Crime Patrol has begun a new season on Dhurandhar cops. Commentators have begun to use Dhurandhar khiladi to describe a cricketer who aces his game.

The new word to describe the ultimate is 2025’s contribution to the Hindi dictionary.

After Dhurandhar, Akshaye Khanna is also the new aphrodisiac of the audience.

With everybody scrambling for more info on the man of the year, it’s amusing to watch some fish around for a byte on his love life. The truth is, even if equipped with the sleuthing nose of Ajit Doval, a bevy of women will not tumble out of Akshaye’s cupboard. For he is not his father, Vinod Khanna.

For full-bodied stories of that sort, travel back to the 70s and 80s. Or even to the 60s to catch a glimpse of a slightly rebellious Vinod, son of a south Bombay businessman, who went to Sydenham College to do his BCom.

Long after he became a film star, the corridors of Sydenham reverberated with stories of how Vinod was more out of the classroom than inside it. Famous was the time he stood up to talk to a respected professor who wore a hearing aid. When the professor couldn’t hear VK, he took out his hearing device, cleaned it and put it back only to see the tall student still speaking but no sound reaching him. It took a while for the professor to realise that it was a prank; Vinod was moving his lips and pretending to speak. For that and other antics, VK was rusticated.

He was always Naughty Vinod.

More discreet, more a loner and more introspective, Akshaye was never a naughty boy. In fact, if Vinod’s wish had come true, Akshaye would’ve been a girl. When first son Rahul was about three and Vinod’s first wife Geetanjali was pregnant the second time, the actor had surrounded himself with pictures of baby girls saying, “I want a daughter this time.” Akshaye arrived in 1975, the same year as Ektaa Kapoor and Sholay.

Vinod’s handsomeness had a niceness that added to his appeal. Once, when I needed him to counsel a female friend in a personal matter, he spoke to her with patience, kindness and clarity to pull her out of an emotionally tricky situation. Never mind that filmmaker Bhappi Sonie and the rest of his cast, which included Rajinikanth, tore their hair outside VK’s vanity van waiting for him to come out and resume shooting.

That’s where he lost out to closest competitor Amitabh Bachchan, comparisons inevitable between the two tall actors. Vinod’s personality overshadowed Amitabh Bachchan’s, but in the end, Amitabh beat VK with his discipline, discretion and distractions that didn’t play havoc in the workplace.

Despite the exterior calm and charm with a giveaway cleft in his chin, there were storms inside VK. Compounded by the death of a close female cousin in an accident.

He held a press conference to announce that he was leaving behind films and his family to follow Osho to Oregon, US. Akshaye won’t even remember the press meet but the freeze-frame for me was the entry of his young sons who’d come to bid their dad goodbye. My heart went out to 10-year-old Rahul and the bewildered 7-year-old who had no clue why he was there or what was going on.

When VK returned to acting in 1986, he didn’t move back into Sumangal, the Malabar Hill apartment where he and Geetanjali had once set up home. He checked into a club opposite the building.

The children were heartachingly young but even before the press conference, wife Geetanjali knew she’d lost her man — to other women like Smita Patil. He’d already had a quiet fling with Shaque (1976) costar Shabana Azmi. But Osho’s Live for the Moment philosophy made him throw discretion to the winds and he soon began to be known as the Sexy Sanyasi.

Hope 86 was a celebrity event that the Hindi film industry had put together to raise funds for workers affected by a strike. Smita Patil was an active part of Hope 86, where VK appeared for the first time and announced that he was back to the movie industry for good this time.

Vinod was welcomed back with hits like Insaaf, Satyamev Jayate and Aruna Raje’s feminist cinema Rihaee, a film VK was particularly proud of for playing a husband who supports his wife who’s pregnant with another man’s child. Interestingly, Rihaee was a film which was written with Smita Patil in mind. After her premature death, Hema Malini walked into it.

Meanwhile, Vinod got into a new relationship when his friend J.P. Dutta’s Batwara (1989) introduced him to Amrita Singh.

The grown-up Akshaye may be brave, but imagine how the events of 1982 would have impacted a tender psyche.

However, unlike his father’s inner turmoil, Akshaye’s emotional conflicts have never prevailed over his professionalism. His reassuring reliability makes him score high with filmmakers.

Vinod and his first two sons wear their charm in different ways. While dad was the full-blooded Punjabi, the boys are 50 per cent Parsi, an understated community that most times flaunts neither wealth nor women. Early millennium, there was a vague rumour about Akshaye and half-British, half-Indian Tara Sharma. Neither of them dignified it with an official comment and when Tara wed Roopak Saluja, Akshaye attended the celebration sans drama.

In contrast, for a glimpse of how the men of the 70s handled attention, travel by car to a location shoot near Bangalore. When two young girls in the car to the location shoot of BR Films’ Zameer fawned over Vinod Khanna as the bespectacled heartthrob of Imtihan (1974), co-passenger Amitabh Bachchan cleared his throat and asked dryly, “Has anyone here seen a film called Sanjog?” AB too had worn specs in that film. AB’s wry wit was at its best in that short travel time between the hotel and the shooting spot.

In 2025, travel of any kind was put to the test when the Indian skies had crew issues spiralling out of control, followed by visibility-related glitches. Celebrities coped with it just like others did. When Anupam Kher’s flight from Delhi to Khajuraho was cancelled, he calmly caught the Vande Bharat train and reached the Khajuraho International Film Festival (KIFF). Poonam Dhillon walked like a trooper between terminals and rested for three and a half hours at Delhi airport before her flight to Khajuraho took off.

Khajuraho itself revealed another story. Apart from its array of delicately sculpted world heritage temples, the town is known for its KIFF organiser, one time actor-turned-activist Raja Bundela, who is married to still-busy actress Sushmita Mukherjee. Amazingly, in the freezing cold of Khajuraho, Bundela goes fiercely barefoot and like a Sabarimala pilgrim, shuns the comfort of a bed. It is Bundela’s tapasya to put KIFF on the national map. Similar meditative obduracy has him pushing the cause of statehood for Bundelkhand.

But there was also room for a chuckle or two at KIFF. During a media meet, writer-director-actor Saurabh Shukla (who scored well in Raid 2 and Jolly LLB 3 this year) took the mike after a personal question on their equation was put to his writer-director wife Barnali Roy. “I’ve never seen Lord Rama. I’ve never seen Lord Vishnu. Or Lord Shiva. But today I have seen Narad Muni,” he quipped.

Then or now, some actors don’t need cues from the wings.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and an author