Yaari,
dosti,
yaarana – there was a time when Bollywood routinely churned out films on this theme, and a foreigner studying India through Hindi cinema might have been misled into believing that only men form friendships here. By the turn of the century, the preferred label became “male bonding flicks”, which was a more honest, accurate description of this almost-exclusively-male genre.
The likes of
Dil Chahta Hai and
Rock On have finally begun making way for women, the most high-profile example of this evolution being Shashanka Ghosh’s
Veere Di Wedding (2018). I remember speaking to women friends who were as tickled as I was that