Bollywood’s star is on the rise

Among mainstream Western audiences, Bollywood stars remain largely unknown. But it’s a state of affairs that maybe changing as South Asians make up one of the fastest-growing immigrant communities in the US.

As Bollywood movies targeting South Asians explode on the American screens, Indian stars are set to get comfortable with their place in the sun.

My sister, who was on assignment with Channel 9, recalls an anecdote that actress Preity Zinta shared with the television crew when asked to compare Bollywood with Hollywood. Zinta was flying from London to New York when she saw a pouty-lipped American woman in distressed jeans and dark glasses ensconced in the first-class cabin.

The American woman muttered an ‘Oh, God!’ when autograph-seekers from the economy section descended on the first class. She then stared incredulously as the passengers shot past her to mob Zinta. The Indian actress smiled apologetically at her and signed autographs for her South Asian fans.

The pouty American was none other than Angelina Jolie. The ruling queen of Hollywood must have wondered ‘Who on earth is this Indian diva?’ Quite evidently, Bollywood’s star is rising.

But someone like Amitabh Bachchan has no illusions — and no regrets — about the limitations of his fame and celebrity. When I asked him if he wanted to cross over to Hollywood at a film retrospective at New York’s Lincoln Center where he was the subject, he laughed, saying Hollywood had never exerted much of a pull.

“Every actor thinks about his home first. I am comfortable where I am”.

Bachchan is also dismissive of the ‘world’s greatest film star’ tag that he got when a 1999 BBC online poll voted him the Star of the Millennium, ahead of greats like Laurence Olivier.

Bachchan flares up at the suggestion that Indian cinema should change to cater to western tastes. “It would be a sad day if our films were to become, in some way, less Indian”.

But changes are coming willy-nilly. If you’re looking for proof that globalisation is transforming Bollywood, look no further than Kites. There are two versions of the film starring Hrithik Roshan, distributed by Reliance BIG Pictures.

There is the 130-minute Hindi version with all song- and-dance routines and the crisp 90-minute English version titled Kites: The Remix, edited to suit Western sensibilities by Hollywood director Brett Ratner. In shortening Kites, Ratner excised almost all of the film’s dance scenes, subplots and redundancies.

Kites passed the test, becoming, for the first time, an Indian movie to break the weekly top 10 grossing films in the US when it was released in May.

The New York Times was smitten using words rarely uttered in the Grey Lady, noting Hrithik Roshan had a “smoking body”.