From the article:

Watching Agneepath at Gaiety is a heady experience. The entire theatre shouts and whistles every time Hrithik/Vijay Dinanath Chauhan lands a blow or fires a shot and even Chikni Chameli’s pelvic thrusts can’t dim the fervour for Vijay or the villain, Kancha. The arrival of this Agneepath, unlike its cult original, has been timed well. Questions of artistic merit aside, it also has the advantage of being at the right place at the right time because action films have staged a spirited comeback in Bollywood. 

The first indication of this came in 2008, when Aamir Khan aggressively growled and smashed his way to the box office milestone of Rs 100 crore with Ghajini. Today, of the nine films that have grossed over Rs 100 crore (net) in India, six belong firmly to the action genre (Dabangg, Ready, Bodyguard, Singham and Don 2 are the other action biggies ) and if the box office trend holds, Agneepath could well be the tenth (as of January 30, it had totalled Rs 67. 5 crore). 

Every film that enters the Rs 100-crore club cannot automatically claim to have captured a sense of the cultural zeitgeist but sometimes the iconic and the superhit merge to reveal a pattern. Agneepath, Singham, Dabangg and Ghajini seem to have breached the ennui that the metrosexual-romantic themes now evoke in audiences. There is the looming sense that the hypermasculine hero is back. 

Hindi cinema, for all its escapist glory, has never existed in a vacuum. The continuing success of action films with their larger than life, muscle-bound heroes could also be rooted in what our country and the world is experiencing. Raj Kapoor’s na?ve tramp, Dilip Kumar’s Nehruvian characters and Amitabh Bachchan’s angry Vijay have all, at different times, embodied the prevailing spirit of the nation. 

So, is it time to bid farewell to Raj of DDLJ and welcome Vijay back? This Vijay of 2012 is morally conflicted and has shades of Clint Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns which have long defined American individualism. As Eric Patterson, scholar in American cultural studies, puts it: “Eastwood has become and remained the most popular actor in America because of his persistent theme of rebellion against an established authority which deprive the individual of autonomy. ” As Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry, he succinctly summed up his philosophy on violence as, “Nothing is wrong with shooting, as long as the right people get shot. “