It was the summer of 1994. I was visiting my grandparents for summer vacations. We didn’t have cable TV at the time, but we did have a VCR, and only one movie cassette for some reason – Yash Chopra’s Darr. Only a 6-year-old at the time, I didn’t relate to the love story in it too much. It was purely a hero and villain story for me. The hero (Sunny Deol) – a handsome military man who single handedly rescues the daughter of a minister from terrorists, has a beautiful girl in love with him and doing everything right one to be deemed a hero. The villain (Shah Rukh Khan) – a lonely psychopath, who stalks a young woman repeatedly, shoots at the hero like a coward, and kills policemen by falling elevators. From scene one, it was clear who was the hero, and I rooted for him. Yet, when the film was over, I could only recall the scenes of the villain in my mind, hum his songs through the day, and speak his dialogues to the people around me. Such was the impact of SRK in Darr.
