What's Hindi cinema's attitude to old age?

Compared to Hollywood (and French cinema)

What’s Hindi cinema’s attitude to old age?

The question arises out of a guest post on the substack Joining the Dots by a former BBC colleague Henri Astier. He wrote about French cinema’s relatively recent obsession with dying. Click here to read his piece.

Hollywood, as I recently wrote off the back of Henri’s piece, seems fascinated by youth and this is reflected in the films it churns out. With notable exceptions such as Nomadland, Hollywood doesn’t seem to work overly hard to portray seniors as real people with real lives. Instead, it prefers to lapse into cliché or comedic moments that marginalise the old. Click here to read the piece on Hollywood’s attitude to old age.

But what of Bollywood, the world’s largest film industry? How does it portray the organic process of ageing and the lives of people who are no longer young and all that sprightly? Not being a film buff, I can’t rattle off the names of every Hindi film ever that has senior characters. But even from a sociological persp…