Suketu Mehta scribes in the magazine of another maximum city about the film industry of the Mumbai (via Amardeep). He describes it as a love affair with an international beauty:

The Soviets gave us arms; we gave them our kitsch movies in return. Israelis watch them. Palestinians watch them… Dominicans and Haitians watch them. Iraqis watch them. Iranians watch them. In a building full of immigrants in Queens, an Uzbek man once cornered me in a dark stairwell… As he towered over me, he started singing, “Ichak dana, bichak dana…”

The initial flush of romance, often consummated in what used to be a porn theater, the Eagle in Jackson Heights:

Why do I love Bollywood movies? To an Indian, that’s like asking why we love our mothers; we don’t have a choice. We were born of them.

The unreality of the affair:

My aunt’s family emigrated to Uganda from India a century ago; she now lives in England and has never been to India… none of the children under 5 in her extended family spoke English… The children, two or three generations removed from India, were living in this simulated Indiaworld.

Falling out of love:

It was not until graduate school that I became cynical about Bollywood movies. I too began to think that the plots were weak, melodramatic. At the University of Iowa’s student-run movie theater, the Bijou, I could see two movies for five dollars, most of them European. I was introduced to Renoir, Fellini, Fassbinder, De Sica… the Indian movies seemed pointless and absurd to me…

Getting back together again:

I was valued in Bollywood because I had stories. I would roam among the gangsters and the bar girls and bring their stories back to the moviemakers. The gangsters and bar girls would give me their stories because I would tell them how the movie people lived, what they wore, what they ate, whom they slept with…

Dealing with 9/11 fallout:

A couple of weeks after 9/11, 16 of India’s biggest stars got on an American airliner; 4 other passengers got off in fear. Anil Kapoor was reading a copy of Time with Osama bin Laden’s picture on the cover; his manager advised him to fold the magazine so that the portrait wouldn’t be visible. Aamir Khan reached for an orange and a passenger flinched.

The cycle of cross-continental sampling:

When he was in New York and missed Bombay, he sang “Kuch Kuch Hota Hai” — which is loosely based on Archie Comics — on the sidewalks of the Big Apple. An Indian boy in America, singing a Hindi song from an Indian movie imitation of an American comic book: the Ping-Pong game of kitsch. Along with the Bhagavad-Gita and Thoreau, this, too, has wings.

This is especially obvious in the music industry. E.g. you can trace the original ‘Kaliyon Ka Chaman’ to Truth Hurts’ ‘So Addictive,’ back to the ‘Kaliyon Ka Chaman (2004)’ video.