| BOOKS: INREVIEW
Recipe for Bollywood Success
By
Shailaja Neelakantan/HONG KONG
Issue cover-dated January 24, 2002
Bollywood: The Indian
Cinema Story, By Nasreen Munni Kabir. Channel 4 Books,
495 rupees ($10.23)
While India's art cinema has a worldwide following due to
directors like Satyajit Ray and Adoor Gopalakrishnan, its commercial
cinema -- or Bollywood, as it is known -- has been taken seriously
almost nowhere except Russia, the Middle East and some African
countries.
But that's changing.
Lagaan, a film about a cricket match between a peasant community
and a team of rapacious British overlords, won international
acclaim; Asoka, a film about an Indian emperor in the third
century B.C., directed by ace cinematographer Santosh Sivan,
is getting rave reviews on the festival circuit; and Mira Nair's
The Monsoon Wedding, very much inspired by Bollywood fare, won
the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival recently.
If Bollywood conjures up only images of lavish song-and-dance
sequences and you're still unsure what all the buzz is about,
the essential Bollywood primer is here. Bollywood: The Indian
Cinema Story by Nasreen Munni Kabir is a perfect introduction
to the world's largest film industry, which makes 800 movies
a year.
The book is divided into chapters covering the ingredients
that make the Bollywood mix. Just as masala is a mixture of
basic spices, a Bollywood film is a mix of some essential ingredients:
a larger-than-life hero, a pretty and playing-hard-to-get heroine,
a sacrificing mother, a villain and his moll, songs and dances,
a wet sari song sequence and absolutely no on-screen kissing
or coupling. Hence the wet sari, for that dash of sexuality.
Shah Rukh Khan, one of Bollywood's contemporary idols quoted
in the book, couldn't have described it better: "A {Bollywood}
film is like Titanic, everything is told to you. This is going
to happen, the ship will hit an iceberg and just in case you
don't know it, let me show you at the beginning of the film
how it happened."
Shailaja Neelakantan is a Hong Kong based writer.
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