The new year is a few days away, but one clear development in the last 12 months is that while the boys are coming along just fine, the men still have some growing up to do.

Among the year’s happiest actors must be Sidharth Malhotra, who charmed his way through Hasee Toh Phasee and grimaced through Ek Villain. Varun Dhawan yammered and hammered in the action comedy Main Tera Hero and was surprisingly good in Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhania. Arjun Kapoor flexed muscle in Gunday and tried his hand at drama in 2 States and comedy in Finding Fanny.

All these actors appeared opposite women their age or thereabouts, unlike their seniors, who soldiered on in roles inappropriate for their advanced years and paired themselves with women born a decade or more later.

As the four Khans and the one Roshan and Devgn get closer to the halfway mark, they are gifting themselves eternal youth through their movies. Their female co-stars remain by and large young, conventionally desirable and virginal. If the women got any younger, they would be in danger of violating social codes of acceptability, not to mention the law.

Age no bar

In Happy New Year, Shah Rukh Khan is paired with Deepika Padukone. Saif Ali Khan has two turkeys on his platter, Humshakals and Happy Ending, both featuring nubile women who resemble overgrown adolescents. Happy Ending, which sees itself as a rom-com satire, is blind to the comic possibilities arising out of Khan’s aging Lothario character chasing Ileana D’Cruz’s clearly younger mark.

Salman Khan stars opposite the fresh-faced Jacqueline Fernandez in Kick. Only Katrina Kaif doesn’t look strange swooning over Hrithik Roshan in Bang Bang!, but perhaps to compensate for the visual match, her character’s brain cells do not seem to have evolved beyond a 12 year-old’s.

Ajay Devgn takes the patisserie in Action Jackson. He plays two characters, one of whom romances Sonakshi Sinha, a young actor whose wise-beyond-her-years face and body make her the ideal heroine in the ultra-macho, so-called mass movies usually featuring aging male stars. (She also propped up Akshay Kumar’s ego in Holiday). Action Jackson’s vamp quotient is more than fulfilled by former model Manasvi Mamgai, who collapses in ecstasy after watching Devgn’s second character wield various phallic symbols, never to recover.

Boyhood forever

The actresses who started their careers alongside the A-listers have retired, either out of choice or force, or have been edged into what are charitably known as character roles. Kajol, who has never looked better, made a smashing pair with Shah Rukh Khan in the nineties, but partly due to her pickiness and partly because there aren’t any exciting roles for her, she is usually spotted these days at charity events and awards functions. Kareena Kapoor Khan’s last interesting appearance was in Talaash in 2012. Her marriage with Saif Ali Khan the same year means that she will now be seen in select productions in roles written specially for her – which can, as in the case of Kajol, mean a movie only every few years.

Rani Mukerji, the doughty drama queen who starred in the female cop drama Mardaani this year, has also settled for matrimony. These still talented and attractive women will surface in prestige projects designed around them, rather than intense love stories, unless filmmakers and audiences evolved by many light years while we were dozing in the rear stalls.

The Peter Pan complex

In his masterful essay The Ugliness of the Indian Male, historian and columnist Mukul Kesavan concludes his theory that Hindi film heroines are beautiful and their male co-stars ugly because they reflect Indian society, by speculating that Indian men “achieve the bullet-proof unselfconsciousness that allows them to be so abandonedly ugly” because of a “sense of entitlement that’s hard-wired into every male child that grows up in an Indian household”. Kesavan adds, “That, and the not un-important fact that, despite the way they look, they’re always paired off with good-looking women”.

The current crop of Bollywood’s eternal boyhood brigade is better preserved than the average Indian male, of course. The marquee names at the top spent hours on sculpting their torsos, selecting their wardrobes and magically wiping out their worry lines – to the point where some of them appear embalmed. The quest for permanent relevance, the sense of entitlement that comes from being at the top of the heap, and a low-risk strategy in choosing roles further limits their options. Some of the A-listers, such as Salman Khan, Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgn and Hrithik Roshan, are continuing to appear in the kind of movies that cemented their stardom. (To be fair to an actor such as Salman Khan, there is little else he can do.)

Others like Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan are stretching out within their comfort zones, but since they need to line their bank accounts and keep their production companies in the black, they will opt for stories and co-stars who are current and commerce-friendly  ‒ which means pairing up with the leading heroines of the day, usually younger, with a shorter career span and therefore disposable and replaceable.

The box office, as always, is sending out mixed signals. It endorses youth and appreciates their experiments, but it also rewards A-listers in rinse and repeat mode. And is there a Kesavan-esque truth to the fact that an older man may successfully woo a younger woman in real life, as he does on screen?