Hindi Movie Villians (Dark yet Funnily Endearing)

One thing that makes Hindi Movies stand out is its amazingly eccentric and ironically loveable bad guys. Dark yet funnily endearing is the best way I can describe them... it is not the perfect description but it is hard to put into words why there are so likeable! From KN Singh in the early 50s to Prakash Raj currently, we have had some phenomenal villains who have developed their own entertaining styles. Hindi movies have had a predominant culture of having entertaining and interesting personalities of bad guys - a culture that has only started to crumble recently. Bad guys in Hollywood too have been eccentric and entertaining (Christopher Walken, Jack Nicholson) but not to the dark yet funnily endearing levels of Hindi movie bad guys. It is because their evilness is usually over-the-top.

I have listed my favourite top 15 villains. With them in the movie, you do not need a comedian for comic relief. Their evilness is quite entertaining because of their over-acting and staying within the energetic eccentricity of their characters.

Here's my list of top 15 bad guys:

15. Rehman the passively entitled and 14. Dalip Tahil the actively entitled

I combined these two as they have a similar theme. Rehman always plays a filthy rich guy and has an entitled aura surrounding him. This is best exemplified by how he (Chinai Seth) kills a man in the movie Waqt (1964) and acts as if it is a crime to accuse a reputable (rich) man like him. Dalip Tahil's filthy rich characters are more explicit in this regard. He usually plays characters that boast about being unscrupulous pricks because *THEY CAN* without any consequences.

13. Ajit the patient

Ajit must be on top of the list for many people as his idiosyncracies have been well-documented and joked about for a long time by many comedians. He always has henchmen and even henchwomen who he orders around while sitting patiently in his armchair. His feathers are never ruffled and he has a calm, patient demeanour indicating that he is untouchable by law enforcement which is really fun to watch.

12. Ashish Vidyarthi the overconfident

Very few actors post 2000 can be categorized as endearing villians. Ashish Vidyarthi is one of them. He mostly plays a bad guy in David Dhawan movies which are funny anyway. His trademark style is being cocky, impulsive, overconfident, and throwing tantrums when things do not go his way.

11. Ranjeet the pervert

The characters he plays makes my skin crawl. The way in which he massages his own chest and exhales loudly when looking at a woman sends a creepy current down my spine! This is precisely why he is so good at what he does.

10. Sharat Saxena the self-righteously frustrated

The most stark scene that is in my memory for Sharat Saxena is from Ghulam (1997) where he expresses frustration at people not liking him just because he extorts money from them! Usually plays the henchman of the main bad guy and always has an impatient, frustrated look on his face which I personally find amusing to watch.

9. Jeevan the creep

This guy was creepy to the point of making my hair stand on end and sending a tingle down my spine whenever he appeared on screen. That is exactly what made him so awesome! Also, he was creepy in a non-sexual or a non-perverse way which is difficult to pull off. The backstabbing, manipulative characters he played really suited his nasal laugh and tiny eyes.

8. K.N. Singh the energy conserver

His uniqueness lay in the way he kept a quite demeanor for a majority of the scene being very soft-spoken and then suddenly exploding in rage! Also like the way he kept a skeptical face while thinking through his evil plots and made funny noises with his mouth and nose while he did the thinking.

7. Sudheer the loud

He never played the main villain but always the sidekick henchman. Loved the loud way in which he talked while slurring the 's' sounding syllables. He was so hot-headed and impulsive that he could have easily been the real life version of Yosemite Sam!

6. Prakash Raj the ego-maniac

Sadly after the 90s, very few bad guys have made a mark in the new millennium. Prakash Raj is one of them. Love the way he plays thin-skinned characters who obsess over every little insult thrown at them and then describe in detail how he is going to screw up the life of the good guy. Very entertaining! Reminds me of Dick Dastardly from Hanna Barbera cartoons.

5. Sadashiv Amrapurkar the smug bully

The most underrated villian! His character always took pleasure in hitting raw nerves of people and embellishing how powerful he is vs. how powerless the good guys are. The entertaining part about his personality was how he oscillated his body from left to right while being a smug bully.

4. Pran the whiner

Similar to Sharat Saxena above, Pran too played perennially frustrated bad guy roles. What I liked was his incessant whining and grumbling of how the good guy get in his way and foils his plots and he did it in the most unique way by tightly nodding his head from side to side. The best part of course what his facial expression which was a unique combination of bitter, skeptical, and complaining.

3. Shakti Kapoor the shameless

This man is the love-child of Ranjeet and Jeevan. He practices shamelessness with utmost ease! As examples, watch him belch throughout the movie (Jungbaaz, 1989), roam around in his underwear (Raja Babu, 1994), or make orgasmic sounds all the time in almost all of his movies. He gives his 100% without any reservations for any role he plays. That is why characters like Crime Master Gogo (Andaz Apna Apna, 1994) easily stick out in memory!

2. Gulshan Grover the bad man

This man plays such unapologetically bad characters that it is funny! In fact, he repeatedly calls himself a "Bad Man" in Ram Lakhan (1989). His over-the-top evilness reminds me of Skeletor. I can easily imagine Gulshan Grover making plans to capture Castle Grayskull.

1. Prem Chopra the transparent 

My absolute favourite! He plays lowdown characters that lie, cheat, smuggle, and do every bad thing possible and cannot hide their evil, childish excitement while doing those things. This excitement comes in the best way through his throaty, gargly dialogues. Also, his cowardly fear for getting caught is very transparent and fun to watch. It is entertaining to see his facial expressions give away his bad intentions throughout the movie and in the end, it is even more entertaining to see him either run away crying when all seems to be lost or hopelessly apologizing to the good guys! 

Cows that exhale oxygen on a flat Earth

It is really hard to do but sometimes we need to look deep inside right wing nutjobs, bigots, and trolls to understand where they are coming from and how they are able to function in their daily lives when they are full of hate, conspiracy theories, oversimplified views on life, and respect for exploitative authority! Let me perform the tough task of looking at them from an empathetic point of view.

Right wingers come in many different forms with different levels of hate, jingoism, fanaticism, and irrational beliefs. I am going to specifically focus on those who have crazy irrational beliefs. After painfully observing such people online and a few of them offline over a large period of time, I have an idea of where they are coming from.

One can attribute the ostracism of homosexuals, sexism against women, narrow-minded social beliefs, and racism to bigotry. But what has baffled me over the years is the right-winger stubbornness to disbelieve everything liberals say even though it makes perfect sense! "Since a 'libtard' said it and is advocating for it, it HAS to be wrong." That is how their brains are unfortunately wired.

Why do so many Americans deny climate change or believe in a flat earth? Why do so many Indians believe that cows exhale oxygen which enriches our environment and why are left-handed Indian children forced to write and eat with their right hand? A major source of such inane, self-defeating beliefs is an ingrained inferiority complex fueled by the academic industry and the glamour industry.

Academics are in large part believers of science and socially liberal. The famous ones like Neil Degrasse Tyson and Bill Nye promote science as a 'cool' thing. This irks people who are not academically oriented or have a good educational background. Such people are often dogmatically religious as well. It irks them because they have not built the temperament to understand the concept of critical reasoning which could be because or their upbringing or their circumstances. No human wants to feel inferior, so in order to fill that void they start believing in simpler theories that are not cognitively taxing and make more sense. "I look around me and can clearly see that the Earth is flat so it must be flat!" "Cow is our holy animal and it can do no wrong, HENCE it has to be true that it exhales oxygen!" "Oil helps economy. It creates jobs! So how the hell can oil be bad?" "All my neighbor's children are right-handed. So logically, my child also HAS to be right-handed". Such people mistake simplistic thinking for irrefutable logic because their sub-conscious wants them to feel good about themselves by keeping them in a denial mode. The very definition of "conservative" is not wanting to know beyond what one already knows and is comfortable with!

Such an inferiority complex is further fueled by both Hollywood and Bollywood being largely liberal. When glamorous people have opposite views from you, it can get painful as you do not feel to be a part of their in-group. You resent the fact that you neither look nor think like them and therefore will make an extra effort to refute the most obvious things! A holy cow becomes a part of your identity and any fact that shows it in bad light, even if it is exhaling carbon dioxide, has to be wrong!

I often indulge in masochism and look at online posts of flat-Earthers. I have always failed to find a justification from them about why NASA would lie to us. Then I realized that they resent the fact that deep down in their sub-conscious, they know that they are not that smart. This ingrained inferiority complex makes them believe anything that refutes basic scientific knowledge. After all, you can feel really powerful when you make your own shit up! It's a drug that they are now addicted to and cannot give up even in case they'd like to do so.

In a nutshell, what I am essentially saying is that the strength of belief in an obviously false theory is caused by the need to fill an intellectual void which is mediated by a sub-consciously generated inferiority complex. 

I know have not presented any empirical evidence for the above and I have largely spoken like an armchair psychologist. However, my intuitive theory can be worth testing.