The vertical video won. We might as well admit it. Every week, another piece of our collective cultural memory gets squeezed into a 9:16 aspect ratio, doused in a beautifying filter, and fed to the Great Algorithm in the sky. This time, the sacrifice is “Aankhein Chaar.”
Neelam Kothari, a woman who successfully pivoted from 80s stardom to the kind of jewelry-selling, reality-TV-adjacent relevance that Silicon Valley dreams of, recently appeared on your feed. She wasn’t alone. Beside her stood Shanaya Kapoor, a debutante currently stuck in the high-stakes loading screen of stardom. They were performing the "hook step."
If you aren't familiar with the term, a hook step is a piece of choreography designed not for the human body, but for a 15-second loop. It’s the visual equivalent of a clickbait headline. It’s simple, repetitive, and optimized for maximum thumb-stop. In this specific instance, we’re watching a legacy software update. Neelam is the original code—the 1989 version of Farz Ki Jung—being ported onto Shanaya, the latest hardware iteration from the Kapoor manufacturing plant.
The tech industry calls this "intergenerational synergy." I call it a desperate bid for bandwidth.
Look at the mechanics of the clip. The lighting is that flat, expensive glow that costs a PR firm roughly $12,000 to set up when you factor in the "social media consultants" and the professional color graders. Everything is curated to look casual, yet there isn’t a single stray hair in sight. It’s the uncanny valley of Bollywood. Neelam looks radiant, sure, but she’s performing a caricature of herself. She’s playing "Neelam," the vintage asset, to help bootstrap Shanaya’s "it girl" metrics.
The friction here isn't in the dance moves. Those are easy. The friction is in the trade-off. To stay relevant in the current attention economy, legacy stars have to turn their past work into TikTok fodder. They have to strip the context from their careers and boil them down to a three-second arm movement. For the younger Kapoor, the trade-off is different: she’s borrowing gravitas she hasn’t earned yet to bypass the grueling process of actually having a hit movie. It’s an IPO for a company that hasn’t shipped a product.
We’re seeing the "Reel-ification" of nostalgia. It’s no longer enough to remember a song; you have to perform it to prove the data exists. The algorithm loves this stuff. It bridges two distinct data sets: the Gen Xers who remember Neelam’s heyday and the Gen Z kids who follow Shanaya for her skincare routine. It’s a cross-platform merger disguised as a fun afternoon.
But there’s something hollow about the precision of it. In the original 1989 footage, there’s a certain grainy, chaotic energy. There was film stock. There were actual mistakes. In the 2024 version, the movements are frame-perfect. They are optimized for the "duet" feature. It’s a product designed to be consumed, replicated, and discarded within a 24-hour cycle.
The industry likes to pretend this is about "bringing people together" or "celebrating the classics." Don’t buy it. This is about retention. It’s about ensuring that the scroll never ends. By the time you’ve finished watching Neelam and Shanaya point their fingers in sync, the platform has already gathered enough data on your hover-time to serve you three more clips of people doing the exact same thing.
This isn't a revival. It’s a content farm. We’ve reached a point where the only way to acknowledge the past is to turn it into a puppet show for a recommendation engine. We aren’t watching dancers; we’re watching two brands negotiate their market share in real-time.
Shanaya gets the "legacy" tag added to her metadata. Neelam gets a spike in her engagement graph. The audience gets a hit of dopamine that lasts exactly as long as it takes to swipe up. Everyone wins, except maybe the concept of actual, unrecorded fun.
If a dance happens in a living room and no one posts it to a story with a trending audio track, does it even make a sound? Probably not. Not in this economy.
Who actually benefits from seeing a sixty-second choreography lesson for a song that’s older than the internet itself? The users don't. The stars barely do. Only the machine, ever hungry for more high-definition motion to analyze, truly enjoys the show.
Is there any part of our history that won't eventually be sold back to us as a "challenge"?