It may be something to do with what you now see on our silver screen. I’ve noticed that some of my younger women friends are in a state of deep shock, brought about as one of them puts it, by “men beginning to look like women”. Why, this journalist friend wondered, were men competing with women? “I like my men to have hair on their chests. No wonder women are running to Silicon Valley, to get bigger breasts. When men start looking like women, they have to do something different.” Whether it was Shah Rukh Khan soaking in a tub full of rose petals for a soap advertisement or showing off his six pack abs (on his hairless torso) in Om Shanti Om. Or, take debutant Ranbir Kapoor in the most talked-about towel scene in Saawariya: the will-he-drop-it-won’t-he-drop-it tease of a scene that promises, and yes, fleetingly delivers.

The millennium hero, it seems, bares his body and touts his muscles for the benefit of both men and women in the audience. Shirtless Salman Khan with his rippling muscles, Akshay Kumar and Hrithik Roshan all-bronzed and pumped-up with upper torsos on display and now even Shah Rukh Khan with his new six pack gym-conjured abs. Then, of course there’s the male pin-up par excellence: John Abraham has even the grannies drooling.

Perhaps it was Shah Rukh Khan’s transparent peek-a-boo shirts in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (the camera lingered longer and more erotically, over his nipples than it did over Kajol’s body) that triggered the spate of song-and-dance numbers in which the camera drools over the male stars. Finally, the men are getting their share of wolf whistles – increasingly from men as well. When I went to see Om Shanti Om and Saawariya the whistles when SRK did his Dard-e-disco number and the young RK his towel-act were decidedly from males. No wonder male actors get paid zillion times more than their female counterparts.

I guess finding out what women want is not enough for our Bollywood producers: they have to, increasingly, find out what men want. Oh, yes, about that boy and the towel scene. Ranbir Kapoor tells me that Sanjay Leela Bhansali really wanted to show what a young man does when he just discovers that he is in love and is alone in his room.

Well, Salaam-e-Ishq.
Poetic justice can be sweet, indeed sweetly erotic for some. Raj Kapoor is our grand daddy for the wet sari in Hindi cinema – and with it a voyeuristic camera that has down the decades caressed the curves of nubile young things. Remember green-eyed Mandakini under the waterfall in Ram Teri Ganga Maili in her translucent white sari that really left nothing to the imagination. Or, before her, Zeenat Aman in Satyam Shivam Sundaram. And, before her, the incredibly bountiful and voluptuous Padmini repeatedly jumping in and out of a body of water in Jish Desh Mein Ganga Beheti Hai.

I could go on.
In an ironic twist of sorts the newest Kapoor on Bollywood Boulevard is now at the other end of the probing camera-eye. Bhansali’s camera lovingly takes in the contours of the well-sculpted body of Rishi Kapoor’s talented debutant son in Saawariya. You could say that he’s doing to his hero what his acknowledged guru (the film is a self-confessed homage to Raj Kapoor) did to so many heroines: turned on the erotic gaze.