Box office compulsions, Nahta says, may also play a part in this trend. “Budgets are sky rocketing, so it makes sense to hedge out the risk on more than one shoulder. Hence, it’s a move to have more than one hero and the recurring theme of male bonding,” adds Nahta.

Take the movie Golmaal, which had Ajay Devgan, Arshad Warsi and Sharman Joshi playing best friends. Rimi Sen had a blink-and-you-miss-her appearance in the movie. The gamble worked, and Golmaal was declared a moderate hit.

Amongst forthcoming movies which will use the bromance formula are David Dhawan’s Partner with Salman Khan and Govinda. Salman Khan plays a cool love guru who doles out advice to the innocent Govinda. David Dhawan has said that “The movie will concentrate on buddy talk and male bonding,” while Lara Dutta and Katrina Kaif provide the eye candy. Choreographer Ahmed Khan’s debut Fool and Final, with Sunny Deol, Suniel Shetty, Shahid Kapoor and Vivek Oberoi is a full-on male action comedy.

In many ways, the Bhai-sexual has always existed in Hindi films. While Sholay is a show-piece for the early Bhai-sexual, Yarana, Dostana and Amar Akbar Anthony are examples of films where full-bloodied heterosexuals who wouldn’t know a metrosexual from a train station, matching steps with one another, and thinking nothing of falling into hard embraces in moments of high drama.

Bollywood’s revisitation of this world is in many ways a nostalgic romanticisation of a time when friendships and loyalty transcended the labels — metrosexual, bi-sexual, retrosexual — that constrict behaviours and relationships today. “A lot of the films that we’ve loved and watched have had male friendship as the eternal theme. There’s something universally appealing about male bonding, one can connect with it very strongly,” says director Rohan Sippy, son of Ramesh Sippy who created Bollywood’s most famous friends, Jai and Veeru. “Everybody wants buddies like Jai and Veeru. Their relationship is playful, emotional, loyal and they’re ready to give up everything for each other,” adds Rohan. Both his movies Bluffmaster and Taxi 9-2-11 explore the friendships between Abhishek Bachchan and Riteish Deshmukh and Nana Patekar and John Abraham, respectively. For Rohan, the archetype of the friendship is classic, but the setting is modern. “The friendship is as unconditional as it was in the movies of the ’70s, but it is packaged for a modern audience,” he says.

... contd.