Shiva (1990), is the story of a reluctant hero, a college student who hails from a typical Indian middle-class family.  True to his middle-class roots, he has a typical middle-class attitude of doing the darnedest to stay out of trouble. However, despite actively wanting to avoid confrontation, Shiva is guided by a moral compass which allows him to suffer in silence, only up to a certain point. After that, he adopts a 'thus far, no further' stance.  Shiva has a rather high tolerance threshold, but if one crosses it,  he doesn't simply take it lying down. When a college goon crosses the line with acts of provocation, Shiva dishes out as good as he gets. However, even in his payback, he is very restrained. Even under extreme provocation,  it's never as if the floodgates open, unleashing a monster which was chained up within the placid outer shell.  When pushed too far, he swiftly retaliates by pushing back, but takes care not to go overboard while making his point and he then tries to go right back to his pre-retaliation lifestyle.  Though his act of retaliation sets in motion a chain of events which keeps spiraling downward and outward into further violence and darkness, he never gives the feeling that he's changed internally.  He doesn't suddenly start liking his new-found power, as that was something he never aspired for, in the first place. In the face of progressive escalation of violence by Bhavani, the local goon, Shiva is forced to up his own ante, which he does, but it's not something that he particularly enjoys or appears to be proud of. Shiva starts out being rather reluctant to step out of his middle-class pacifist lifestyle and he continues being exactly that right through, despite all the violent changes in his life.

Satya (1998) is the story of a social misfit, a guy who is too fiercely proud of himself to take a hit on the chin and allow it to pass.  He's a guy who wants to do things to ensure that he gets his way and doesn't give a damn about the costs involved in getting what he wants, the way he wants it.  When he's presented with an opportunity to gun down a man who had repeatedly insulted him,  he takes the opportunity, literally with both hands, by grabbing a gun and wasting the guy. Satya completely enjoys his new-found power and revels in using it as he sees fit.  When he uses his underworld contacts to threaten a Bollywood music director into giving a struggling singer friend a much needed (and perhaps deserved) opportunity,  he feels very good about it.  He gets a high using his superior intelligence to plan and execute gangland strategies. So meteoric is Satya's rise that he falls victim to megalomania.  He believes he can outthink and outsmart his way out of any situation but his and his gang's fortunes change dramatically after a change of guard in the police department.  The new police commissioner seeks and obtains a carte blanche to wage an all-out war against the gangsters, to cleanup the city.  Only when the police force starts bumping off gangsters with encounter killings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encounter_killings_by_police) do Satya and his men realize that they are not as invulnerable as they had believed themselves to be.

The movie doesn't take sides and doesn't attempt to either condone or criticize the extralegal encounter killings by police personnel. This is a movie which is probably one of India's finest films and also one of the world's greatest gangster movies of all time, quite in the same class as movies like GoodFellas (1990), Scarface (1983) and Taxi Driver (1976).