public service' shorts.
The dual staircase
The dual staircase represented affluence, arrogance, the fact that we were (and are) a nation of startling contradictions. Rich versus poor. And the rich bitch usually walked down the staircase.
Remember Madhur Jaffrey gliding down her ivory tower to humiliate Saeed Jaffrey when he had the gall to come over to her home, in a bid to get her grandson (Rishi Kapoor, who else?) to marry his daughter (Dimple, duh!) in Saagar.
The staircase was literally about heights you can only imagine to conquer. The staircase was about shaan and shaukat.
Tun Tun & Mukri Inc
The newer generation of character artistes are so slicked up that one forgets that there was a time when Tun Tun was happy being the fatty, Mukri the shorty, Keshto Mukherjee the drunkard, Iftekhar the policeman, Shetty the mean bald bastard.
Thespian aspirations and vanity have pretty much wiped out the genre of the stock character artiste. Some might say it is a good thing. But there is no denying that Leela Mishra portraying the brassy chachi film after film fulfilled the comfort of familiarity that was Bollywood: it was not what was going to happen next, but how it was going to happen next. So long as Amrish Puri was shot dead at the right point.
Victorian paintings to depict sexual assault
Sometimes the actress died after being smothered by the insistent palm of the rapist, hoping to contain her screams. And sometimes the camera panned away from the scene to depict a painting from the gilded past of Europe to mirror the violation at hand.
In the wake of strict censorship laws, what was there to show? So in the 1970s and 1980s, the Victorian painting sufficed. It was also a reflection of our own squeamishness towards sex of our filmic limitations in exposing carnal extremities.
But a scene culminating with an English lassie in trouble was often a sign that things were beyond repair. And they were...
The bra strap
While the 'Victorian painting to depict sexual violation' was because one could not show, if one desired to 'show', the bra strap was usually the proxy. Thick enough to match two Band-Aids, Shakti Kapoor ripping Shoma Anand's blouse was enough to avenge a wayward woman.
The bra was a moral yardstick, not a carnal one. The bra strap became so intrinsic to repressed sexuality in Bollywood that for Allah Rakha, a mid-1980s film, the producer requested Dimple Kapadia to wear a black bra under a white salwar-kameez.
She refused and went to the press about this.
Kashmir
Long before jannat became jehennum, Kashmir was the filmi turf that spelt 'Romance'. Love happened in Kashmir, couples fell in love here like hand meeting glove. Its sweeping vistas not only inspired an entire generation of travellers, but it also re-assured us that this unearthly land was ours.
The insurgency starting from the late 1980s and our own botched attempt at containing Kashmir have resulted in one of Bollywood's most romantic backdrops to fall off the map cinematically.
Even Yash Chopra gave up the snow-clad mountains for the tulips of Holland to celebrate India most sizzling celluloid romance, Amitabh and Rekha.
English, Hindi and Urdu titles
This is truly something that rings a sad bell: it is a reminder of when India was unabashedly a secular nation, one that was not ashamed of the fact that a good chunk of the talent base that fed Mumbai's dream-making factory was Muslim; that we prided ourselves on being a cosmopolitan nation; that the grand illusion that was Bollywood belonged to all citizens of the nation.
The gentrification of Bollywood has erased a crucial aspect of egalitarian cinema - the tri-lingual title - which in the 1980s was a democratic emblem of Hindustan.
The End
Rolling titles a la Hollywood are de rigueur. Yet in an age long gone merely 'The End' was enough to conclude the saga.
Sometimes a theme song from happier times would replay onto a paused scene of an entourage of finally-reconciled family, friends, sideys (usually the police inspector). 'The End' also represented the natya, nritya, bhava - elements of Sanskritic theatre that never left narrative Indian commercial cinema.
A Hindi film then was not about what happened next, but how. So the end was literally a confirmation of what you believed anyway.
Smugglers
One merely needs to revisit Parvarish to experience the heyday of smugglers. This particular film actually boasted a submarine owned by one.
Smugglers perhaps are passé post liberalisation. Imported goods are so easily available now! The ready access to cheese in our bazaars today (and legitimately at that) spelt the death knell for the smugglers of the past.
But it also sadly made redundant a genre of character artiste who was sharp, mean, sometimes sexy, and often safari-clad, glares et al. Let us not forget that helicopter.
Sridevi getting slapped by Anil Kapoor in Lamhe for professing an incestuous obsession was insane enough; what was to follow was a staple of Bollywood fare: when an actress is so incensed that she breaks into a tandav (in this case it was a Flashdance-inspired aerobics number).
But the tandav it was when a woman was provoked to become shakti. If you were a man, a good organ to play was the piano.