June 2001. Second semester of college, a hostel room, a degree most of you wouldn’t have heard of — that’s a story for another day. The weekly outing was mandatory movie watching at the single-screen theatre. In summers especially, that meant three hours away from the heat outside. Two films were releasing that week — Aamir Khan’s Lagaan and Sunny Deol’s Gadar: Ek Prem Katha. Information moved differently then. Living in a hostel meant the little that existed, music channels, newspaper reviews, word spreading through a neighbourhood, largely bypassed you. What you knew about a film before watching it came from accumulated star image. That was the entire brief. The equation was simple. Aamir Khan had Rangeela, Raja Hindustani, Sarfarosh, Ghulam behind him. You waited for his films. Sunny Deol, by 2001, had been in that phase where Bollywood had quietly moved on without making an announcement about it. Not forgotten. Just no longer waited for. So Lagaan was the plan. Gadar was what we ended up watching first. What happened inside that theatre is …