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.
