This Page Is So Frank And Retro, You Will Regret Not Following It Earlier

Bollywood memes have always been a thing. They have literally managed to bring back the careers of fading celebrities. But filmmaker Bahaish Kapoor’s Bollywood memes, built on classic Bollywood films from yesteryear, have put an interesting spin on the format.

Many of these films are ones the younger generation has not even seen, let alone formed any memories or nostalgia around. However, combining film stills from a bygone era with captions that are relatable to the modern generation creates its own style of humour.

What Are These Memes?

Hindi cinema has also seen a retro resurgence, with millennials driven by nostalgia while Gen Z and other younger generations are drawn to its vintage quality.

In an age of AI, where everything is sleeker, more polished, more censored and, in certain areas, closer to propaganda, the retro era has been romanticised, with the younger generation believing that things created back then were more authentic.

It is during this time that filmmaker and media trainer Bahaish Kapoor, who was also a writer on the 2022 Amazon Prime show Modern Love Hyderabad, started turning his arsenal of old Hindi film scans into memes.

The format might seem absurd: how can a movie from the 1950s relate to something like Uber’s surge pricing during the faintest drizzle of rain?

Or how can a scene from a black-and-white movie connect, even remotely, to modern-day work life with all its AI integration and whatnot?

However, that seems to be exactly what Bahaish has done, taking stills from Hindi cinema’s classic era and pairing them with captions that have nothing to do with the original scene or the time it came out in, and instead capture a very current, very relatable moment.

In these memes, a stern glance from a 1970s villain becomes a stand-in for how you look at your phone when a group chat won’t stop buzzing during a meeting. Or a tearful monologue becomes a joke about the ordeal of getting an Uber driver to actually reach your location.

Kapoor is no newbie to the Hindi cinema sphere, being the son of Indian actor, author, and acting teacher Kishore Namit Kapoor. His background has given him access to scans of Bollywood films that are not only rare but crisp enough to carry an HD finish.

Kapoor commented on his collection of original prints, film stills and non-digitised posters, saying, “We have a whole library of film books, and we’ve got scans.”

He also revealed that many of these photos were sent to his father’s acting institute, the Kishore Namit Kapoor Acting Institute.

Kapoor told The Nod Mag, “Plus, we have a friend who has a personal museum with non-digitised original prints that were used for posters and promotional stills, which I have used.”

This is not the first time this kind of meme has taken off. During the COVID-19 pandemic, digital creator Philip Varkey went viral for their Instagram page @_varkey, where they used classical art as a template for their memes.

Those memes went viral because the creator blended the historical imagery of the paintings with modern, relatable captions; the art’s ancient look added an extra layer of humour, making the memes funnier than if a modern template had been used.