She can definitely dance and she can even carry a tune. But a generation ago, Suparna Sood's world would probably have centred around her businessman husband and kids, her interaction with filmi duniya limited to the occasional visit to movie theatres, songs on Vividh Bharati,
Chitrahaar, the Sunday TV movie,
Neeta's Natter, perhaps a hairstyle or sleeve flounce made trendy by a screen diva.
In the 2008 version, however, she is a one-woman Bollywood dissemination machine.
| | | | "Hum Aapke Hain Koun’s typically North Indian version of the ‘ladies
sangeet’ is now an all-India, all-caste and diaspora phenomenon." Patricia Uberoi, Sociologist | | | | |
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Ghunghroos go chhan-chhan-chhan as females from 4 to 40 troop into the basement of her Noida house, getting their jhatkas and matkas right under the gaze of the large Nataraja painted on the wall of her psychedelic studio. They aren't just dancing for Him. With a social calendar brimming with housing society functions, Bollywood-themed birthday parties, Teej, Diwali and Holi celebrations, mehendis and sangeets, those rigorously rehearsed twists, turns, gyrations and thrusts will all be put to good use.
Suparna's Bollywood day, meanwhile, is not yet done. A popular wedding choreographer, she has scripts to write and baraatis and ladkiwalas to school in their party pieces. For an extra fee, she also comperes, sings and dances at weddings, anniversary dinners, even jalwas (40th-day functions for new mothers). As her students take off their ghunghroos, a prospective bride arrives from the other end of town, mom in tow, to approve Suparna's script of the story of her life, especially the boy-meets-girl bit, which will be performed in an hour-long session, with Bollywood songs, at her November wedding. Picking up her papers, Suparna gets into flow: "Ao suno pyar ki kahaani, yeh awesome, unique love story, sweet, hot and juicy..."
Laxmi Mittal's daughter Vanisha being wooed Bollywood-style by her fiance at her sangeet
So what do you make of all that? If you belong to the Let's Live Bollywood 24/7 club, it's time to move to the next article.
| | | | "Bollywood’s influence is stronger in the North because of a lack of alternatives.
In the South, there has been a strong grounding in older, classical values."
Sadanand Menon, Culture critic | | | | |
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However, if your feelings are mixed, as ours were, watching Suparna's carnival unfold, read on. Suparna, and indeed, many of her students exemplify what Shuddhabrata Sengupta, who studies popular culture, says about Bollywoodisation in our times, namely that Bollywood, once largely the sphere of how young men liked to position themselves, is today as much about young women and their aspirations.
"Every young woman can't be a star," points out Shuddhabrata, "but she can appropriate the material of Bollywood and fashion herself a lot of small dreams." Clearly, these are women having fun with their bodies, a serious kind of fun, since this is all about being performance-perfect, knocking the socks off everybody at all those functions, and for some, judging by their statements ("I want to be a star"), getting slotted somewhere in the entertainment industry, but fun all the same. (Whether pre-pubescent girls should be wriggling to Touch me, kiss me, zara zara zara is another story.)
Shahrukh Khan mugs adorn kites being sold in Mumbai
Secondly, in a diverse neighbourhood, in which the real estate broker from Siwan in Bihar lives next door to Banias from Rajasthan and Punjabi Khatris from Delhi, Bollywood song and dance is palpably a tradition that everybody can be part of, no matter where they come from and what caste they are.
| | | | "Things now seem to achieve scale and criticality only with the presence of Bollywood. Even a social campaign like Lead India needs a Bollywood face." Santosh Desai, Columnist | | | | |
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As sociologist Patricia Uberoi puts it, "A national language has come into being."
On the other hand, the good life as lived in this middle-class neighbourhood on the fringes of the capital, and indeed clones of it in large swathes of the country, radiates an obsessiveness with just the one form of popular culture that is almost surreal. We're so steeped in the stuff that most of the time we don't even notice. But if we were to step back, and look at the pace, the intensity and the scope of our consumption of Bollywood, and its consumption of us, we might realise how extraordinary it is, even in a country where Hindi cinema has always been very influential.
"What we are seeing now," says Sengupta, "is more than a fad. Earlier the star was distant, of gigantic proportions, but now the distance between the fan and the hero gets compressed. The star comes packaged into your mobile phone, his or her face becomes the wallpaper of barber shops and laptop screens. He or she reveals her life to you over coffee (they call it KKoffee in Bollywood) in the ersatz, staged intimacy of television chat shows. The star is still magic, but somehow more touchable." And now that the fellow keeps a blog, with hourly updates, even saying goodbye before getting onto a plane, you can kid yourself into thinking he is a family friend.
| | | | Almost 95 per cent of cultural property is owned by the state, addressed to a cultural
elite. With no vibrant new cultural spaces to go to, Bollywood fills the vacuum.
Jyotindra, Jain Art historian | | | | |
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As in comments on Amitabh Bachchan's blog like: "Hi Amit Sir, have a safe journey, tk cr of urself." Or: "How did you both raise such wonderful kids? Give us some parenting tips! Hugs!"
Abhi-Ash gracing a Children's Day function in Mumbai
If we now want parenting tips from Bollywood stars, clearly it's OK to have Bollywood take root in all those spaces of our lives where it never was before. A small but ominous symptom of our acceptance of Bollywood-style entertainment and packaging, not just as something to have fun with but as a way of life, is how Bollywood is creeping into school functions. When one of Delhi's leading schools infused its Annual Day function featuring kids under 12 with a heavy dose of pop patriotism a la Rang De Basanti, with children lustily singing Rubaru, only a few parents seemed put off. Indeed, Teacher's Day, organised by parents at many schools, is even more of a Bollywood-enabled zone, with broad humour and raucous spoofs inspired by the latest movie hits.
Even in the spaces that Bollywood did inhabit, new trends of Bollywoodisation, or should we call it Bollywood dependency, are being set. Bollywood and the language of common speech have always influenced each other, but now, as columnist Santosh Desai points out, "Bollywood is the language we're expressing ourselves in." It is, in fact, the supermarket of choice for slogan shoppers, headline writers, pop patriots, sports fans and machismo peddlers.
| | | | Creating original programmes requires hard work and good ideas.
Putting together a programme based on a film requires nothing.
Shiv Kumar Sharma, Santoor maestro | | | | |
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Even politicians, no mean wordsmiths themselves, are increasingly depending on Bollywoodspeak. As the Manmohan Singh government won the trust vote, Congresswallahs, historically the creators of fine political slogans such as 'Na Jaat Par Na Paat Par, Mohar Lagao Haath Par', did not lag behind TV in disseminating 'Singh is King' through their SMSes, far and wide.
Dependency also means the assiduous promotion of the idea that nothing achieves, in Desai's words, "scale and criticality" unless Bollywood is part of it—not a journalism awards function, not a social responsibility campaign, not a quiz show, not even lesser corporate events. Desai commented wryly in a column on an ndtv awards night function: "It was noteworthy that the first time the PM himself rose to give an award was to Shahrukh Khan; other recipients had to make do with the likes of Kamal Nath and Jaswant Singh."
"Five years ago," says Sabbas Joseph of Wizcraft, an event management company, "the trend of stars coming for corporate events did not exist. But now dealers and distributors want them; if a company cannot get them, they feel it does not have the clout and muscle power to entertain well. If you are used to eating caviar, you won't be happy with lentils."
Reams have been written about what we gain by having Bollywood in our lives; indeed the premise that we do fuels a whole industry. So the question to ask is: what do we lose by having too much of it? Many would say, our traditions. Bollywood may amplify the sounds of Punjab, but as Uberoi points out, it is a bowdlerised version. "It has plundered the rhythms, sounds, vocabulary of Punjabi women's songs—and cleaned them up. The hard-edged, bitter critiquing of marriage, family and the in-laws has gone."
Sport illustrated: Akshay Kumar does a stunt at the unveiling of Delhi's IPL team; Aamir joins the Olympic torch rally in Delhi
Others point to the loss of creativity; that banking on Bollywood is, among other things, both symptom and cause of an epidemic of laziness. "Creating original programmes requires hard work and good ideas. Putting together a programme based on a film requires nothing," says santoor maestro Shiv Kumar Sharma. "A 'known' face is a safe shortcut to thinking up new ideas," comments adman Kiran Khalap, commenting on the huge Bollywoodisation of corporate endorsements. Borrowing a slogan or a catchphrase from Bollywood to sex up a speech or a headline (as in "Chak De India" or "Gandhigiri") is also a shortcut—an easy and effortless way to sound cool and connected.
Yet others draw attention to subtler aspects of our lives. "The impact of Bollywood is that people shun things which have a long gestation period. There is a craving for the immediate, the tangible; anything in the abstract domain is not understood," says Kiran Seth of Spic Macay, a group that vigorously promotes classical music. Observes cultural activist Jaya Jaitly, "India is large enough, wide enough, there should be space for everything. But the dominance of market forces represented by Bollywood is pushing aside folk and classical traditions." And writer Altaf Tyrewala says, simply: "We are losing our ability for silence, for aloneness, and all the wonderful and surprising things that pop up in a free drifting mind."
By Anjali Puri with Namrata Joshi