Working class heroes: Apna Time Aaa Gaya

Working class heroes have quietly carved a few sweet spots in the Bollywood box office. Actors like Ayushmann Khurrana and Rajkumar Rao with their boy next paan shop looks and non-filmy backgrounds have succeeded in becoming ‘bankable’ with their movies turning out to be money spinners.

In their movies they hold regular middle-class jobs - a private company executive or a government bureaucrat and move around in two-wheelers or not so fancy hatchbacks like a Wagon R or a Santro and live in very middle-class colonies and apartments. Their love lives also would be far from perfect and sometimes even their love interests need not have ‘heroine’ looks as in Dum Laga Ke Haisha.

However, both Ayushmann and Rajkumar partly owe their success to Amol Palekar, probably the first working class hero with a middle-class background in Bollywood. It was Amol Palekar, who in association with director Basu Bhattacharjee and Hrishikesh Mukherjee painstakingly carved a niche for such characters in the 1970s, when larger than life heroes held a vice-like grip over Bollywood box office.

During my childhood days in the 70s heroes were six-footers with drop-dead looks, while heroines dazzled us with their flawless skin and even more flawless aadarsh Bharatiya naari character, someone above all forms of suspicion.

Those movies were three-hour long dramas with highly formulaic plots, laden with distinctly black and white characters and copious running-round-the-trees duets. Needless to say, our young impressionable minds easily got hooked to it.

Along came Amol Palekar with his aam aadmi demeanour harried about the challenges of life. Back then it seemed sacrilegious to us that a hero could go about the whole movie without even getting involved in a single fisticuff; not court his lady love in fancy cars, but BEST buses and local trains; drive a rickety Lambretta scooter or Standard Herald car. No Impala or Ford Mustang car chases, no horse riding ... tsk tsk, how can he be a hero!! We wondered.

After some initial tut-tutting people started warming up to him thinking that cinema need not always be an escape from reality, a little dose of realism with a pleasant middle-class setting as a prop was welcome.

Then came guys like Naseeruddin Shah and Om Puri, and it led to further unlearning of our concept of heroes. They came with hard as nails reality and provided a peek into life in lower middle class and slum localities. It took a lot of time for people to appreciate their style of acting.

Their legacy was carried forward by the likes of Manoj Bajpai and now by Nawazuddin Siddiqui. However, though this particular category enjoys greater critical acclaim, its bankability in the box office is low.

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