A Curation of the Finest Dialogues from Hindi Films

Sep 13, 2023

Hello all

I felt (and was also told by a few) that my last few posts got a little too serious / intense / heavy. So this time round I decided to lighten up matters by several notches.

As the clichè goes - in India there are two religions: cricket and movies.

Cricket is something that I am not conversant with - though I was brought up in the neighbourhood of India’s most famous cricketing grounds … which incidentally is also the place where one of India’s most famous and prolific cricketers honed his skills.

Movies, on the other hand, is something that I have devoured from a very early age. Brought up by parents who also loved watching movies, going to the theatres was something that happened to me from an early age. It was a mixed bag that we were exposed to - some classic English movies (The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, My Fair Lady, Sound Of Music, Guns Of Navarone, To Chase A Crooked Shadow, etc etc), some classic and some current Hindi ones (too many to recall - but the one everlasting memory is of my father returning from office early, telling me to get dressed, catching a cab, going to Chitra cinema and buying tickets of Sholay in black), and some really good Marathi ones too (Saamna, Sinhasan come to mind immediately). And in the good old days of the single state run television channel, Sunday evenings used to be around the B&W Crown TV watching every movie that would be aired - irrespective of who was in it. As I have mentioned in one of my earlier posts, I was given the moniker First Day Third Show due to the habit that I got into thanks to an old school friend with whom I reunited during our management college days. He has always been, and continues to be, a movie fanatic; while I … the less said the better as far as keeping pace with current releases is concerned.

One of the things that has always fascinated me is the art of dialogue writing. And fortunately I have been blessed with an elephantine memory when it comes to dialogues from Hindi movies. So for my post this time I have curated 100+ of my favourite dialogues from movies that straddle the 1960s right up to the 2010s.

Of course, when it comes to dialogues, and really memorable ones at that, there are only three names that come top of mind - Salim Khan & Javed Akhtar for their penmanship, and Amitabh Bachchan for delivering their lines flawlessly. So the curation is heavily skewed towards movies that feature the above three - almost one-thirds of the list comprises the works of the troika. These are also some of the most famous and oft-quoted lines that have become part of social fabric over the decades. But you will be pleasantly surprised (hopefully) to read a whole lot of other dialogues that have stood the test of time as well.

Since the number was quite substantial, I decided to venture into amateur video making for this post. Not to mention that Substack doesn’t allow attaching PowerPoint decks. I have timed the transitions such that it should be easy to read them before the next one appears. In cases where the words are too many, and phonetic reading of what are essentially Hindi lines becomes difficult, I would request you to click pause on the frame so that you are able to read them well before the timed transition to the next dialogue happens. I have also tried my hand at adding a looped sample underlay of a neutral background score (The Saint, by Orbital) to add a little zing to an otherwise mundane task of reading a video version of a PowerPoint deck. (I noticed a couple of typos here and there … kindly to excuse! The video upload takes time … and I have run out of it.)

I also realise that the contents of today’s post are not necessarily to everyone’s liking or understanding. I also realise that in selecting only Hindi film dialogues, I may have lost out on a few of my valued subscribers who fall in either of these categories:

Those for whom Hindi is an alien language (I have been lucky to have a few subscribers from different parts of the world).
Those for whom Hindi is not an alien language, but proficiency in it and then ability to relate to Hindi films and their dialogues doesn’t come easy.
Those who don’t belong to my generation - a lucky generation that witnessed the golden period of Hindi film making and the blossoming of the art of dialogue writing.

To all of them my sincere apologies. I didn’t mean to make this post exclusionary.

Since the content of this post is essentially to do with films, I am also not going to have a separate Keep Watching section where I typically review some movie or content.