What Aag-aag you keep doing? Hayen? Bleddy millennial. True '90s boys who have seen Siva, Kshanam Kshanam, Raat, Govinda Govinda, Rangeela, Satya, Kaun and Company remember how essential watching a new Ram Gopal Varma film had become to living life and having faith in Indian commercial cinema.

Ram Gopal Varma, filmmaker and Twitter-terrorist, turned 55 today. He has been making fillms for a very, very long time; such a long time that he gave meaning to the lines "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" more than a decade ago.

Ram Gopal Varma drops a film or two every year despite the commercial failures of his projects. How he does that is a mystery but being bad at your job and still getting to do it is the hallmark of Indian democracy. He is coming up with his new film Sarkar 3 this year and honestly, every RGV fan in his or her heart of hearts madly hopes for the new RGV film to be that one film that breaks the glass ceiling and achieves the kind of critical and commercial fanfare that Ramu's best work did in the '90s.

Why?

Because Ram Gopal Varma changed the way Indian commercial cinema would be made forever. Completely. And since Ramu and his work fell off the zeitgeist, Anurag Kashyap took up the mantle to shake the status quo as Ramu did a decade before him. But now, Kashyap seems to have lost his mojo if Raman Raghav 2.0, despite its out-there moments, is anything to go by. That brings us to RGV. Ram Gopal Varma's tweets, with absolute disregard for moral conventions and political correctness, show that this guy is still one of the best, bold thinkers in the country. To expect something as brave and edgy as a Siva, Satya or Company is not a hard thing to do.

In 1989, Siva was unlike anything the Tollywood audience had seen. It was raw, brutal, underplayed, technically solid and yet commercial enough to simultaneously stand out from the run-of-the-mill Telugu films of the time and make a profit at the same time. Following Siva, RGV's Kshanam Kshanam, Gaayam and Govinda Govinda found that beautiful middle-ground between high art and commercial melodrama. In between all this, Ramu delivered what is perhaps Hindi cinema's best horror-film till date, Raat. Following these, came Rangeela, where the man tried his hand in making an old-school musical with bold, modern aesthetics. That paid off too.

Then came Ram Gopal Varma's seminal gangster drama Satya. It had everything working against it on pen and paper: A tragic story. Bloody and violent. The actors, were new, fresh and looked like real gangsters. The film earned big bucks and won six Filmfare Awards. Between this and his next gangster epic Company, came Kaun?, a small-scale, self-contained pulpy psychological whodunnit. And of course, how can we forget the master-works that RGV backed, like the tough-cop dramas Shool and Ab Tak Chhappan, the revenge thriller Ek Hasina Thi, the horror-anthology film Darna Mana Hai and the weird, one-offs like Road, Gayab and My Wife's Murder.

Before the corporates took over and made a pretence of investing in quality cinema - that facade was dropped quickly - it was Ram Gopal Varma who heralded the neo-golden phase Hindi commercial cinema. Today, the entire Mumbai noir genre owes heavily to RGV's Satya and Company. After RGV's masterwork in the psychological-horror genre, such as Raat and Kaun?, Bollywood hasn't been able to produce many good, intelligent horror films - Pavan Kirpalani's Phobia being an exception. Ram Gopal Varma's gritty, cop dramas still are the standard against which any new cop film is judged. All in all, Ram Gopal Varma's contribution to Indian cinema is truly immense and unparalleled.

As such, keeping Ramu's pace of working in mind, and if one is to hope that he is not going to stop making films any time soon, it is reasonable to expect that Ram Gopal Varma, before retirement, is going to make that one ground-breaking film yet again that will redefine all that we know about and have come to expect from Bollywood.

Here's raising a toast to Bollywood's true Sarkar of the '90s and early 2000s - Ram Gopal Varma.

(The writer tweets as @devarsighosh.)

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