A young director once called up senior action choreographer Sham Kaushal. “Come home tomorrow at 9.30 in the morning,” said Kaushal, who had blockbusters as diverse as Krrish, Bajirao Mastani and PK behind him. In his Punjabi-accented Hindi, he also told the young filmmaker he’d never met, “Puttar, don’t eat anything before coming. We’ll have breakfast together.”

Breakfast was sitting on the floor while Sham Kaushal’s wife rolled out hot, thick parathas from the kitchen that kept coming at full speed. Serving them were Sham’s sons. “Yeh mera puttar Vicky, he’s done some roles here and there. Let’s see what destiny has in store for him… Aur yeh mera doosra puttar Sunny who also wants to be an actor.”

The sons dutifully stood by, put dollops of white butter on the parathas and served huge glasses of lassi. The guest couldn’t get up until he had eaten at least three of those hearty parathas.

That was the ritual in Vicky Kaushal’s house in Goregaon not so long ago. Sunny and he were the well-behaved sons of a closeknit Punjabi family, always ready to serve guests who dropped in. Their mother’s parathas were famous and so was their personal, hands-on hospitality. Even after Vicky began to be recognised and applauded with runaway hits like Sanju (as Ranbir’s friend Kamlesh Kapasi) and Uri: The Surgical Strike, in which he had the main lead, Vicky and Sunny continued to be the informal sons of the family.

The Sham Kaushal family has always been extremely close to Punjabi singer and filmmaker Gurdas Mann. Gurdas and his wife were among the few close friends present at the Katrina-Vicky marriage in December 2021.

For years, at the annual Ganpati celebration in the Mann apartment, Sham and his family were as comfortable as the hosts themselves. Like most Punjabis who’ve made Mumbai their home, the Manns had also begun to celebrate Ganesh Chaturthi with the same fervour as native Maharashtrians. Vicky and Sunny would join in and help to look after the many guests at the Mann residence.

Visitors were pleasantly surprised that despite becoming a known face, Vicky was his usual affable self, fetching water from the fridge and serving it. It was as if stardom did not make a difference to his son-of-the-family status. “Can you imagine Katrina fitting into such a set-up?” said a journo, who heard about the paratha-and-white butter breakfast hospitality, just before the Vicky-Katrina wedding.

It was one of the most outdated comments of the season. Nobody, neither Vicky nor his parents, would have wanted their daughter-in-law to “fit into” their set-up and start rolling out parathas. Becoming a part of the in-laws’ existing family machinery is an outdated concept. Katrina and Vicky setting up their own household, run by their own rules and needs, is the only reality that everybody aims for and accepts today.

What was and what is can be seen in Neetu Singh’s house. In the 80s, she not only issued notices to all her producers to wind up her work before her marriage, it was the expected thing. All actresses on the verge of marriage used to ask filmmakers to free them from their assignments by the time they became Mrs Somebody. Mumtaz did too.

Thereafter, it was all about what a fabulous lobster thermidor Neetu makes or how beautifully she manages her house on a budget. Neetu was also much applauded as the perfect daughter-in-law for touching Raj and Krishna Kapoor’s feet in the morning, or whenever she first saw them during the day. There’d be equally laudatory stories about Mumtaz personally getting a guestroom ready in her London house for one of her star friends who was visiting her from Mumbai.

Today, the same pleased tone will be used by Neetu to laud Alia’s great work in Darlings. One doesn’t have to diss anything that an actress of yore did after marriage. But it is satisfying that in these 75 years of Independence, men and women of India have come a long way.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and author