What angers the Bollywood hero? Is it an unjust social order or personal angst?

In the late 1950s, when the sense of euphoria about Indian independence began to dissolve, Dilip Kumar played a very angry hero in B.R. Chopra's "Naya Daur".

Thereafter, for a long time the heroes in Hindi films weren't a particularly angered species.

The superheroes of the 1960s and 70s - Shammi Kapoor, Rajendra Kumar and Rajesh Khanna - were all at peace with the social order. The battles they fought were strictly an arena for personal drama.

This state of being mellow and insulated changed with the arrival of Amitabh Bachchan, the angriest hero Hindi cinema had ever seen. In his star-making vehicle "Zanjeer", Bachchan fought a bitter battle against corruption in the bureaucracy.

His anger and his fierce battle for personal and inter-personal dignity took the celluloid hero out of stuffy studios to the streets in search of myriad answers to the mystery of corruption in high places.

Today the anti-establishment cop that Bachchan played in "Zanjeer" has rebelled and reneged beyond belief. While he continues to play the seething no-longer-young but still-enormously-angry cop in "Khakee" and "Dev", his son has taken the anti-establishment hero to a new frightening dimension in the lately released "Yuva".

Unlike the seething cop Vijay in "Zanjeer", there's nothing even remotely official about Abhishek's Lallan in "Yuva". They're both anti-establishment guys.

While one has chosen to remain within the system to fight, the other has gone completely out of control. Rudderless and immoral, Lallan represents the Indian middleclass' terrifying inability to cope with the growing demands of consumerism and globalisation.

The difference between the senior Bachchan in "Zanjeer" and the junior in "Yuva" isn't just in the colour of their clothes. Abhishek's entire personality in "Yuva" exudes an alarming disdain for playing the game of existence by the rules of a civil society.

In that sense he's more akin to Kamal Haasan in "Hey Ram" than his father in "Zanjeer". In "Hey Ram", Kamal went looking for Mahatma Gandhi with a gun. In "Yuva", Abhishek guns down his own brother, blaming him for all the ills in his life.

In "Yuva", Abhishek breaks free of the cordon of law and civil conduct that restricted his father's character in "Zanjeer" to make his own rules of survival.

Like Jaya Bhaduri in "Zanjeer", Lallan's soul-mate in "Yuva" watches helplessly as he turns his anger and bitterness into a violent denial of every law of decent living. In fact, there're many similarities between the legendary Amitabh-Jaya pair and the new Abhishek-Rani Mukherjee twosome that seems to be gaining momentum. The two were seen in "Hum Tum" and will co-star in Shaad Ali's next film.

Like Jaya - or for that matter Smita Patil in Govind Nihalani's "Ardha Satya" - Rani in "Yuva" represents the 'grace under pressure' element.

The woman must helplessly watch her man destroy himself with his rage and discomfort, with a social order that demands emergency measures for moral rectification.

The instinct that Abhishek typifies in "Yuva" is extremely frightening. There are hundreds of jobless, aimless, angered and frustrated young men in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar like Lallan who have gone the wrong way for lack of conventional ways of earning a living.

So has the anti-hero finally reached a point of no return? Are the noble heroes in danger of looking like angelic anachronisms?

Interestingly, Ajay Devgan who plays the idealistic student leader in "Yuva" is the adrift Bihari who arrives in Kolkata in Rituparno Ghosh's "Raincoat".

The Hindi film hero seems to be swinging precariously on the moral pendulum. While Abhishek in "Yuva" fights a losing battle with his conscience, his father battles societal demons in "Dev" to emerge morally uncorrupted.