Bollywood in the Panic Room

How much backing and support would a young S. Ray get nowadays?

Over here, many of us consider Hollywood itself a behemoth that delivers little originality-there is a respectable audience for the indie film, the indie film company, the impresarios who get them to us; i.e. Robert Redford, Independent Film Channel, Tribeca Film Festivals-least of all the international filim festivals that make it to our big cities.

Who are the indie filmmakers in India?

The problem with Bollywood is that the current producers` parents who themselves were making movies in the 1930s saw a few Hollywood musicals. Unable to conceptualize anything other than the musical format, these idiots have churned out thousands of crappy musicals over the years. Just as people were willing to sit through a 5-minute movie of a train in the early days of movies, the Indian audience put up with crap. The moviemakers made movies with mythological themes and a hundred songs and for want of anything else, the Indian audience went to these movies for 50 years, This has convinced the Bollywood idiots that they have the key to making money; even worse, they think their movies have the potential to get an Oscar. They have made the enormous mistake of believing in their own bullshit. Just as the Star Wars series in a Western in a different setting, today`s Bollywood movies are the same mythologicals in a different setting. Nothing else can explain an Amitabh Bachchhan single-handedly taking on a hundred thugs in a fist fight and winning. So long as this trend continues, Bollywood has no future.

The real trouble is that India is a land of Rip van Winkles. Indians see something, copy it, are able to sell it for a few years and then refuse to alter anything in the product. Thus you still have the 1954 Oxford Morris being made in India as the Hindustan Ambassador or the original WWII Jeep made in an outdated factory. Idiots who have no concept of what a modern telephone system looks like order cross-bar switches for telephone exchanges. They might as well go to sleep for 20 years and wake up, for all the ``progress`` they have made.

This also explains why you find every insurance company in the US and Europe is able to open up shop in India and sell insurance. One would think that selling insurance to a willing public would be an easy task. But the same people who refuse to buy a policy from Life Insurance Corporation, the state monopoly for 45 years now, are willingly buying insurance from foreign companies. The reason of course is that once you buy a policy and make payments to the LIC, the policy folders have the nasty habit of disappearing when the insured makes a claim. This happens because computers were not allowed to be used for a long time and your folder can be lost in the millions of file cabinets.... of course, Indians haven`t heard of filing alpabetically by name or sequentially by policy number.

The real joke in this is that these clowns now claim to be the back-office service providers for US and European companies. I think if those US and European companies walk through any Indian company, they would take back any idea of locating their back offices in India.

In summary, be it Bollywood or any other enterprise, Indians have the enormous capacity to fcuk things up beyond all recognition. This is why any Indian who is able to escape from this Planet of the Apes does so at the earliest opportunity.

It is time to change the name of the country to FUBAR.

Thank you all for your comments on the article.

FarooqA Saheb is right. Bollywood still works around the fairytale storylines in most of the cases. The industry seems to be reeling under a crisis of ideas, and therefore, returns with rehashed stories time and again. Ana_deborah`s suggestion of benefiting from the rich literature of the subcontinent would appeal to every sane person. But I guess Hindi film producers lack in that faculty. Nevertheless, some serious filmmakers do dabble in that but unfortunately they are on the fringe.

Yesterday ``Devdas`` almost swept the Filmfare Awards. That clearly shows where the heart of the industry lies. God save Bollywood!

Zafar

Too true. It`s not like they don`t have the talent. Why they insist on repeating the same hackneyed themes over and over and over again is beyond me.

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Tushar, Kareena, Fardeen and Esha should be publicly hanged!

I agree with the last part of this article. Not only does `Bollywood` need good writers, but there is so much literary wealth within India itself to do adaptations from without having to resort to copying Hollywood movies. Agni Varsha, for example, was adapted from a play, was it not, and I thought that was very well done. just my few cents worth.

Despite the fact that the bollywood movies have today carved a niche in as unlikley markets as West Africa and Russia, I believe they still lack the most vital element, that is sanity. These movies present a totally unrealistic and exagerated version of life. Devdas might have fetched the producer a huge profit but it was no exception, apart from the lavish sets the movie had no attributes to write home about.