So much for the magic of the old-style cinema theatres. What about the stars themselves? Their stature was inextricably linked to the lack of other entertainment options: and so they loomed large and magnificent in my imagination. It makes me wonder whether those stars had a hold on the collective imagination that later stars would not be able to live up to in quite the same way. Perhaps every big star upto the mid- 90s, whether it was Amitabh Bachchan, Shashi Kapoor, Vinod Khanna, Jeetendra or Shah Rukh Khan, had this advantage, of being able to connect to a collective, beating heart that has now splintered across dozens of streaming platforms. The role of those stars in our lives was essentially a construct of the unique media context of the time.
The third and final piece of the puzzle is an easy one: that when Rishi Kapoor was romancing his way across the screen, I was young and easily influenced and able to fall in love with stars without giving it too much thought. He, along with all those stars of the 80s and 90s, is an inextricable part of a younger me. With Rishi Kapoor go the remnants of the sense of invincibility one felt as a young person; his death is a reminder that the songs and the love stories and the theatres of my younger days are a thing of the past. Is it any surprise, then, that there are tears, and the sense of an ending?