Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Before leaving Darjeeling, Angelo and I had this realization that in order to communicate to our friends and family what it is that we experienced in India, we needed to find a familiar platform on which to compare things to.
We started talking about movies. How to compare Bollywood to Hollywood? There is simply no comparison. I recall a young Indian man asking me whether or not I enjoyed Bollywood films. I said I had only watched a few to get out of answering the actual question, which honestly was, "No". He inquired of me why it is that American films have no music or dancing on a regular basis (we would consider their films musicals if a genre could be compared at all between the two). I said that it was not popular, that film-viewers would not be interested in seeing movie stars sing and dance, but rather to act out the story through dialogue or action sequences. I said that there were musicals in North America that had relative success at the box office, though they were either half a century ago, or rare risks that Hollywood took that paid off. Bollywood film is unlike anything of this hemisphere. It is melodramatic and contents are, well Indian, making the comparison completely impossible.
I do have to admit that I fell for one big movie star in India, Amitabh Bachchan. He is the movie star and endorser of an innumerable amount of products. He is like our George Clooney, but sings, dances (pretty damn good too) and can cry like nothing else! Just so you know, Amitabh's mother is ill, so India awaits the doctor's synopsis, I'm sure.
This is one example of many of the differences that are difficult to translate. Truly, Canadians live exactly the opposite of Indians. There is no balance on which to weigh these two worlds.
We started talking about movies. How to compare Bollywood to Hollywood? There is simply no comparison. I recall a young Indian man asking me whether or not I enjoyed Bollywood films. I said I had only watched a few to get out of answering the actual question, which honestly was, "No". He inquired of me why it is that American films have no music or dancing on a regular basis (we would consider their films musicals if a genre could be compared at all between the two). I said that it was not popular, that film-viewers would not be interested in seeing movie stars sing and dance, but rather to act out the story through dialogue or action sequences. I said that there were musicals in North America that had relative success at the box office, though they were either half a century ago, or rare risks that Hollywood took that paid off. Bollywood film is unlike anything of this hemisphere. It is melodramatic and contents are, well Indian, making the comparison completely impossible.
I do have to admit that I fell for one big movie star in India, Amitabh Bachchan. He is the movie star and endorser of an innumerable amount of products. He is like our George Clooney, but sings, dances (pretty damn good too) and can cry like nothing else! Just so you know, Amitabh's mother is ill, so India awaits the doctor's synopsis, I'm sure.
This is one example of many of the differences that are difficult to translate. Truly, Canadians live exactly the opposite of Indians. There is no balance on which to weigh these two worlds.
