It was the year of Devdas, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s shiny reworking of the Devdas saga, with Shah Rukh Khan playing the titular role, accompanied by Aishwarya Rai and Madhuri Dixit. At the opposite end of of the spectrum, layered with grime and grit, was Ram Gopal Varma’s Company, a spiritual successor of RGV’s Satya, which upturned the way Bollywood told the gangster story.

Devdas isn’t my favourite SRK film, not by a mile, but I have to admit that he looked good in that clean-cut good-boy Bengali bhadralok attire of kurta and dhoti, accessorised with that booze bottle, mooning over his Paro and Chandramukhi, while making everyone, not just himself, thoroughly miserable.

The buzz around Bhansali’s iteration of Devdas, funded by one of Bollywood’s then fave jeweller-financier Bharat Shah,

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