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This week I watched four Hindi films that made me feel like Rip Van Winkle, having fallen asleep for 20 years and waking up in a cinema hall to find suddenly that our films contained miles and miles of kissy. Not that I disapprove: I’m all for the kissy. And I’m all for Mahie Gill who in Saheb, Biwi aur Gangster displays an unapologetic female sexuality. I also watched Soundtrack, and on the small screen, Shaitan and Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara, in which the women’s sexuality was less aggressive, even as they were unafraid to show a bit of skin or get into bed. I nudged my wife and asked, “When did Hindi films go porno?” to which she, as usual, shushed me.

I suppose Dev D two years ago had been a trailer for this more casual or even gritty cinematic intimacy, but I was still pretty shocked to see Rajiv Khandelwal on top of Soha Ali Khan, or to see Katrina Kaif and Hritik Roshan pretending to do the post-coital spooning. Not that they could completely pull it off: Soha Ali in Soundtrack seemed like the girl-next-door, whereas you wish Mahie Gill in SBG was the girl-next-door, and Katrina is just a plastic doll with movable parts. Even Kalki Koechlin, who in Shaitan was inspired by Black Swan to have a brief girl-on-girl moment, was for the rest of the movie too busy being crazy like a character from The Ring (according to my daughters). I’d say my wife got a better voyeuristic deal: a Salman Khan fan from the early days of our marriage (when we went to see Maine Pyar Kiya in a single-screen auditorium in south Delhi), she’s been gushing about Rajiv Khandelwal or muttering about how she wished she had Randeep Hooda for a driver.

Admittedly, one of the few vividly memorable parts of ZNMD was Katrina’s kiss with Hrithik because that was one of the few spontaneous things in an otherwise contrived and plasticky film.

It’s like the kiss at the back of the fleeing car in Delhi Belly: totally convincing and pretty much an ineffable summary of where the two kissers had evolved to at that moment of the film. (The other immediate memory from DB is the roof caving in while Vir Das hangs from the ceiling fan, the point at which the film ought to have ended.) And if in each of the films mentioned, the kiss served to demonstrate (without telling) so much character development, then you have to wonder what we’ve missed in earlier films when filmic kissing was a taboo.

Think what a difference it would have made if Guru Dutt had got to kiss Waheeda Rehman. Or if Dev Anand had kissed her in Guide: his post-jail renouncement would have made so much more sense. Or if Amjad Khan had kissed Hema Malini in Sholay after Dharmendra had seethed, “In kutthon ke samne mat nachna”. Or if Vinod Khanna had kissed Amitabh Bachchan at the end of Muqqadar ka Sikandar. The possibilities are endless.

This is not to say that each and every film needs the kissy. In Shatranj ke Khiladi Satyajit Ray threw in a kiss, obscured by the dark, between Shabana Azmi and the late Sanjeev Kumar. Though Ray was one of the reasons (along with Kubrick, Kurosawa and Bergman) that I fell in love with cinema in the 1970s, that particular scene seemed so lifelessly arty. Similarly, a kiss between Madhuri Dixit and Vinod Khanna in Dayavaan seemed so artless and unnecessary. And I can’t imagine Rajnikanth kissing anyone.

Kubrick used the kiss to good effect (though many of his films have no kissing at all). In Lolita, Humbert Humbert’s kiss with his wife turns from joyless to sensual as soon as he spots his step-daughter’s photo. In Barry Lyndon, even as Barry climbs the social ladder, his only impassioned kisses are with those women who share his humble origins. In Eyes Wide Shut, Tom Cruise gets more satisfaction kissing a corpse than from kissing his wife. And though Bergman’s cinema is known to be gloomy and angst-ridden, you will rarely find as joyful kissing at the movies as you will in Smiles of a Summer Night.

The past few years we’ve been subjected to mindless Hollywood corporate trash where kissing is perfunctory or even absent (think Transformers 3, which even my daughters found head-splitting). I can’t remember a single kiss from the otherwise beautiful and meditative The Tree of Life. Even the recent Contagion showed kisses only briefly, as a mode of spreading infection (perhaps Steven Soderbergh wanted only the virus to undergo character development). Was there any kissing in Inglorious Basterds or The Social Network? I can’t recall.

Which is why when I watched the four Hindi films this week, I was surprised, pleasantly. While the quality of kissing varied from convincing to not-so-much, I am thrilled that it’s here to stay, because it can only get better. And this week, for the first time in my life, I said to myself, bring on the Hindi films: I can now live without the foreign movies.

— The writer is the Editor-in-Chief, DNA, based in Mumbai