A farewell to Bollywood romcoms: Have we lost the charm of Hum Tum and Jab We Met forever?

I was 13, and I spent the entirety of 2004 watching Hum Tum. It was the time of VCD’s, and so we played it everyday after school, till the CD gave out and got scratched.

The CD still exists on a dusty shelf in our house, surviving like an old, worn out relic for millennials and probably an object of historical fascination for upcoming generations, ‘How did this even work?’

Ironically, Hum Tum, reminds me of that old CD. It’s almost symbolic of the romantic comedies that Bollywood had churned out in the early 2000s.

A normalcy back then, a luxury now.  

Silly, goofy and fresh, the story was not a profound sermon on life and love: Two people become friends and fall in love slowly over the course of nine years. It was far from love at first sight—their initial meetings are marked by sharp dislike, and one of the rare early instances where Bollywood acknowledges that suddenly kissing a stranger doesn’t automatically translate into instant love or attraction. Rani’s slap to Saif was well-deserved.

And the payoff, seemed well-earned. Sorry, but Saif’s final admission, “What do I say, that I will love you more than Tommy the dog and our children,” still wields more power over most of the attempted love confessions in Bollywood today, if at all.

 Where did that enjoyable silliness of Bollywood go?

To quote most of the wearied millennials, we really had it good. If it wasn’t Hum Tum, it was the chaos of Salaam Namaste, starring Saif and Preity Zinta, this time. When the story dragged, the songs lulled us back in.

Those were the days of My Dil Goes Mmm, where Bollywood made you believe that you walk down foreign streets singing and everyone will join you in tune.

And when we weren’t watching grand locales of New York and Paris, we were brought to the real heartland of Punjab in Jab We Met, where again, Bollywood had us convinced chattering to a sad passenger on a train would inevitably lead you to the love of your life.  And of course, the train station becomes the not-so-subtle metaphor for making decisions in life.

But we bought into it. Maybe it was because we didn’t see them as actors; we saw them as the characters. There was a looseness to these films, a willingness to let actors simply exist in the story instead of constantly appearing larger, tougher or cooler than everyone around them. It was conviction, fun storytelling and music that did the rest.

 Over the years, little bits and pieces of Bollywood romances kept falling away. Sometimes it was the music. Sometimes it was actors slowly stepping away from romance altogether.

Sometimes it was stories becoming louder, more self-important and overly polished. Each change seemed too small and insignificant to notice in the moment, until one day, it felt as though the genre had vanished altogether, replaced by thrillers, hyper-masculine spectacles and mind-numbing histrionics.

The violent hero became the new romantic ideal through films like Kabir Singh and Animal, where rage, control and emotional destruction were packaged as intensity. He was always redeemed, of course, but never before leaving behind a trail of wreckage that the film expected audiences to overlook in the name of love.

Sometimes the actors became too big, and the films began bowing to their stardom, sacrificing emotion and storytelling in the process.

 There’s not much romance left in Bollywood, and so we should contend with adrenaline-pumping, loud and masculine Chaavas and Dhurandhars in the world. Softness, fun, the ability to be silly and enjoyable is rather difficult to find, these days.

This isn’t to say Bollywood hasn’t tried making romantic comedies again. Recently, I watched Do Deewane Seher Mein, starring Siddhant Chaturvedi and Mrunal Thakur. The acting was decent, and the film had all the right ingredients on paper, but something about it felt overly engineered, as though it was carefully assembled from a checklist of modern relationship problems rather than lived emotions. Even the conflicts felt synthetic, stretched out for drama when a simple conversation could have resolved them in minutes.

And the music, while pleasant enough, lacked the kind of emotional memory older Bollywood romances carried. Earlier, even 'flop' Bollywood films could be joked about, laughed at, or even discussed or ridiculed in fun. No one would forget the ending of Mujhse Dosti Karoge when Hrithik Roshan 'accidentally' knocked the sindoor on Rani Mukerjee's head in the climax.

We had fun, even when watching the outlandish ones. But the idea of 'bad' and 'flop' films has changed too. We don't want to remember the bad ones now.

Now, romance often seems to rely on emotional extremities instead.

Saiyaara sparked all the buzz last year, crossing over Rs 500 crore, and to be fair, the acting was decent and the music was strong too, after what seemed like ages. Bollywood really wanted us to believe in unconditional love, except, it chose the route of conflating Alzheimers, PTSD with romance in a frenzied, contrived manner.

Maybe we just have to accept that Bollywood romances now exist like scratched CDs on dusty shelves. They're worn out, outdated, but impossible to throw away.