…please show me a Hollywood version of Lagaan, from which Aamir Khan imported something?

I rest my case. Cheers!

The Bollywood actor Amir Khan has just released a movie “Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na” and it has a huge hit song called ‘Pappu Can’t Dance Sala”. It’s a huge hit on all FM radio stations and outrageously the lyrics also go “Pappu Can’t Stand Sala”. Half of the street gay crowd is going crazy about it because it has a gay subtext — Pappu in Hindi street slang is not just a pet name for a lot of young men but it’s also a code name for the penis.

Gives an entirely new meaning to the Junoon hit.

He is the next satyajit ray of India..

Really? I mean REALLY?

Why are desi novels so much more advanced than desi film? Because the writers are selling to more urban, Western audiences.

I’d buy that, but the fact is that Bollywood is quite sensitive to its international audience. Karan Johar is a good example. I think a greater problem is that the Bollywood audience is too diverse, and Bollywood is too wary of setting its movie in a specific social/cultural milieu, for fear of alienating the rest. So the movies are all set in some kind of generic social and cultural nowhereland: is it possible to create interesting characters or tell good stories without providing them with a well-defined social or cultural background?

The better Bwd movies of the past few years (Hazaaron Khwaishen Aisi, Maqbool, Omkara, Being Cyrus, Blue Umbrella, Manorama, Lagaan,Company,Mai Madhuri Dixit…) all picked a certain social milieu and stuck to it. They could not target the bigger Bollywood market because of this, but they succeeded in telling the stories they set out to do. I recently watched Bommarillu (which Prakruti mentioned above) with a few friends (though I don’t understand Telugu myself), and I enjoyed it more that the regular Bollywood movie because it was set with a specific Telugu background and cultural nuances and assumptions that it could reference, and also occasionally question. Bwd is just unable to do that: because there is no background at all to reference, except some sort of Bollywoodland.

That doesn’t mean I don’t catch every Bollywood release I can: I don’t even know why .