Now that Saiyaara has become a smash hit, and Gen Z is being ridiculed for liking such cringe, let me tell you a story about how Millennials dealt with their hormonal years.
In the summer of 2009, I downloaded a copy of the previous winter’s sleeper hit, the moody romance Twilight (2008), eight times. It was on a boy’s recommendation, so I thought the movie cannot be too sappy—teenage me was still grappling with gender and genre misunderstandings.
I kept playing it on the wrong media player—all I needed was VLC—and deleting it again and again, thinking the fault was in the files. The broadband bill was sky high that month.
That is how Millennials survived their hormonal, puberty-stricken, lovesick teens: by devouring every romcom, gothic romance, doomed lover story they could get their hands on.
This was the dark romance era of teenagers feverishly writing entire fanfic novels on Tumblr after school. It wasn’t just Twilight, closer home people were losing their minds over films like Aashiqui 2 (2013) and Kalyug (2005), another Mohit Suri gem.
But by the time the 2010s were over, the tide shifted. The years of yearning were over. Bollywood and Hollywood both seemed to pull back from love stories of that ilk. We became starved again.
The Appeal of Doomed Romance is Not New
Saiyaara has become the heartbreak epic of the summer, sneaking up on audiences the way these stories always do.
Starring debutants Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda, the Mohit Suri-directed film had no big expectations. It was initially intended as Aashiqui 3, then rebranded as a standalone after it grew too emotionally ambitious for franchise constraints. And yet here we are: over Rs 225 crore in global collections already, the fifth highest-grossing Hindi film of the year, and a social media storm of fan edits and emotionally fraught debates.
The story of Krish Kapoor, a drug-addicted musician with rage issues, and Vaani Batra, a quiet poet battling early-onset Alzheimer’s, is pure melodrama and classic Mohit Suri territory.
Krish and Vaani’s relationship blooms but we know how it will unravel; cruelly undone by illness and memory.
It's not fully logical. It is derivative. But it has hit a collective nerve. The appeal of doomed romance is not new. Every Indian generation has had its own heartbreak anthem.
For Gen X, it was Aashiqui 1 (1990). For Millennials, it was Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), Veer Zara (2004), Aashiqui 2, and Lootera (2013). Before that, Ek Duuje Ke Liye (1981), Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988), and Sadma (1983) took the idea of romantic loss to even darker places. For Boomers, there was Pakeezah (1972) or Ankhiyon Ke Jharokhon Se (1978). Then there has been Devdas through the ages.
But Why Do These Work So Well?
These aren’t happy love stories. These are tales of longing, grief, and things left unsaid. Saiyaara fits squarely into that canon, with a modern gloss and a distinctly Gen Z cadence. It has walked in the footsteps of so many that it was bound to be an unoriginal hand-me-down.
Indians don’t just watch doomed romances, we canonise them. But why? Why do we, generation after generation, remain obsessed with stories that hurt us? Why do we resonate more with pyaar barbaadi hai (love is destruction) than with love that simply works out?
Perhaps it is because sad love on-screen feels safer than real love in real life. And if the world is burning anyway, there should be something worth living for amidst that doom and gloom, and that something might just be love. It sounds nobler than wanting to live for money or a big house.
Love Stories and the Great Gender Debate
In romances like Saiyaara, dark or otherwise, the woman does little but gaze adoringly or admiringly at her man. She is willing to shrink, but the man refuses to let her (yes, “let” her has its own issues, but logic be damned). She cannot believe her luck that in a patriarchal world full of misogynists and murderers, the “beast” fell in love with the “beauty” and he changed for the better.
Every woman ultimately wants a man who can make her feel safe from the world, from himself. That is the ultimate fantasy right there. When it turns out that most “nice” men are also pretending, masquerading to care till they can get you or at least in your pants, there can be no fantasies about him.
So yes, a man who will want to be with you even if it is doomed that is worth fantasising about. If it ends tragically? Even better. He stays perfect in his pain. He never cheats and mourns you forever. This isn’t heteropessimism. It’s peak heterooptimism, in a world that teaches women to be terrified of love.
Where men proudly wear the scars of sixth-grade rejection as reason to become incels, worship Andrew Tate, and hate women. Where daily headlines scream of dowry deaths, rape, and femicide. Where the "nice guy" is also just a patient predator. In that landscape, doomed romance is still the safer option.
The women have plenty of reasons to love doomed romances. But so do men, whether or not for the same reasons is debatable. The fact is men want to be seen as the protectors and saviours, yes. But they want to yearn too. They want to be adored and adore someone unconditionally too. And the passive Vaanis and Bellas of the world offer them that fantasy.
Every generation finds its own version of this masochistic fantasy. Saiyaara is just the latest.
Is Saiyaara Generation Defining?
The thing is, whether or not Saiyaara is “deserving” of being a generation-defining film is beside the point. We’ve seen plenty of thinkpieces already. Here’s another one. So, people are emotionally invested. That is what a cultural moment looks like.
It also helps that Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda have both become overnight sensations.
Now that Ahaan has played the broken romantic hero and pulled it off, he gets the ultimate dual-stamp: the women desire him, and producers trust him. Same goes for Aneet; she’s now the it-girl of emotionally tormented softness. They’ve both been anointed by that strange alchemy of desirability and success.
Some have argued Saiyaara is too derivative. And it is. It's based on the Korean film A Moment to Remember (2004), and echoes the DNA of Aashiqui 2, Rockstar (2011), Sadma, Ankhiyon Ke Jharokhon Se and many more. But so were Twilight and Fifty Shades (2015).
Derivative doesn’t mean irrelevant. You can still not like it but art doesn’t always get to be original. Sometimes it just has to resonate.
There are two kinds of stories that stay with you: one that reflects something you’ve been through, and one that makes you wish you did. Saiyaara, at its best moments, does the latter. Its story or even music may not be timeless. But in this moment, it’s lightning in a bottle.
Will we remember it ten years from now? Will the kids—the ChatGPT generation of forgettable reels, TikToks, and 15-minute fame—be dancing to its songs in college celebrations the way we did with Ek Pal Ka Jeena? Kaho Naa... Pyaar Hai was after all the last biggest star kid launch vehicle and that was in 2000.
The jury’s still out. It'll probably fade from memory just like Krish did from Vaani’s. Maybe it’ll become the start of another wave of dark romances, the way Aashiqui was. What’s certain is this: in every era, there’s a Saiyaara.
(The author is an independent film, TV and pop culture journalist who has been feeding into the great sucking maw of the internet since 2010. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)