When the posters for Bade Miya Chhote Miyan came out, I was puzzled. It recalled David Dhawan’s 1998 film of the same name, but looked so different. All too meta, since David Dhawan’s film was a comedy of errors about lookalikes—Amitabh and Govinda (in a pair of double roles) play two ramshackle cops muddled and befuddled by two crafty crooks who are their dopplegangers. The 2024 version starring Akshay Kumar and Tiger Shroff, is an action-comedy-ish film sans look-alikes where two different people declare one identity—“hum hain Hindustan” and the villain is masked or faceless.

When I discussed this with a friend, he told me, “One Gen Alpha (bole toh born after 2010) said the 2024 film is a version of SWAT Cats (a cartoon about cat-soldiers).” We both laughed, but uncertainly. Popular culture is a round robin of myths and metaphors, interpretations and parallels, a hall of mirrors where we see our times reflected back at us in different ways.