The Bollywood classic everyone quotes… except me.

There’s a Bollywood film called Sholay.
If you’re Indian, or even loosely Bollywood-adjacent, you already know exactly which one I mean.

It’s quoted endlessly.
It’s sung.
It’s parodied.
It’s treated like scripture.

And me?
I’ve never seen it.

Whenever this comes up in conversation, the reaction is immediate and dramatic. Shock. Mock horror. Someone inevitably shouts a dialogue at me. Another person breaks into song. Heads are shaken in disbelief, as if I’ve just confessed to a minor cultural crime.

“You’ve never seen Sholay?!”

I always laugh. Because for me, it’s never been that deep. It’s just a movie I never got around to watching.

Part of it is timing. Sholay came out in the 1970s, long before I was born. My relationship with Bollywood really started in the early to mid-1990s, when I moved to India. That was my era. The films I grew up with were full of oversized emotions, dramatic love stories, unforgettable soundtracks, and stars who felt larger than life. That version of Bollywood shaped my memories, my references, my nostalgia.

Sholay belonged to a different generation. My parents’ generation. Maybe even my grandparents’.

And yet, the pressure of cultural touchstones is real. There’s often this unspoken expectation that to belong fully, you need to know all the references. The films. The songs. The dialogues everyone else seems to have memorised. Whether it’s an old Bollywood classic, a famous book, or even an internet meme, not knowing can sometimes feel like being slightly out of step.

But lately, I’ve been thinking that not knowing can also be its own kind of belonging.

Not knowing leaves space for conversations.
For teasing.
For curiosity.
For stories being told to you instead of already known by you.

It becomes a small reminder that culture isn’t a checklist you complete. It’s something you brush up against in different ways, at different times, through different lenses.

So no, I’ve never seen Sholay.

Maybe one day I will. Maybe I’ll finally sit down and watch it, just to see what all the fuss is about. Or maybe I’ll continue carrying this gap as my own quiet rebellion against the idea that there’s only one correct way to belong.

Either way, I’m oddly comfortable with it.

— Raulito