NEW BLOODLINES IN OLD BOTTLES

How one could be fooled into thinking that the rise of two nepo kids-Zahan Kapoor and Ahaan Panday- signals a quiet revolution in Bollywood

- BY GAUTAM CHINTAMANI

Some revolutions start with firecrackers. Others with declarations. Some with hashtags. And then there is the slow, murmuring sort—the kind that whispers its way into the cultural bloodstream and leaves everyone wondering whether something actually changed or if they just got better at pretending it did.

Enter Zahan Kapoor and Ahaan Panday. Two young men, two recent debuts, and two distinct paths in an industry that is always looking to reincarnate itself. At first glance, both seem like the kind of fresh-faced actors who show up at press events and insist they auditioned But scratch a little, and you will see that they are representatives of a new evolutionary offshoot in Bollywood's genealogy—the nepo-sapien 2.0. Not quite the privileged insider, not quite the scrappy outsider. Instead, they live in a curious grey zone: distant relatives of fame trying to prove themselves in a world that quietly wants them to succeed.

Zahan Kapoor is a Kapoor. That should be enough, right? Except he is that Kapoor—the grandson of Shashi and son of Kunal, a name that has not quite echoed in cinema halls the way the names of his uncles or cousins have. There is something refreshingly low-pitched about his arrival. His debut in Hansal Mehta's Faraaz (2022), a real-life hostage drama based on the attack of a Dhaka cafe in 2016, was stripped of the usual fanfare. No Switzerland, no chiffon, no chart-busters.

Zahan’s performance, spare and simmering, was more theatre workshop than a trailer launch. It seemed almost designed to avoid comparison—he wasn’t mimicking the Kapoor swagger; he was building something quieter, rawer.

Then came