In the late summer season of 2004, a lean but muscularly built man drove a fancy sports car off a cliff before jumping out of it in style, his mane whiffing about in the warm wind as a crescendo of macho affirmation played in the background.

John Abraham became an overnight sensation with Dhoom. His masculinity was so viscerally unique. More than women, it was to men like me that Abraham immediately stood out for strutting an altogether new form of sensuality – one which exuded the confidence of alternate identities rather than conforming to those that had already existed in cinema’s imagination. No actor in India’s cinematic history, maybe with the exception of the once broody Amitabh Bachchan, arrived with the controlled tenacity to rival the agreeable, crew-cut, chocolate boys of Indian cinema. Unfortunately, the second leg of Abraham’s career has betrayed the promise of those whirlwind formative years, when the man himself was more cult than the films he did.

Abraham had knocked on our doors through the audacious Jism, where he was perhaps overshadowed by the stunningly sensual turn of Bipasha Bashu. This was an age where the number of kisses in a film still made the news, so you can kind of understand where the erstwhile focus of the audience might have leaned. With Dhoom, in the presence of two star kids (Abhishek Bachchan and Uday Chopra) mind you, Abraham may not have punched above his peers, but seemed a stylistic breakthrough. Unanimated, self-aware, and modest even in victory, Abraham’s anti-hero was unlike anything we had seen before. And for the sake of saying something obvious, let us just agree he looked hot. Like Milind Soman, Abraham had his modelling career follow him in the way the camera obsessed over his metal-grade facial and body features. But unlike Soman, Abraham could also act a bit. More importantly, as time would show, he could also read — at least scripts that were shunned by others.

Lakeer, Paap, Kaal, Zinda, Water, Garam Masala, Taxi no 9211, Kabul Express, No Smoking. These films belong to the resume of an actor who did not just want to play hero, but also explore meaningful character roles that went beyond the boxed-in version of the heroic saviour. You could argue that most mainstream love toys, who also called themselves ‘heroes,’ must have rejected these roles for someone like Abraham to get them. But it shows a great amount of courage and foresight on Abraham’s part to not just demand the eye candy roles. Most of these films were acquired tastes that were made against the grain, as aspirational projects trying to push the boundaries of what was readily accepted as cinema back then. Abhay Deol gets his fair share of credit for doing offbeat cinema during the heyday of the romantic hero, but Abraham is far less recognised for what he chose in spite of what he could have easily become – the hunky romeo.

I became part of the Abraham cult, after Karam, a wonderfully stylised and provocative film that simply did not get the audience it deserved. Abraham’s wet locks and pained exterior made for rapturous viewing, that at some point, may have even translated into homoerotic desires. In college then, I even tried to lengthen my hair and save enough money to straighten them. Such was the influence of this unheralded actor who had come out of nowhere. Months into my oath, I realised I just could not ride bikes with aplomb like Abraham or defy domestic grooming recommendations to 'stick it to the man.' I renegaded the Abraham covenant as a thing that rarely manifested but continued to follow it as a thing that existed defiantly.

Ironically, Abraham was a punch-up, anti-establishment emblem sex symbol in his prime. The most unobvious of male leads — handsome, and yet approaching something other than the sum of his handsomeness.

The John Abraham of the last decade or so is a painfully conformist toad. Bulked up and bullish, this version of the actor, like the Municipal Corporation’s bulldozer, is satisfied to mindlessly demolish things. None of his new roles evoke the vulnerabilities of the many characters he played in the first decade of his career. Like the walls or bones he breaks, Abraham has chosen an incredibly brittle core to stage the latest of his career on – despite having done better before. It is a stunning decline.

Surprisingly, Abraham has always commanded a personality beyond the metrics of his stardom – a love for two-wheelers, a love for football – unlike his peers whose life was lived between house parties and Karan Johar’s Koffee with Karan couch. It perhaps takes an amount of conviction to hold on to interests that no one sees value in until they become cool to follow. Abraham has even backed a film like Vicky Donor at a time when it would have been easier to abandon.

Just why he wants to smash through concrete as if cracking into his 13th boiled egg of the morning for a career today, is beyond me. Or maybe it is just too easy to figure out. For all the experimental, somewhat ground-breaking choices that he once made, Abraham’s second innings as actor has turned out to be nauseatingly one-toned and shrill, as if he is resigned to playing the body he has built, rather than recast the soul he once teased all of us with.

Abraham's next film Satyamev Jayate 2 is slated to release in cinemas on 25 November.

Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.



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