Bollywood - Film Industry

Cinema is India's great social leveler: from the President right down to the shoeshine boy, everyone loves a good film. In fact Mumbai boasts the largest movie industry in the world. Wryly called Bollywood, it churns out nine hundred films every year, mostly racy potboilers or mushy romances filled with song, dance, violence and melodrama. Heroes drive around in flashy cars, oomphy actresses cavort in itsy bitsy mini skirts and the poor boy always succeeds against the rich villain. But India also has a serious parallel cinema that has never quite wooed the box office. Made for the country's cognoscenti, so-called "art films" regularly win awards at Cannes and other international festivals, and their actors are universally acclaimed.

The average Hindi film is about three hours long at the end of which you will probably feel like a wrung out rag, but the audience never seems to mind. Indian film stars are demi - gods and the reigning matinee idols often compete with the more divine variety for public attention! What's more, in Bollywood, fiction and reality often get blurred; there are real life stories of actors who once slept on the pavements outside their palatial homes, proof that fairytale endings do not belong to cinema alone.