Go well, Yusuf saab.

For me, he reinvented speech itself for Indian cinema. Taking it away from the distant theatrical orations of the likes of Sohrab Modi. Down to ordinary human speech, intimate whispers, mumbles, bringing a sense of nearness and interiority.

#DilipKumar
The classic clash of styles came in Mughal-e-Azam, where his soft, sensitive Salim faced off against the thunderous Prithviraj Kapoor with...yes, words...but also silences, and speaking eyes.

The scene that framed this the best is his very entry....
All the grandiose pageantry of the Mughal court comes to us first, nobles, palace maids and eunuchs running about, orchestras heralding his arrival....

All that magniloquence comes to a halt in anticipation of his first words.

And it's an intimate whisper: "Ma".
His very diction has filled out our notions of a Hindi film hero's speech more than we sometimes realise. Amitabh Bachchan lifted his entire tone and modulation. (And Shahrukh Khan after him.)

I realised this as a teenager one day, when the TV was playing in the other room...
...I rushed out thinking an Amitabh Bachchan film was on! That was clearly Amitabh speaking!

(Back in the early eighties, we were all still fans.)

Still recall the shock. I ran into a B&W frame, with a horse-back #DilipKumar filling the screen, quite the young charmer then.
Syllable for syllable, the rise and fall in tone, the enunciation, the chosen places for emphasis...there was no doubt that Amitabh had found a singular model to emulate and base his speech on.
Another lesser-known side of #DilipKumar. I couldn't ever fathom why composers never made him sing more. To my mind, this one song beats everything that happened in film music since the eighties.

The film is Musafir. Hrishikesh Mukherjee's first.

For #DilipKumar, the person, look no further. In his own words.

Gathered all of what I wrote on #DilipKumar into a single tribute. Slightly expanded, but still a quickie. Pardon any infelicities.

And thank you so much @drmanishranchi for allowing me to steal your lines without you knowing :))

On the politics of naming, edge-wise....

And one for the sadists with zero-watt tubelight brains....

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@TIinExile @neha_aks Yes, but it finally does, does it not, somewhere during what can be called the classical phase, leaving not much of a trace in the post phase. What we see is clearly a very interesting transition to total patronymy.
@TIinExile @neha_aks Yes, there's clearly a widespread tendency attestable -- often the figure of the father is more fleeting, and it's also matrilocal. In this case, you also marry that against the overall tendency and attitudes from the devas, despite being kin.

@TIinExile @neha_aks There are two separate strands here. One is the higher degree of variety before codification, which is general. In this specific case, one sees a kind of classing on that basis, and conflict, which the higher deities try to adjudicate over.
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@TIinExile Hi TN, okay, this is how I would offer my response. It comes not from any hasty perusal of literature, I did not do it then, and I did not it now -- in fact, took your words at face value and issued a corrigendum on that factual point on my post. But they come from a deeply...
@TIinExile ...considered view of things over decades of knowing/living a reality, just like millions of others, and you could spare some space in your mind and heart for it, if you do have that space. There exist multiple tracks here, in plain view. Tying them up is the lore related to...
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This has got to be the most unintentionally hilarious one ever :)) utter innocence on three counts:

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Here's a small sample of Bali iconography picked from Wikipedia. This is from Badami, Karnataka, 7th c AD, with the Bali figure highlighted on the right. Doesn't look very much like a member of the "choti and thread" club :))) ImageImage
Here's another. Choti-thread? Why on earth (or sky or pataal) would they at all want to turn a Daitya king into that? Image
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