Let’s be honest, Bollywood has flatlined. The last few years produced films that came and went without leaving a trace. Not one single story stirred excitement, not one frame made the wait worth it. The industry that once sold dreams has reduced itself to a formula: bloated budgets, safe storylines, remakes of remakes. Even its music — Bollywood’s soul — has slipped into monotony. Every track sounds like a recycled patriotic anthem or a sermon in moral science. What once gave goosebumps now barely raises an eyebrow.
Which is why when a track like Pardesiya lands with that old-school Sonu Nigam vibe, or when a film like Saiyaara hits the theatre, there’s suddenly a flicker, an almost forgotten anticipation, a reminder of why Bollywood once mattered. And that anticipation turns sharper, more charged, when the show carrying these moments comes wrapped in a title like The Ba***ds of Bollywood, created not by an old warhorse, not a rebel outsider, but by a 27-year-old “newbie.”
Aryan Khan, a complete insider, son of the ‘Badshah of Bollywood’, has arrived with a show that doesn’t try to defend Bollywood, but dares to roast it. He grew up in the bubble, watched the industry get defamed and politically flogged, and has now turned that experience into a parody. Which is why the show feels less like a debut and more like an intervention.
Ridicule is resistance
Aryan Khan last dominated the news cycle in 2021, not for any work of his own, but for being paraded as a trophy arrest in a “drug bust” that turned out to be more of a political theatre than a criminal case. Back then, the media bayed for blood, the political class smirked, and it felt like the whole state apparatus had found its perfect fall guy. Over 20 days in prison, bail rejections, and a nationwide circus later, Aryan Khan was cleared of all charges. The officer who led the raid now faces corruption and money laundering charges. And India’s morality play ended, as most morality plays here do, on a note of irony.
Fast forward to 2025, Aryan Khan has flipped the script. The Ba***ds of Bollywood is his clapback, though not in the way you’d expect. It isn’t defensive, it isn’t self-pitying; it’s irreverent, satirical, and biting in a way Bollywood rarely allows itself to be. The show skewers the industry’s caricatured image of today — nepotism, coke-snorting party animals, bubble-wrapped elites — and turns the mockery into punchlines. It laughs at itself so hard that you almost forget that this same industry was, until recently, a national punching bag for the ruling establishment’s “cultural war” against Mumbai’s film world.
In a sense, Aryan audaciously embodies the contradictions of Bollywood today: both heir and disruptor, both beneficiary and critic. And perhaps that is why The Ba***ds of Bollywood matters. At a time when the industry has been creatively bankrupt and politically scapegoated, it takes someone born at the centre of its power to both expose the absurdities of Bollywood and remind audiences why they once cared. Bollywood has spent the last decade being defamed, bastardised, and politically flogged. Aryan Khan has handed it back, on screen, with a smirk. And that, perhaps, is the most badass thing of all.
Of course, not everyone will get it. The older generation will call it crass. The moral police will call it corrupting. The political class, who perfected the art of ridiculing Bollywood while milking its glamour, might just squirm. Because here’s the thing: satire stings hardest when it makes you look inward, and Aryan Khan has dared to do what few in public life can — mock his own ecosystem unapologetically, and with a full heart of laugh and gall without flinching. For the audience willing to loosen up, the show offers what today’s public square desperately lacks: the big, unapologetic laugh. In an era where comedy is silenced, satire is censored, and everything offends someone’s ‘sanskaars’, The Ba***ds of Bollywood is a reminder that ridicule is resistance too.
Satire has always been cinema’s secret weapon. It makes you laugh, then leaves you squirming. It sugarcoats the critique with comedy but still forces you to swallow the bitter pill — politics, hypocrisy, cultural absurdities, all exposed under the glitter of a joke. From Dr. Strangelove (1964) to Thank You for Smoking (2005), satire has shown us that a laugh can often be sharper than a knife. In Bollywood too, satire has always been more than just comedy; it’s survival. It gives filmmakers a way to poke at power, to question authority, to mock the very structures that suffocate them, all without shouting slogans. The best satirical moments in Hindi cinema — whether it was Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro (1983) skewering corruption or Peepli Live (2010) exposing the media circus — outlived their box office runs because they forced uncomfortable conversations. They proved that laughter could sting as sharply as tragedy.
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Claiming the narrative
The Ba***ds of Bollywood is no Kubrick classic, but it’s also not trying to be. What it is trying — loudly, brashly, unapologetically — is to carve itself as a satirical show. This is satire reimagined for 2025: loud, crass, sometimes juvenile, but very aware of what it’s mocking. It takes Bollywood’s most tired clichés — the Delhi outsider chasing stardom, the cardboard villain father, the sobbing mother, the nepotism — and exaggerates them until they collapse under their own weight.
What makes it hatke (stand out) though is the garnish: satire so loud, so crass, it refuses to be subtle. The gali-galoch (use of expletives) is relentless — the F-word lands like punctuation, as if it’s the new mandatory vowel of Bollywood English. The show drowns in Hinglish, parodying the very accusation that “Bollywood only speaks in English.”
But it’s not just a throwaway gag. It’s a mirror. Because this is what India itself has become, loud, brash, and perpetually switching tongues to signal class and look cool. The English is for aspiration, the Hindi for abuse, the Hinglish for survival. The performance of language has turned into the performance of identity. Bollywood isn’t mocking itself alone; it’s mocking us, a country that speaks in contradictions, abuses in multiple dialects, and still hasn’t made peace with its own insecurities about who we are and how we sound.
So yes, The Ba***ds of Bollywood is a show about Bollywood’s chaos. But it’s also a show about India’s chaos: the narratives, the gatekeepers, the false morality. And Aryan, the kid once trapped in a show trial, has now weaponised art to become both subject and auteur. The show is designed to unsettle you. It’s as much about Aryan reasserting authorship as it is about storytelling. He’s claiming the narrative: I will not be your victim again. He’s turning the camera on the camera. He’s saying you shoved them — the scandals, the leaks, the smear campaigns — down my throat. Now let me show you how they taste from the inside.
And in doing so, he’s carving a new space in Indian pop culture. The kind of space where satire, anger, nostalgia, and self-mockery coexist. Where you can laugh at your mess, but refuse to let it define you. Where art pushes back at power — even if power is still watching.
So the question isn’t just whether The Ba***ds of Bollywood works as a show. The question is whether India can still laugh at its own absurdities. If satire is all that survives when politics kills nuance and culture kills originality, then Aryan Khan has handed Bollywood a mirror. The real suspense is not on the screen; it’s in whether we, as a country, are brave enough to look at it.
Shruti Vyas is a journalist based in New Delhi. She writes on politics, international relations and current affairs. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)