2021: The year of Aryan and Aarya

What was it about 2021 that made one name, one title Aarya/Aryan more in-demand than others? If Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan Khan made headlines , Kartik Aaryan was hands-down the star of the year ,not only for his super-successful performance as a news anchor desperate for TRPs in Netflix’s Dhamaka, but also for signing plum roles and bagging some of the choicest projects obtainable in Bollywood during its critical post-Covid phase.

Kartik Aaryan’s Dhamaka director Ram Madhavani had another Aaryan connection in 2021.His webseries Aarya entered a second season giving its leading lady the monstrously underrated Sushmita Sen. the kind of career fillip it needed. Aarya has overnight turned Sushmita into one of the most sought-after actors on the digital platform.

Speaking of Aarya and Aryan brings us to Arya, the Tamil actor who came into his own with Amazon Prime’s prized Tamil feature film Sarpatta Parambarai. Tamil star Arya , his wife and family faced peculiar trauma during the past one year. Two men had been impersonating Arya on the internet ; they cheated a Tamil woman in Germany of nearly 75 lakh rupees and promised to marry her , all the while pretending to be Arya.Arya’s ordeal ended when the cybercell arrested Mohammad Arman and Mohammad Hussaini of Pulianthope for impersonating Arya.

At year-end it is the versatile Tamil-Hindi actor Madhavan making waves as Arya in the eminently watchable Netflix series Decoupled.

In one way or another Arya-Aryan was the most googled name in 2021 from the Indian entertainment world.