In Bollywood, every cliché is true. The script does not matter, only the proposal does. The song and dance is everything. Packaging counts and marketing delivers. Everything revolves around a handful of stars. Much of the funding is from unorganized and sometimes even questionable sources. But Bollywood, a derivative name for the Hindi film industry that is a loose agglomeration of old-style film families and newly established studios, of venerated stars and tough-talking directors, often defies the clichés it embodies. Since 1995, a fantastic year which saw three different genres of cinema – Aditya chopra’s diaspora-meets-desis romance Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge; Ram Gopal Varma’s ironic comedy Rangeela; and Mani Ratnam’s contentiously political Bombay – there has been a tectonic cultural and commercial shift. A new breed of filmmakers has taken over altering age-old artistic conventions and business norms. The three filmmakers are just some of the characters who walk in and out of the frames of this. What drives – and how they drive – multi-million rupee industry, whose impact on society in India is as wide as its influence among the increasingly vocal diaspora, is what makes this book the picture-perfect beginner’s guide to current Bollywood.
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