Austin360 blogs > Globe-Jotting > Archives > 2007 > September > 22 > Entry
And then my head exploded
Bollywood isn’t a feverish film genre. It’s an exotic drug that I can’t believe is legal in Texas. I know the movies are banned in Kentucky, Ohio and Georgia, which is appropriate and just. Consider us lucky.
Bollywood movies aren’t merely watched and experienced. Bollywood infects you molecularly, pours sequins and glitter into your blood, which then turns neon-orange and starts dancing hysterically and lip-syncing with woozy breathlessness and facial calesthenics.
Am I a wee late to the sorcery of Bollywood? Totally. Like so many, I appreciated its native insanity from a healthy distance, the better to avoid eyebrow singes and flesh scaldings.
Heat. The movies are all about heat — erotic heat, dancing and singing heat, melodramatic heat, fluttering-eye heat, crazy-action swooping-crane-shot heat. Billowing-silk-sari and ’80s motorcycle-jacket heat. Bollywood is the most pungent cheese available, and its own heat melts it into buckets of masala queso. Bring chips, and naan.
Last weekend I watched the sensory-molesting B-wood classic “Main Hoon Na,” a 2004 masterpiece of overkill starring Bollywood royalty Shahrukh Khan and Sushmita Sen, who is a former Ms. Universe and whose hair mysteriously blows in the breeze no matter where she is, be it classroom, bathroom or under a waterfall.
Caroline, who so wishes her first name was Amrita, is my BW expert (she actually owns Barbie dolls of Khan and simmering starlet Kajol), and she brought the DVD over to witness it on my elephantine HDTV. She offered astute running commentary that taught me much. And like any good teacher, she ignited latent passion and active curiosity. Now I’m all about Bollywood.
Anyway, the movie, hyperkinetic and loud and explosive, made my concrete walls rumble, possibly crumble. We were delighted. Tammy the rat chewed Caroline’s slip-ons and toes in elation. Aftward, she destroyed my plant.
Caroline left me only one B-wood movie to watch on my own, “Don,” starring the celestially suave Khan. More would be dangerous, we both agreed. I only own one fire extinguisher.
If you don’t think I’m taking like 10 Bollywood studio tours while I’m in Mumbai/Bombay, the Bollywood capital, then you need to go see “Om Shanti Om”. It’s as simple as that.
Revel, sigh, roll around in all that is Shahrukh Khan, aka, SRK:
As a gauzy dreamboat that sails in the calm, sugary seas of his own magnificent self-regard
As a fan’s smitten pencil sketch tacked above her bed, next to drawings of unicorns and a poster of ‘Disney’s High School Musical,’ which flirts with Bollywood in ways we won’t speak of
As an exuberant Pepsi shill — sweet, bubbly, sinful, whorish
With Sushsmita, a vision that turns my heart to mush-mita
As a Barbie doll. Speechless.
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