He-Man with a Heart: Masculinity was gentle but never fragile with Dharmendra

 OH MEREE MEHBOOBA… abhi na jao chhod ke.

These lines hummed in my head when I heard the news.

Dharmendra—Punjab da puttar, India’s original He-Man, Hindi cinema’s soft-spoken storm—had left the frame.

For a man so famously handsome, he never once weaponised it. For a man so famously strong, he never needed to shout about it. For a man so famously adored, he never let arrogance steal the soul from his smile.

I was never a Bollywood buff. But if you grew up in India in the ’70s and ’80s, you didn’t need to be. Cinema was our common language, and the names we recited were few but fierce: Amitabh Bachchan. Shashi Kapoor. Rajesh Khanna. Dharmendra. They weren’t just stars; they were constellations guiding a country still learning how to dream.

Among them stood Dharmendra Kewal Krishan Deol—broad-chested but tender-hearted, a chocolate-boy carved out of soft light and steel. The last of the gentle giants.

His songs were stories in themselves. Not spectacles, but sentiments. Not choreography, but confession.

“Aap ki nazron ne samjha pyaar ke kaabil hame…” A boy-next-door whisper of self-doubt and desire. “Jhilmil sitaron ka aangan hoga…” A lullaby wrapped in longing, where romance was moonlit, not manicured. “Main tere ishq mein mar na jaaun kahin…” Love as surrender, not stunt.

In every melody, Dharmendra wasn’t serenading a heroine—he was serenading all of us, telling us that masculinity could be gentle without being fragile, emotional without being emasculated.

Before men learned to chisel themselves in gyms, he taught them to be chiselled by character. Before abs were an aspiration, affection was. Before swagger became the script, soul was.

And then came Sholay. A film as immortal as folklore, as ubiquitous as childhood.

I remember it vividly—Gabbar’s (Amjad Khan) growl, Basanti’s (Hema Malini) breathlessness, Hema dancing on glass, and Dharmendra, the original Veeru, turning the village water tank into a stage for heartbreak.

He was funny without forcing it, heroic without announcing it, vulnerable without apologising for it.

Even Amitabh’s brooding brilliance needed Dharmendra’s warmth to become legend. The two men together taught an entire nation the duality of desire: the impossibly tall and the achingly tender.

Dharmendra passed away on November 24, 2025. But India refuses to let him go.

And interestingly, the ones carrying his flame forward are not always the ones you expect.

Salman Khan, for instance. A superstar who—beneath all the fame, frenzy and filmi fireworks—owes much of his early persona to Dharam’s effortless masculinity. Not the hulking kind, but the hearty kind. Not the gym-bunny bravado, but the broad-shouldered, big-hearted boy who could fight a hundred villains and still blush in front of the woman he loved.

And then there is Nirbhay Choudhary, acting with Salman in ‘Galwan’, a young man cut from the same cloth—rugged but real, athletic but unmanufactured, carrying that old-school innocence that screen gods once possessed before the era of algorithms and abs.

Boys like him remind me that cinema still has space for sincerity.

Dharmendra’s passing is not just the end of an era; it is the end of an ethic. A time when men were celebrated not for how loudly they roared, but for how deeply they felt. A time when romance didn’t need choreography or CGI—just a man, a melody and a moment.

In remembering him, we are remembering a gentler India. A slower India. An India where love didn’t need to be branded, filtered or flaunted—just lived.

And perhaps that’s the grief beneath the grief: We didn’t just lose Dharmendra the actor.

We lost a mirror of who we once were.

But maybe, just maybe, that is why songs survive. They archive us. They return us. They remind us.

And somewhere between “Oh meree mehbooba…” and “Jhilmil sitaron ka aangan hoga…”, India will once again find the man it adored—not gone, just replayed. Forever.