Long before Modern Love had us believe a montage and a voiceover could solve commitment issues, Anurag Basu gave us Life in a… Metro (2007). This was a film that wore ennui on its sleeve and its soul in one banger of a song after another.
The Life in a… Metro soundtrack became the mood board for a generation figuring out what it meant to want more when the world told you to be satisfied with what you had.
This was a story that decidedly belonged to the last gasp of the pre-recession era. This was when a junior manager at a call centre could still have his own cabin, a four-figure salary could be boasted about in the marriage market, and you could land jobs after one casual reference made over landline calls. This was when lunch breaks were long enough for both, vada pavs and plot twists. The anxieties were there, but they rose above formula and saw life’s many vagaries through a distinctly Bollywood lens.
Life in a... Metro wasn’t particularly revolutionary in its plot. It was partly inspired by Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960) and followed a crisscrossing set of characters—first chapter of his hyperlink trilogy—in Mumbai wrestling with marriage, heartbreak, ageing, and other urban pathologies. What set it apart was its tonal confidence. It knew what kind of film it wanted to be: melancholy without being maudlin, poetic but never precious.
It did not try to be too profound. It was more concerned with observing the messiness of adulthood. It didn’t wrap up heartbreak with monologues about self-worth. There was no moralising. No grandstanding. The characters felt lived in. And most importantly, there was a sense of humour that seems to be distinctly missing from most of today’s Bollywood.
Basu is now all set to return with its spiritual sequel, Metro... In Dino. So, it felt like the perfect time to revisit the original that depicted urban loneliness and set the trend rolling in mainstream Hindi Cinema. It made space for the tortured poets of Mumbai’s rush hour in its 132 minutes runtime. I was only 16 when the original released. Too young to appreciate or understand the nuances for what it conveyed. Now in my mid-thirties, I have lived some of it.
Stories That Lived Between Lines
As I hit play on a shoddy print of Life in a… Metro on YouTube, it instantly felt like I had stepped into a time capsule dripping with nostalgia. I have missed this Bollywood. This was when Hindi cinema embraced kitsch without apology, found stillness between melodrama, and let realism coexist with artifice.
Before the very Millennial Wake Up Sid (2009) rebranded young adult aspiration and angst, and the Gen X-representing Qarib Qarib Single (2017) repackaged midlife despondency with quirk, Basu had already composed a soulful, rain-drenched symphony to heartbreak and desire. There was an echo of Konkona Sen Sharma’s Shruti Ghosh in Aisha Bannerjee and a bit of Irrfan Khan’s Monty in Yogi.
Set in Mumbai, Life in a… Metro followed nine characters. In between bids of ambition and betrayal, there was the fleeting wholesomeness of love and the quagmires of loneliness.
The film introduced us to a city teeming with people, but starved for connection. In one of its early scenes, Shilpa Shetty’s Shikha rues about her fraught marriage, “Ab humari khamoshiyaan bhi aapas mein jhagde karti hain,” (Even our silences fight with each other). It’s poetic, but so devastating. And it wasn’t just these lines that were so well-written. Monty’s character injected a ridiculous amount of absurd fun into a film that, in lesser hands, would’ve sunk under its own melodrama.
The writing was clever in other ways. Shruti and Shikha were Bengalis — not unusual in a Basu film. But what stood out was their surname; Ghosh. In a Bollywood that loves its Bengalis to be Bannerjees and Chatterjees (both Brahmin surnames), this caught my eye on this rewatch.
This was nothing earth-shattering. But it did indicate a quiet dismantling of the Bengali-on-screen archetype. Ghosh carries a certain ubiquity, associated with both (upper caste) Kayasthas and other so-called ‘lower castes’ in Bengal, making it a subtler, more grounded choice than the usual Brahmin-coded surnames main characters get in mainstream cinema.
The Tortured Poets Society of South Bombay
There was a distinct texture to the film’s emotional vocabulary. This was the sufiana-rock phase of Bollywood soundtracks, where every guitar riff signaled yearning and every lyric carried the weight of unprocessed emotions.
Pritam’s music (with lyrics by Sayeed Quadri) wasn’t just accompaniment. The Metro Band (consisting of Pritam, Suhail Kaul and Fahruk Mahfuz Anam aka James) appearing diegetically throughout the film — strumming guitars atop rooftops and in alleyways, playing troubadours to no one and everyone — might seem whimsical today, but back then, it was unironically cool.
The film romanticised rain like no modern-day Mumbaikar would dare to do anymore. Performances held their own. Konkona Sen Sharma and Irrfan Khan’s oddball pairing remains among the most lived-in portrayals of late-blooming romance. Their flirtation was not aestheticised. It was awkward. It was anti-ideal.
In Shiney Ahuja’s Akash Sharma, I noticed a beta version of Adam Sackler from Girls. He was penniless, brooding, prone to burgeoning moments of passion and anger. He was a typical theatre dude with a Bollywood edge.
And in a rare feat, the women weren’t written as moral compasses or collateral damage. Be it Shilpa Shetty’s Shikha or Kangana Ranaut’s Neha, they were just as messy and conflicted as their male counterparts. And they were not punished for their moral frivolity (unless you count the fate of Nafisa Ali’s Shivani).
Even places played their part. Stations and airports have long seduced cinema as sites of heightened feeling. They are the everyday junctions where heartbreaks, reunions, and reinventions unfold on repeat. Life in a... Metro tapped into this, bookending its drama with lovers in pursuit across Mumbai’s local train station platforms.
And Now, Metro... In Dino
We are experiencing anthology storytelling about matters of the heart in a post-Modern Love, post-Lust Stories world. We’ve already seen various degrees of urban emotional chaos represented with varying degrees of subtlety and pretension.
Life in a... Metro captured a cultural moment. When music videos bled into movies. When everyone still hoped to catch someone before the train left the station.
Metro... In Dino arrives with what can only be described as a casting buffet. Pankaj Tripathi, Konkona Sen Sharma (the sole returnee), Neena Gupta, Anupam Kher, Fatima Sana Shaikh, Aditya Roy Kapur, Sara Ali Khan, and Ali Fazal populate four interconnected stories across Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, and Bangalore. The ambition is wide, but so is the margin for generic storytelling.
But this is a film that has its work cut out. Will it be able to capture the particular ache of the original, the mood of what the world has become now, or is it just another nostalgia gimmick coasting on the ambient goodwill of a title track and a wistful generation too tired to protest a reboot?
(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.)