Mumbai
Bollywood
Cinema is India's great social leveler: from the President right down to the
cobbler, everyone loves a good film. In fact Mumbai boasts the largest movie
industry in the world.
Popularly called
Bollywood, it churns out nine hundred films every year,
mostly racy potboilers or mushy romances filled with song, dance, violence and
melodrama.
Heroes drive around in flashy cars, oomphy actresses cavort in its bitsy mini
skirts and the poor boy always succeeds against the rich villain. But India
also has a serious parallel cinema that has never quite wooed the box office.
Made for the country's cognoscenti, so-called art films regularly win awards
at Cannes and other international festivals, and their actors are universally
acclaimed.
The average Hindi film is about three hours long at the end of which you will
probably feel like a wrung out rag, but the audience never seems to mind. Indian
film stars are demi - gods and the reigning matinee idols often compete with
the more divine variety for public attention!
What's more, in Bollywood, fiction and reality often get blurred; there are
real life stories of actors who once slept on the pavements outside their palatial
homes, proof that fairytale endings do not belong to cinema alone.
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