What is this Bollywood business?

Spending any time in India for a period, you cannot avoid getting to know the local Bollywood celebrities. Through osmosis I now know what they like to eat for breakfast, who is dating who, what their mums think of their careers, who they do and don't like working with (and why), what goes on at their private parties etc and where they are located at any given time.

The media coverage is incredibly extensive, with even the dry old crusty daily newspaper tomes dedicating at least one of their pages each day to these wonderfully sparkly people of Bollywood. There are a multitude of celebrity talk shows and interviews on various television channels; and I even saw one headline news story of a reputable national news channel filming and interviewing one of the special people getting a hair cut - I kid you not (and not as per a Brittany haircut scandal...no, no, no - this was merely a Bollywood dude getting a regular haircut!)

Unlike a Hollywood release; the entire nation of India watches with extreme interest and baited breath as each new movie is spewed out the end of the very fertile machine that is Bollywood. The majority of films stick rigidly to the proven formula...always with a minimum of two or three large dance sequences, and stories based around themes of love. I have noticed an amazing tendency for Bollywood to shoot love scenes in the rain. I am assuming this is by and large due to a very vocal moral society which simply would not condone bawdy sex scenes...instead substituting highly emotive and impassioned rain scenes, suggestively allowing the viewer to fill in the blanks (no pun intended).

They say that fourteen million people in India go to the movies every day. It is a cheap form of entertainment, accessible to the masses in the many cinema houses throughout the country, and are viewed with equal enthusiasm by young and old, rich and poor, metro dwellers and rural folk alike. It is as common to see street kids singing and dancing to a new release theme song, as it is to hear a wizened old taxi driver singing the same tune - which is in turn being downloaded at a minimal cost by the millions who own a mobile phone. Bollywood most definitely has a long arm and a big reach here.

Bollywood movies are released in video and DVD format not only for the local market, but for the extensive and hungry foreign market of NRI's (non-resident Indians) who populate the globe. A generous viral marketing campaign of new movies via bootleg copies are also quite readily available. Bollywood movies reach far into the Middle East, throughout Asia - and even into Pakistan (despite a government ban on Indian movies). Its reach is steadily extending into the "western" countries, making the Bollywood audience large, growing and mobile.

Revenue would be the main difference between Hollywood and Bollywood. For example in the year 2002 Bollywood sold 3.6 billion tickets and had total revenues of 1.3 billion USD. Hollywood films sold 2.6 billion tickets in the same year, generating revenues of 51 billion USD.

Hollywood movies here have limited runs, in only a few theatres, for very short spells. The best place for viewing Hollywood movies are the HBO, Star Movie, Zee, Pix, Hallmark and World Movie sattelite tv channels.

Bollywood is well established, has massive national support, a generous multi-media backing and will continue to grow and spread in its popularity - particularly as they slowly but steadily start to introduce more contemporary themes to their storylines.

And don't forget....as a fairly average looking (not too wrinkly!) foreigner in Bombay, you too may well be approached on the streets by one of Bollywood's plentiful roaming movie touts inviting you be in a Bollywood movie! Your 15 seconds of fame is attainable, most likely in the background of a large scale hindi dance sequence on celuloid - but hey, what a thing to show the grandkids!

Challo, tik hai! (lets go, its all good!)