There is no confusion of seeing your own face reflected in the enemy’s face if he is masked. Self and others are poles, not a tangle

Illustration/Uday Mohite

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........

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