Showstoppers 2024-25: Forbes India's top 75 picks in cinema, OTT, music and sports
Actors, filmmakers, sportspersons... yes, it's that time of the year for our Showstoppers list, of 75 outperformers from the world of cinema, its domesticated counterpart streaming, sports, and music. They have competed with the best in the world and with themselves
Cinema means many things to many people. For some, it is an escape from life’s harsh realities, or as French-Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski put it, “cinema should make you forget that you are sitting in a theatre”.
For others, cinema is the antithesis of an escape. It should hold a mirror to life’s harsh realities, even nudging the audience towards solutions. Or, as Lebanese actor and filmmaker Nadine Labaki famously said: “It’s about changing things and making people think.”
Then there’s the view that cinema is not what it claims to be—“the most beautiful fraud in the world”, French-Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard called it. The character Ramadhir Singh (played iconically by Tigmanshu Dhulia) in Anurag Kashyap’s spoofy two-part crime tour de force Gangs of Wasseypur was on a similar wavelength, albeit in a slightly more colourful way. Sanitised and stripped off a choice word, the dialogue can be loosely translated to: “As long as there is cinema in India, people will continue to be made fools of.”
Move away from films to another form of entertainment (for the audience) and achievement and catharsis (for the players), which is sports. It’s as real as life: Raw, volatile with ups and downs, celebrating the triumph of the human spirit on track, field and turf.
If anybody could draw a link between cinema and sport, it had to be Manchester United legend Eric Cantona. Known as much for his goal-scoring prowess as for his philosophical utterances, the footballer-turned-actor memorably articulated: “In football you have an adversary, in cinema that adversary is yourself.”
(This story appears in the 10 January, 2025 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
