After 21 years in Hindi cinema, director Imtiaz Ali’s filmography reads less like a collection of romantic dramas and more like a long-form ethnography of the Indian millennial psyche.Long before brands commissioned data dashboards to decode urban loneliness or “experience-first” consumption, Ali’s characters were already articulating the quiet crises of a generation that had been promised mobility but not meaning.
Born in 1971 and delivering his peak work in 2015, Ali wasn’t plausibly reflecting Gen-Z’s fears and aspirations. Yet, his characters craved romantic certainty and fluidity in commitment, imploded in creative rebellion, thrived in existential rupture, and embodied traits that are currently marketed as features of Gen-Z (born between 1997 and 2012), not millennials (1981 to 1996).
Consider the cultural afterlives of Jab We Met, Love Aaj Kal, Rockstar and Tamasha. These are not just films that succeeded commercially or critically; they function as emotional case studies.Ali’s work feels prescient when you consider that his protagonists are rarely chasing wealth; they are negotiating with emptiness. They want intensity, authenticity, and escape.Yet, the millennial cravings remain underrepresented in contemporary storytelling and, sometimes, more crucially, misread by the market as a uniquely Gen Z feature.One could argue it’s because millennials didn’t develop the vocabulary to articulate their dissatisfaction the way their juniors have.In Rockstar, Jordan’s artistic awakening is inseparable from heartbreak, suggesting that creative fulfilment is born from rupture rather than stability. It is a narrative that, in hindsight, prefigures the millennial turn toward passion economies—content creation, music, independent art—often pursued at the cost of conventional security.Similarly, Tamasha diagnosed the corporate treadmill years before “burnout” became a mainstream talking point. Ved’s crisis is not unemployment but overemployment—a life too structured to feel alive. Today’s explosion of therapy apps, mindfulness platforms, and “quit your job” discourse echoes precisely this condition.Even Love Aaj Kal, often read as a relationship drama, doubles as an early commentary on modern dating’s transactional rhythms. Its fragmented romance anticipates the logic of swipe-based intimacy where choice is abundant but emotional resolution remains elusive.And in Jab We Met, Geet’s impulsive travel and self-fashioning feel like a proto-influencer ethos—an insistence on curating one’s own narrative, even at the risk of collapse.What ties these films together is their intuitive grasp of what millennials want—or, more accurately, what they feel is missing. Not just love, but a sense of alignment between identity and action. Not just success, but meaning. Not just consumption, but experience.In that sense, Ali’s cinema anticipated entire spending categories before they cohered into industries.The romanticisation of unstructured journeys in his films foreshadows the rise of slow travel—longer stays, experiential itineraries, the rejection of checklist tourism. His characters’ emotional volatility and introspection point toward the normalisation of therapy and mental health services.The restlessness with traditional relationship structures aligns with the eventual dominance of dating apps. And the recurring rejection of rigid career paths mirrors the current obsession with work-life balance tools—from co-working retreats to productivity frameworks designed to reclaim personal time.These categories were born out of millennial angst but have been aggressively productised for Gen-Z. The 20-something consumer, more digitally native and culturally visible, has become the default target for brands.
Also Read: Death of the ‘Godly’ Hero: Is ‘Dhurandhar 2’ a turning point for masala movies?India’s advertising ecosystem, always eager to chase the next cohort, has pivoted swiftly to Gen-Z—its slang, aesthetics, and attention spans. In doing so, it risks overlooking the cohort that actually holds the purse strings for at least another decade.In October 2024, consulting firm BCG released a report saying that Gen-Z would account for every second rupee spent in the economy by 2035. By 2030, they would be spending 46% of the total consumption.For now, millennials, now in their early 30s to mid-40s, are the country’s biggest spenders. They anchor housing loans, travel economies, digital subscriptions, wellness industries, and aspirational retail. But much of the marketing sphere is hooked to the Gen-Z narrative.The misalignment is not trivial. Millennials may not dominate cultural discourse the way Gen-Z does, but they dominate purchasing power.They are paying for the very solutions their younger counterparts are merely experimenting with. Yet, the language of these products—playful, hyper-ironic, youth-coded—often alienates the very users who sustain them economically.Ali’s films, in contrast, speak directly to this demographic without condescension or trend-chasing. They recognise that millennial desire is not about perpetual youth but about deferred adulthood—about reconciling the promises of liberalisation with the realities of routine. His protagonists are not trying to be cool; they are trying to be whole.There is also a structural insight embedded in his storytelling: the system is both enabling and suffocating. Liberalisation opened up opportunities—global careers, urban mobility, consumer choice—but it also introduced new anxieties: comparison, precarity, and the burden of self-definition.The result is a generation that is materially better off than its predecessors but emotionally more fragmented. Ali does not resolve this contradiction; he stages it.That may explain why his films age unusually well. As the millennial cohort moves through life stages—marriage, parenthood, career plateaus—their relationship to these narratives evolves.Tamasha feels less like a rebellion fantasy and more like a cautionary tale.Rockstar reads less as romantic tragedy and more as a study in self-destruction. The films do not change; the audience does.If there is a critique to be made, it is that Ali’s recent work has struggled to capture the same cultural voltage. But even that gap is instructive. It mirrors the broader industry’s difficulty in articulating millennial interiority at a time when attention has shifted elsewhere.The cohort that once defined the zeitgeist is now caught in a peculiar limbo—economically central, culturally sidelined.Perhaps the enduring value of Imtiaz Ali’s cinema lies in this: it reminds us that beneath every consumer category lies an unresolved emotion. Slow travel is not just a trend; it is a response to suffocation. Therapy is not just a service; it is a language for pain.Dating apps are not just platforms; they are infrastructures for loneliness.Two decades on, Ali’s films continue to function as a diagnostic tool. For an industry and an economy eager to decode India’s most powerful consumers, the answers have been hiding in plain sight, flickering across his frames all along.Also Read: The Oscars finally catch up with Paul Thomas Anderson
