I have had strangers sing Hindi songs at me in four different countries, a cab driver in Dubai humming Kishore Kumar like he grew up on him, a shopkeeper in Nairobi reciting Amitabh Bachchan dialogues better than I can, a student in Germany who had a Shah Rukh Khan poster taped above his bed, and every single time it hit me the same way, which is that my country’s biggest cultural export was never anything a government ministry shipped out, it was Bollywood, and Bollywood traveled on pure feeling. For most of my life I never had to explain what it was, because until very recently, somewhere around the time every leading man grew an eight pack, Bollywood was India’s soft power, and it did the work of a hundred embassies without a single budget line.

Amitabh Bachchan and Shah Rukh Khan were names that sat comfortably next to Robert De Niro and Keanu Reeves, and I mean that in the plain sense that people who could not point to India on a map knew these faces and loved them anyway. The Soviet Union fell in love with Raj Kapoor decades before I was born and Egypt claimed Amitabh as its own and Senegal ran Shah Rukh Khan fan clubs that met on weekends, and none of it was planned by any ministry or negotiated by any diplomat, the movies just went where feelings were and made the whole world hum along in a language it did not speak.

That is soft power, the kind you cannot buy, and we had it in absurd quantities.

Lately nobody asks me about it anymore. When people abroad learn I am from India the follow-up questions are about tech support and scams and nobody brings up cinema, because the room Bollywood used to hold has been taken by K-dramas and Turkish serials and Korean films that figured out how to travel without anyone’s permission. I keep waiting for one of our films to cross over and it keeps not happening, and I have spent a while trying to understand when exactly the music died, and my honest answer is that it was a slow degradation that accelerated somewhere around 2014 when the current government came to power.

Because once the BJP settled in, the machine started censoring everything it could reach, scripts and songs and scenes and whole documentaries, and it went after every form of cultural and personal experience it could not control, and Bollywood, an industry that once poked power in the eye for entertainment, decided that survival meant shrinking. The censor board once wanted eighty nine cuts in Udta Punjab and mobs stalled Padmaavat until it bled at the box office and a documentary about the prime minister simply vanished from the country, words get muted and scenes disappear and releases stall because someone somewhere decided to be offended, and boycott trends now open movies the way trailers used to. So the films got tamer and the subjects got safer and the industry quietly stopped touching anything that made you think, because thinking is expensive when the state is watching, and the content thinned out year after year until what is left is expensive-looking nothing.

Cinema is supposed to make you feel the pain and the warmth and the joy, all of it, the full mess of things that make us human, and that is exactly what a censored cinema cannot give you. If you try to stay correct in everyone’s book you will never make anything revolutionary, and I know this disease intimately because the corporate world has had it for years, where nobody offends anybody and every decision gets sanded down until it ships beige, and having sat through enough all-hands meetings I can tell you that this correctness is all bullcrap from top to bottom.

Censorship is an attack on thought itself, it goes after the idea in your head before it ever reaches a screen, and it has taken over Bollywood so completely that Bollywood has stopped being Bollywood. An industry that polices itself this hard invites every other mob in the country to take a swing at it, which is why people from within the country now attack it for reasons that are completely unfounded and nobody inside the industry even flinches, they just issue an apology and move on. And cinema is supposed to be a reflection of what the public is going through, but when you manage what the public is allowed to see while ignoring what it actually feels, you get compromised art, which becomes poor content, which becomes no artistry at all, and I do not know where this cinema goes from here.

I do not see Bollywood coming back from this, and writing that sentence hurts more than I expected it to, because there are so many stories left to tell about this country, messy and uncomfortable and true ones, the kind that made the world fall in love with us in the first place, and every year fewer people are allowed to tell them. Somewhere a kid is growing up thinking Indian cinema is whatever trends on a Friday and he will never know that we once sang loud enough for the whole planet to hum along.

Tell me the last Hindi film that made you feel something. I am @troysk704.