Bollywood

For the past ten months, I have been in the grips of a powerful addiction: I can't stop watching Indian movies.   Bollywood, i.e., the Bombay film industry, has cast a spell on me.

My addiction began at a birthday party in an Indian restaurant behind White Flint mall.   At previous parties there, I had half-noticed that the restaurant played giant-screen Indian music videos all night, but for some reason that night, they struck a chord in me.   Maybe it was the train video.

Shahrukh Khan (SRK)

"Every year, they show this video, and every year I can't get the song out of my head," my friend Helena remarked, pointing to the screen, where a crowd of people, including superstar Shahrukh Khan (SRK), were dancing on top of a train and singing a maddeningly catchy song. "I always want to hear it again, but I don't know what it's called."

The next day, I embarked on a mission to identify the Train Song for Helena.   After some Googling, I found a website ( www.SmasHits.com ) on which one needed only to watch a brief ad for international money transfer and then could access a huge collection of Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, or Telugu (Tollywood) films.

I don't know how many music videos I watched, or how much ad-ware I cleansed from my computer, but after about a week of scouring SmasHits, I located the Train Song.   Called "Chaiyya Chaiyya," it's from the SRK movie Dil Se (1998), a dark musical about terrorism and romance.   I happened to mention the train video to my daughter Hortense and she said it was so famous that she had once seen it in an art museum.

By the time I managed to locate "Chaiyya Chaiyya," I was totally hooked on Bollywood.   The more I saw of it, the more I craved the dreamlike gorgeousness of its images-- beautiful people in colorful clothes singing (or rather, lip-syncing) and dancing in scenic locations ranging from the street markets of New Delhi to the Swiss Alps.  

I had to have more.

Apparently, this is not uncommon.   According to the website, BollyWHAT? ( www.bollywhat.com ), Bollywood addiction is a growing phenomenon, and the site is full of testimonials from my fellow Bollywood Geeks--see "You Know You're Addicted to Bollywood When: 40 Signs of Film Illness." I was shocked to discover that I already have about half of the 40 signs, including thinking that American actors like Leonardo DiCaprio are "pathetic little fancy-lad[s]."

Since December, my addiction has grown worse--or better, depending on your point of view.   For people selling Bollywood DVDs on Ebay, it's good news.   I try to buy only legitimate films, since I am concerned about how much money the industry loses--apparently, as many as 88 percent of Hindi movies are watched in pirated form.1  The scourge that is piracy became evident to me when I tried to project the song "Mahi Ve" (my favorite) from the SRK film Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) on my friend Barbara's wall-sized high-definition TV and found that it looked like colorful Swiss cheese.

Indian films can be rented, if you're lucky enough to live near a store that has them (there are several in Langley Park).   Initially, I had trouble sitting through a three-hour movie and was afraid of overdue fees.   Luckily, a Bollywood-expert friend solved my problem: she introduced me to the owner of a small Indian grocery that rents films and vouched for me so the owner lets me check things out indefinitely.   It pays to have friends in high places.  

At first, I could only get through one movie every few weeks, but I'm up to several films a week now.   I can't stop myself--I pop in a disc and push Play and then three hours later, I thud back to reality.   Last night, for example, I turned on Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (2000), and before I knew it, I had missed dinner and it was time for bed.

As I was writing this, Hortense phoned from Paris, and I asked her to confirm exactly where she had seen the train video.   "It was an art museum, right?" I asked.

" An art museum ?" she repeated as if speaking to a peasant.   "It was the Pompidou .   Some kind of Bollywood exhibit.   I mentioned it to Mean Emily at the time."   (All the girls of Hortense's generation have the same five names, so it's necessary to distinguish them with adjectives.)   "Mean Emily said, 'Oh, everyone knows about the train video.'   Why?"

I told her that Bollywood was my Sin of the Month.

"Your columns have been crazy lately," she said in her scornfully affectionate way.   "Are you going nuts?"

"Maybe so," I said.  

"What was all that stuff about people in coffins, with no limbs?"

"I don't know," I said.

"You always start out perfectly innocuous, talking about dust bunnies or whatever, and then pretty soon you tie it in with the world situation and it all spirals downward."

"Yeah."

"Are you going to do that again in this one?"

"Probably."  

"You should write about me instead," she said.

She started talking about her visa problems then--she can't apply for a visa without a job, but she can't get a job without a visa--and then about Persian cats, so I didn't get to tell her about Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani , a daffy comedy that segues weirdly into political corruption, riots, executions, and, of course, romance.   By the end of the movie, a Geraldo-like TV journalist, played by SRK, has gone from obnoxious to heroic, been beaten bloody, accepted the marriage proposal of a rival journalist (played by the divine Juhi Chawla) and, as usual, saved the day, if not the entire nation of India, while singing and dancing.

I managed to get Hortense off the phone, but she called again about fifteen minutes later crying because the visa thing is serious and she's probably going to have to come home, go to the French Embassy, then fly over there again.   I calmed her down by promising to pay for her flight, and then she IMed me and sent me some pictures of kittens.

All this took a long time and was distracting, so now this article will not have a chance to speculate on what it is about Bollywood that appeals to me, or why at a time of global political and meteorological chaos people would be so drawn to a culture so infinite in faculties, one that has suffered appallingly yet manages to present a face of insouciant optimism to the world.   "It's like Grease ," my friend Andie said when I showed her a startlingly-grand production number from Dil To Pagal Hai (1997), and she opined that Bollywood movies are to India's actual culture as Grease is to America's, which is no doubt true.   I was about to write about that, and to begin a lengthy diatribe on America's tragic sociopolitical decline, when Hortense IMed me again.   I told her I was still working on this column.   "Don't write about politics. Write about me," she demanded.   "Me me me."

I promised her I would.

Lavina Melwani, "Showtime!" Little India (September 2005): 18+.