If you’ve scrolled through Instagram over the last two months, you could not have missed monochrome posts with stills of Hindi film stars—Dharmendra to Meena Kumari, Kishore Kumar and more— espousing the wittiest one-liners, alongside their pics. If you've paused to read them, doubled up and busted some of your everyday stress over it, you’ve got one guy to thank—Bahaish Kapoor!
The light-hearted posts are absolute gold—on point and so perfectly paired with the stars, that it is as though they’re mouthing the tongue-in-cheek lines themselves, whether it’s vintage Dev Anand wearing a smirk over a modern corporate joke or a dramatic Madhubala from the 1960s taking your Monday-morning mood into a hilarity.
Bahaish has got everyone laughing (and waiting for the next post) with a list of celebrity followers in India and abroad in the likes of Keegan Michael Key and Patricia Arquette to Sharon Stone, Farah Khan, Hrithik Roshan and Ishan Khattar.
Current Internet darling, guy with a vision and astute knowledge of films (he’s veteran actor and acting teacher Kishore Namit Kapoor’s son), he's riding the wave and loving it!
Manifest walks into the 80s film frames with Bahaish Kapoor—surrounded by his laptops and two cats—as he talks about his gift of the gab and why humour should never be lost (thankfully!).
Bahaish Kapoor (BK): I love cinema and I love memes, so it seemed like a natural fit. Initially, I was looking at old paintings, including Renaissance art, for faces with very specific emotional expressions. Apart from Raja Ravi Varma’s work, I wasn’t quite finding what I had in mind. So, I turned to vintage cinema. There was an entire world of expressions waiting for a change of context.
(BK): I’m drawn to the faces, the compositions, and the emotional world of these films. There’s so much feeling in a single frame. As a filmmaker, that interests me. With the memes, I get to take that feeling and recontextualise it. I also like the idea of younger people interacting with these images instead of seeing them as something that belongs exclusively to their parents.
The connection is in the emotions. Someone waiting for a lover decades ago can look remarkably like someone waiting for a reply today. Lovers were left aching decades ago just like today; we just get ‘read receipts’ now.
(BK): There has to be an emotional connection beneath the apparent disconnect. The caption might have nothing to do with the original scene, but it should make sense of the expression or the relationship between the people in the frame. If it can carry some part of the original film’s intent while making the joke happen, that’s the holy grail.
The seriousness of the actors’ expressions is also very important. The actors are completely committed to their situation, and that gives the absurd caption something solid to sit against. If the image is already signalling a joke, it can become too obvious. I like the people in the frame to remain entirely unaware of what I’ve involved them in. Good comedy is always sincere, not buffoonery.
(BK): Those films deal with desire, rejection, ambition, status, and belonging. Those things still play a huge part in our lives. Putting them beside workplace language or internet behaviour makes the similarities visible. There’s also something funny about seeing a very contemporary, very small inconvenience treated with the emotional scale of a Hindi film.
(BK): They capture the modern nihilistic or absurdist attitude toward modern life (a sort of gallows humor) or aspiration sassiness (people wishing they could be cleverly impolite) but also allow you to leave a lot unsaid. The image supplies a performance, the caption changes its meaning, and the reader brings their own experience.
(BK): Yes, and I like that possibility. Someone might come for the joke and stay because a face or a frame interests them. I choose these images for textures, faces, and costumes. I want people to see what attracted me to them in the first place. If that leads someone to watch the film, that’s a lovely outcome.
For some people there’s nostalgia; for others, these faces and compositions might be quite new. The glamour helps, too. Existential dread photographs rather well in black and white.
(BK): The queens remain Meena Kumari (for her tragedy) and Rekha (for this fiery spirit she is mythologised for).
What makes me return to a face is how much it communicates without dialogue. For these posts, a glance, a raised eyebrow or the distance between two people can do half the writing.
(BK): The shoe-stealing song in Hum Aapke Hain Koun..! With the caption, "To unlock all features, please enter your credit card details.” Or, Sridevi dancing in Chandni with the caption: "Apparently being happy for me requires choreography."
(BK): I keep returning to the illustrations in my old Hindi textbooks. I also love vintage magazine art and popular illustration. The humour comes from bringing together what we’re still trying to reconcile in our own lives.
(BK): Yes. I’m still thinking about performance, framing, timing and what the audience knows. A crop can change who appears to have the power in a conversation. Where the text ends can change the timing of a joke. It’s a very small piece of storytelling, but many of the same decisions apply.
(BK): We have so many lovely faces. For me, an interesting face is a sincere one. Like Mr. Nawazuddin Siddiqui or Mr. Manoj Bajpayee. I’d look for the same thing I look for in older images: a performance that remains interesting when you take the dialogue away. Someone taking a situation very seriously is usually a promising start.
(BK): Anything by Guru Dutt. Whatever the choice, I’d want them to experience the complete film—the performances, the music, the pacing and the world around those familiar images.