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By SREENATH SREENIVASAN Going to the movies in India is an interactive experience. Audiences often jeer and make catcalls, sing along to the tunes and yell warnings to victims-to-be. "Indian cinema enables Indians to dream with their eyes open," says Shashi Tharoor, author of "Show Business," a novel about the Indian film industry. They can dream of palatial homes and fancy cars, of glamorous parties and foreign travel.
Like the country itself, movie theaters are colorful, noisy, redolent, and yes, quite crowded. And then there are the movies, generated at the rate of 750 annually, making India home to the world's largest film industry. It produces a wonderful multilingual mix of the predictable and the fantastic.
A typical Hindi movie plot: A poor and saintly father and mother are killed by a rich villain. The couple's twin babies are separated. They grow up to be handsome heroes, fall in love with voluptuous beauties, then encounter the villain and his son. The heroes defeat the villains' nefarious scheme, beat them senseless and marry the heroines.
Anything that strays from the formula is instantly labeled an art film and doomed to a limited run. These are not how Bollywood (as the Bombay-based industry is known) makes money. The key to its profits is repeat business. And one thing that brings the audiences back is that great staple of Indian movies, the song-and-dance sequence. Usually set amid lush gardens and obviously fake rain, actors and actresses lip-sync and cavort in long, carefully choreographed numbers. Soundtracks are often among the best-selling albums, luring audiences back to theaters with their easy-to-hum, disco-infected beats.
Most movies last three hours, with a 15-minute intermission. Seats can be reserved, and tickets in the big cities range from 7 rupees (20 cents) for the seats right next to the screen, to 50 rupees ($1.35) for the balcony. Profits are steady but the industry cannot be complacent. The boom in satellite television threatens to cut into audiences and profits.
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Satellite photography has made detailed images of the planet's folds and ripples commonplace. The earthbound lenses of statistical researchers are less precise. Still, data from media research sources around the wor ld do offer a sampling of the images, sounds and ideas people are turning to for enlightenment or escape. American exports are everywhere, but Japanese love their own pop and Indians like their own movies. Among book buyers, history and self-improvement seem to be universal passions. What follow are snapshots of national tastes and vignettes that try to explain them.
