In India, cinema has always been more than an escape; it is a barometer of the national mood and a sketch of the future we imagine for ourselves. The idealism of the 1950s, the romantic shot abroad effervescence of the ’90s, the chest-thumping nationalism of the last decade – each era is etched onto celluloid, replayed until it becomes part of the cultural weather.

The latest entry in this chronicle is Saiyaara, a film that has crossed the Rs. 300 crore threshold and crowned its leads, Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda, as Bollywood’s first true Gen Z breakout stars. Its ascent, however, has not been without turbulence. In a familiar 21st-century twist, the film’s popularity has been “cancelled” in certain quarters, accused of inflating its cultural moment through fabricated social media reels depicting audiences in tears.

Drawn by the prospect of a long-overdue Bollywood hit – and curious about what it might reveal about youth in 2025 – I went alone to a screening. I wanted to see the spectacle firsthand, to decode not just the film’s appeal, but also the faint cultural signal buried within its noise.

On the surface, Saiyaara is a doomed, love story – Krish and Vaani, bound together by music and undone by memory. It has the DNA of the Mahesh Bhatt school of melodrama, where pain is the sweet nectar that draws the faithful. The antagonist here is early-onset Alzheimer’s, a disease that plays its cruel tricks on Vaani, eroding her recollections in fragments.

The lovers are also collaborators – Vaani the lyricist, Krish the would-be rock star. In the currency of Gen Z, each carries enough “main character energy” to resist being eclipsed by the other. The film is steeped in the artifacts of the present: Google Maps, Spotify, collabs, airport looks, nepotism references, online reviews, and reels.

It’s a romance staged in a world where attention is perpetually scarce, where “scrolling through relationships” feels less like a metaphor than a navigational tool. Made for an audience accustomed to swiping into love, Saiyaara tries to answer what a thumbs topper could be for this generation.

The film is preoccupied with memory: what we choose to remember, how those memories are shaped, and what they validate in us. But its other obsession – perhaps its truer one – is with reels. The film sees the world as a twenty-year-old might, through the lens of endlessly looping clips, understanding that in our current calculus, life is measured in its capacity to be shared, replayed, and briefly admired.

Every reel, the film seems to say, wants to be remembered – but in this economy of attention, only few create memories.

Possibly wanting us to pause and see value in relationships, Saiyaara flips the love story narrative, there is no obstacle to love, love itself is presented as the obstacle that must be overcome. While in the films of yore, obstacles came in the way of love, love itself is an obstacle here, because we no longer become adults looking for the one, we can truly love, rather we achieve adulthood, to achieve success we have always aspired to. It’s this that makes the love story deliciously deviant and a dog whistle for feeling and loving intensely, in a fleeting world, where moving on is the accepted norm.

Every character at some point tells Krish to forget Vaani and self-actualise as the musician and rockstar he always dreamt of becoming, time and again he steps back and chooses looking after his lover, over his individual dream, that’s seriously subversive in the land of startups, shark tanks and Indian idols.

On another level, the film brushes against something like magic. Early-onset Alzheimer’s, in Saiyaara, is less a medical condition than a cultural metaphor. Vaani’s disorientation – her inability to separate the meaningful from the trivial – mirrors our own, in an age when the nonsensical claims the lion’s share of our attention.

Her forgetfulness, which she dismisses with eccentric charm, is life-threatening, incurable, as her doctor reminds her. It is also, perhaps, our condition: forming our convictions and shaping our worldview through a diet of social media scrolls and WhatsApp forwards.

In March, we skipped the usual Holi celebrations at home for a few days in Sonamarg, while the valley was still buried under snow. On a climb up a mountainside, I met a group of local boys who knew every photogenic turn in the trail and, for a modest fee, offered to film reels I could post online. When I declined, one of them tried a final pitch: memories ban jayengi – you’ll be making memories. It was a line, I suspect, that often worked.

If the philosophy of Erich Segal’s Love Story was that love outlasts loss, Saiyaara offers its 2025 revision: to be loved is to be remembered…probably the hardest thing to today.

In the end, Saiyaara is not simply a love story, or even a meditation on memory; it is a mirror held up to a generation fluent in ephemera. We watch it knowing that, like the reels it obsesses over, its glow will fade, its hashtags will sink, and its images will be replaced by the next scroll-stopper.

Yet for the span of its runtime, it makes a quiet, defiant claim: that in a world addicted to moving on, love – stubborn, inconvenient, impossible to monetise – might still be worth the trouble. And perhaps that is the real service cinema performs for us, decade after decade. It doesn’t just reflect who we are; it dares to remind us who we might be, if only we could remember.

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