I’m watching this thing and about twenty minutes in I’m thinking, “Wait, this is supposed to be the greatest Indian film ever made?” Because honestly? It starts like every spaghetti Western you’ve ever seen. Two guys on horses. Dusty landscape. Ominous music that sounds like Ennio Morricone had an affair with a sitar.
The western influences surprised me—not because they were there, but because they worked so damn well. You’ve got this revenge story that could have been lifted straight from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, except suddenly Dharmendra and Amitabh Bachchan are riding a motorcycle singing about friendship and I’m sitting there thinking, “This should be terrible. This should absolutely not work.”
Except it does work. Spectacularly.
Look, I need to talk about the musical numbers because they’re driving me insane. In a good way, I think? The adventure, the spiritual ties to the Seven Samurai cultural history, the friendship between these two men and their dance between crime and their better angels—all felt very relevant. But those songs! If I’d walked into this expecting a straight Western, I would have lost my mind when everyone suddenly breaks into “Yeh Dosti.”
Three hours into what’s essentially a meditation on justice and vengeance, and we get a four-minute motorcycle anthem about male bonding. In any other universe, this kills the movie stone dead. Here? It somehow becomes the emotional center of the entire film.
I keep thinking about genre expectations and whether they’re helping or hurting my experience. Because honestly, I went in knowing this was Bollywood, knowing there would be songs, knowing the rules were different. So when Basanti starts dancing to save Veeru’s life, part of me is like, “Of course she is, this is what happens in these movies.” But if I didn’t have that baggage—if I was some hypothetical viewer expecting Once Upon a Time in the West—would that sequence feel like genius or like the movie having a complete nervous breakdown?
And Gabbar Singh. Jesus. Amjad Khan creates this bureaucrat of evil, this guy who kills people like he’s filing paperwork, and somehow he’s more terrifying than any villain I’ve seen in a Western. Maybe it’s because he exists in a world where people burst into song about friendship, where joy is the default setting, and he’s this black hole of systematic brutality cutting through all that celebration of life.
“Kitne aadmi the?” has to be one of the greatest villain introductions ever filmed. It’s just a simple question—“How many men were there?”—but Khan delivers it like he’s already bored by whatever answer he’s going to get. Like violence is just another Tuesday afternoon for him.
The whole thing runs nearly three and a half hours and I barely noticed. Which is insane because I check my watch during most two-hour movies. But Ramesh Sippy somehow makes this sprawling, ridiculous, genre-blending mess feel necessary. Every song, every shootout, every moment of comic relief that should feel interminable somehow fits.
R.D. Burman’s score deserves its own paragraph because what the hell was he thinking? The opening sequence starts with pure Western guitar work—you could drop it into A Fistful of Dollars and nobody would blink. Then suddenly there’s tabla and shehnai and it should sound like a car crash but instead it sounds like… well, like Sholay. Like this specific world where anything might happen next and somehow it all makes sense.
The cinematography helps. Dwarka Divecha shoots this thing like it’s Lawrence of Arabia crossed with a John Ford Western crossed with… I don’t know, a particularly elaborate music video? Those landscape shots of Karnataka looking like Monument Valley, but with this distinctly Indian sensibility that I can’t quite put my finger on.
It felt timeless in that way great Westerns do—you know how The Searchers or Unforgiven feel like they’re speaking to something fundamental about human nature? Sholay has that quality, but it arrives there through this completely different route that involves motorcycle songs and dance numbers and three hours of emotional manipulation that somehow never feels manipulative.
I keep coming back to this question: what if I didn’t know the rules going in? What if Sholay was my introduction to Indian cinema, my first encounter with the idea that movies can stop for songs, that heroes can be criminals with hearts of gold, that villains can be both campy and genuinely terrifying?
I think it would have blown my mind completely. Maybe that’s what happened to Indian audiences in 1975—they thought they were getting one thing and instead got this genre-defying monster that rewrote what movies could be.
The friendship between Jai and Veeru becomes this template for every buddy movie that followed, but watching it now, it feels fresh because these guys actually seem to love each other. Not in a “we’re tough guys who secretly care” way, but genuinely, openly, without irony. When Bachchan dies—sorry, spoilers, but the movie’s fifty years old—you feel like you’ve lost a friend too.
Which brings me to something that really bugs me about how this movie gets discussed. People always focus on the box office records, the cultural impact, the dialogue that entered the language. Fair enough. But what strikes me watching it now is how emotionally honest it is despite all the melodrama. Or maybe because of it?
Look, Sholay shouldn’t work. It’s too long, too weird, too willing to completely change tones every twenty minutes. It combines genres that have no business being in the same movie, let alone the same scene. But somehow Sippy and his team pulled off this miraculous balancing act where everything that should feel ridiculous instead feels essential.
Maybe that’s what great art does—it makes you forget your preconceptions about what’s possible, what’s allowed, what fits together. Sholay grabbed every rule about storytelling and genre and threw them out the window, then built something entirely new from the pieces.
Fifty years later, it still feels like nothing else. Still feels like this impossible thing that exists in its own universe, playing by its own rules, somehow managing to be both completely of its time and absolutely timeless.
I’m not sure I’d change a single frame.