Terrific SF Chronicle article about a Bollywood dance competition taking place in San Francisco tomorrow. Snip:
Growing up in Calcutta, I rarely watched Hindi films. Going to the movies usually meant viewing English-language evergreens like “Born Free” and “Willie Wonka,” or hoary literary classics with dialogue in my native Bengali. Bollywood was a risqué world with money but little class where the vamps flashed thigh and cleavage and the heroes kept their shirts unbuttoned. At my school, we had regular “hair check” days, at which school staff made sure our locks were not curling over our collars like some “two-bit Bombay film star.” We knew Bollywood produced more films than Hollywood, and millions of Indians queued up on opening weekend to buy tickets on the black market, but I was taught to look down my nose at the genre’s kitschy excess.Now, to my surprise, Bollywood is entering the American mainstream, thanks to movies such as Mira Nair’s art-house hit “Monsoon Wedding” and the Bollywood-inspired pageantry of “Moulin Rouge.” Indian beauty queen Aishwarya Rai recently appeared on “60 Minutes,” and rapper Dr. Dre was slapped with a lawsuit for mixing a snatch of an old Hindi song into his single “Addictive.” It’s also hit academia in media-studies courses on campuses from UC Berkeley to MIT.
Link (Thanks, Brian “Badass” Lam!).
Update:
Boing Boing reader Kevin H points out that the author of this SF Chron story appears to have made a minor error:
Dr. Dre didn’t have a single called “Addictive”. The single was for Truth Hurts, and it featured a blistering Rakim rap. Truth Hurts is an artist on Dre’s label Aftermath Records. DJ Quik produced the single. It drips with hotness.