Bollywood, a popular nomenclature for India's “national” film industry in the Hindi language, along with the Taj Mahal, yoga, Buddha, and Mahatma Gandhi, is one of the best-known introductions and universally recognized associations with India across the world today. Despite its predominant narrative styles not confirming to the First World European and/or American cinema structure, Indian cinema is increasingly viewed as the world's second-most important film industry, after Hollywood, with box-office influence crossing over with European cinema. Bollywood FAQ provides a thrilling, entertaining, and intellectually stimulating joy ride into the vibrant, colorful, and multi-emotional universe of the world's most prolific (over 30 000 film titles) and most-watched film industry (at 3 billion-plus ticket sales). Bollywood blockbusters are simultaneously screened in theaters and cinemas in over 100 nations from the USA to Japan, New Zealand to the Netherlands, and Peru to Pakistan. Every major Hollywood studio (Warner Bros., Fox Star, Disney, Sony Pictures, and Viacom 18) is now making or distributing Bollywood films. Yet much of Indian cinema continues to amuse and confuse audiences and critics outside of India, including during their first/occasional introductions to its, in the words of Salman Rushdie, “epico-mythico-tragico-comico-super-sexy-high-masala-art form in which the unifying principle is a techni-color-storyline.” Bollywood FAQ explains and explores the above myths and magic. It introduces India's maharajah-like stars and their cult-commanding stardom. Movie buffs will find a ready reckoner on iconic Bollywood films, with a bonus must-watch listing of the cinema's most spectacular song-and-dance moments, highlighting the pleasures and popularity of a national cinema that has come to be a genre in itself. This book is a reader-friendly reference to everything one has ever wanted to know about the spectacular, robust, humongous, colorful, and dramatic multi-generic cinematic being called Bollywood. The narrative is enriched with insider insights culled from its author's long career as a film writer and critic in the city of Bollywood, Bombay (now Mumbai).

Bollywood takes over in this contemporary, magical middle grade novel about an Indian American girl whose world turns upside down when she involuntarily starts bursting into glamorous song-and-dance routines during everyday life. You know how in Bollywood when people are in love, they sing and dance from the mountaintops? Eleven-year-old Sonali wonders if they do the same when they’re breaking up. The truth is, Sonali’s parents don’t get along, and it looks like they might be separating. Sonali’s little brother, Ronak, is not taking the news well, constantly crying. Sonali would never do that. It’s embarrassing to let out so many feelings, to show the world how not okay you are. But then something strange happens, something magical, maybe. When Sonali gets upset during a field trip, she can’t bury her feelings like usual—instead, she suddenly bursts into a Bollywood song-and-dance routine about why she’s upset! The next morning, much to her dismay, Sonali’s reality has shifted. Things seem brighter, almost too bright. Her parents have had Bollywood makeovers. Her friends are also breaking out into song and dance. And somehow, everyone is acting as if this is totally normal. Sonali knows something has gone wrong, and she suspects it has something to do with her own mismanaged emotions. Can she figure it out before it’s too late?

A cross-cultural study that explores and redefines what philosophy, philosophizing, and philosophers are through the lens of literature. The academic discipline of philosophy may tell us, too rigidly, what a philosopher is or should be; but fictional narration often upholds the core conundrums of humankind in which philosophy germinates. This collection of essays explores whether a study of 'philosophers' at a planetary scale, or at least on a broad cross-cultural spectrum, can decouple philosophy from its academic aspect and lend it a more inclusive domain. Contributors to this volume play with three conceptual poles, making them interact with each other and get modified through this interaction: 'fiction', 'narrative' and 'philosopher'. How do these three terms get semantically modified and broadened in scope when we speak of the figures of philosophers in imaginative writing? How do these terms assume different connotations in different cultural contexts, interacting with the multiplicity of not just 'thought', but also the media and tools of 'thought'? Do we always think only rationally? Or do we also think with and through emotively powerful images, symbols and tropes? In the end, Finding Philosophers in Global Fiction insists on the need to 'de-elitize' and democratize the concept of a 'philosopher' by reflecting on the possibility of seeing a philosopher as one who sees things clearly, from any vantage point.

American-born ingénue Rakhee “Rocky” Varma knows a career in Bollywood is no fairy tale, but that truth hits home when her outspoken nature lands her in hot water with the media.Banished to her leading man’s crumbling mansion on the outskirts of Delhi until things cool down, she is wholly unprepared to meet her costar’s reclusive brother, Taj Ali Khan. Taj, a former action hero until a stunt gone horribly wrong ended his career, wears a cape of scars and a crown of rudeness.As his cynicism collides with her determination to stick it out in Bollywood no matter what, sparks fly.

Appreciating Melodrama: Theory and Practice in Indian Cinema and Television seeks to identify and appreciate the continual influence of the ancient Sanskrit drama treatise, the Natyashastra, and its theory of aesthetics, the rasa theory, on the unique narrative attributes of Indian cinema. This volume of work critically engages with a representative sample of landmark films from 100 years of Indian film history across genres, categories, regions and languages. This is the first time a case study-based rigorous academic review of popular Indian cinema is done using the Indian aesthetic appreciation theory of rasa (affect/emotion). It proposes a theoretical model for film appreciation, especially for content made in the melodramatic genre, and challenges existing First World/Euro-American film criticism canons and notions that privilege cinematic 'realism' over other narrative forms, which will generate passionate debates for and against its propositions in future studies and research on films. This is a valuable academic reference book for students of film and theatre, world cinema and Indian cinema studies, South Asian studies and culture, Indology and the 'Sociology of Cinema' studies. It is a must-have reference text in the curriculum of both practical-oriented acting schools, as well as courses and modules focusing on a theoretical study of cinema, such as film criticism and appreciation, and the history of movies and performance studies.

Bollywood is India's most popular entertainment and one of its most powerful social forces. Its blockbusters contest ideas about state formation, capture the nation's dispersed anxieties, and fabricate public fantasies of what constitutes "India." Written by an award-winning scholar of popular culture and postcolonial modernity, Bollywood's India analyzes the role of the cinema's most popular blockbusters in making, unmaking, and remaking modern India. With dazzling interpretive virtuosity, Priya Joshi provides an interdisciplinary account of popular cinema as a space that filters politics and modernity for its viewers. Themes such as crime and punishment, family and individuality, vigilante and community capture the diffuse aspirations of an evolving nation. Summoning India's tumultuous 1970s as an interpretive lens, Joshi reveals the cinema's social work across decades that saw the decline of studios, the rise of the multi-starrer genre, and the arrival of corporate capital and new media platforms. In elegantly crafted studies of iconic and less familiar films, including Awara (1951), Ab Dilli Dur Nahin (1957), Deewaar (1975), Sholay (1975), Dil Se (1998), A Wednesday (2008), and 3 Idiots (2009), Joshi powerfully conveys the pleasures and politics of Bollywood blockbusters.

These efforts have been enabled by the neoliberal restructuring of the Indian state and economy since 1991.