Purab aur Paschim: Colonials, Neighbours and Others by Arun Gupta takes us on a fun Bollywood Villain themed roller coaster ride. Bollywood villains are iconic. They are bad, scary and many times give the hero a reason for existing. Who is a villain? He is generally the one who throws the spanner into the story. In the olden days, they were created as people with traits which were to be avoided. They did bad things which you should not or could not do.

Cinema has always taken sides. The person who makes a film many times wants to convey his political or nationalistic views. He may put it in an overt or subliminal way and often conveys it through a character. Bollywood went through this phase as well around the time of independence. A lot of the bad guys were British. Their clothes, accents, food habits and way of living was very different from ours and this is what made them bad.

Physical anomalies or a different mental state of a person makes him or her stand out in a crowd, which is then branded as not fitting in to a mould, so broken or cast aside. The roles they portray become interesting to etch out because of the alleys and nooks of the human mind which are dark, grey and off the beaten track.

Interesting villains have given rise to the anti-heroes. They brought the hero closer to the real world, and made him more believable. For poetic justice, the anti-hero was killed off in the end, so that the collective morals of the society were finally honoured.

In today's times when it is difficult to distinguish between good and bad, the villain has become an alluring figure. He is almost like one of us. The villain has now changed from a person to a type of behaviour disrespectful, ill-mannered behaviour that we watch on 'Big Boss' or its versions all over the world. We get a virulent thrill from watching people behave in ways that we were always told not to. Virtue is boring; what really engages us is impropriety.

My love affair with Bollywood (Hindi language cinema from Bombay/Mumbai) is a complicated affair. I grew up on it, watching it in Bengali speaking suburban Kolkata of the early 1970s, proud of its slightly puritanical and past-invoking 'kaalchaar' but somehow tolerating (and I suspect slyly enjoying) the excess, and sex, of the masala mix offerings from Bombay.

The local single screen cinema halls, named Biva and Mukti, left wonderful memories of singing, dancing, and sinful fun, in my adolescent psyche, besides, of course, casting lasting impressions of the glamorous leading ladies and their equally smooth prince charmings (Asha Parekh, Mumtaz, Saira Banu, Jeetendra, Dharmendra, Shammi Kapoor and Rajesh Khanna, to name a few). But what was also fun were the bad guys (and girls) - Pran, with his sophisticated villainy; Helen, with her cabarets to heaven; Prem Chopra with his in-your-face sleaze and Shetty with his unique combination of the bald and the brawn!

And then education happened. I went to Delhi University and studied English Literature, becoming enamoured of the very British and 'classy' Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen. Further damage was done at FTII, Pune, where I studied Film Direction, and dived headlong into the gloom and doom of Bergman, Bresson, Tarkovsky, Resnais - austere European 'auteurs' far removed from the colourful sound and fury of my growing up years.