I met a Senegalese guy once. He spoke no English, and I, obviously, spoke no Senegalese. There was a brief, awkward silence between us, until he astonished me by asking "Aap Hindi bolte hain?" It turned out that he actually spoke better Hindi than I did. And he had learned it all by watching Hindi movies back home in Senegal. ("Maine Pakeezah pachpan baar dekhi hai" he confessed to me, "Aur Sholay paintalees baar.") Cut to Jakarta, a couple of years later. I took an acquaintance to an Indian restaurant for dinner. When I asked what he'd like to eat, he rattled off the order to the waiter: tandoori chicken, daal, chapati, etc. I was impressed at his culinary savvy. But then it turned out he had never eaten Indian food before; he had just learned the names of the dishes from the numerous Hindi movies he had watched over the years. There are literally hundreds of stories like this, from all over the world. Like the Russian taxi-driver who serenaded a friend of mine with 2 hours of old Raj Kapoor songs. Like the Cairo businessman who interrogated another friend of mine at length about Amitabh Bachhan's welfare. Like the old Malaysian lady who once told me I looked like Joy Mukherji (a left-handed compliment, I suppose). And so on. What all this does, of course, is to point out the universal appeal of the Hindi movie. There is something about it that seems to transcend language and touch a chord in all of us, black, brown or yellow. And the formula, if you think about it, is almost identical to the good old soap opera formula that has been tried and tested all over the world, from Brazil to China: it pushes all those same emotional buttons that lie there inside us - romance, family conflict, good-and-evil, tragedy, humour, action, the works. It's surprising, though, that nobody has managed to monetise this phenomenon -- this opportunity -- in any major way. OK, the Hindujas tried it, fairly successfully, with their marketing of Sangam in the Middle East in the '60s. Amitabh Bachhan tried it, unsuccessfully, when he launched ABCL a few years ago. And a various people have atttempted in between -- including Zee -- with varying degrees of success. But nobody has really, truly cashed in on the opportunity on the mega scale it warrants. Until now, that is. The people who could change all that are B4U -- who are now marketing Bollywood very aggressively indeed. They recently launched their Hindi movie channels in the Middle East, Europe and America, and their business plan talks of 1.5 million international subscribers by 2005. (Already they have picked up nearly 200,000.) So far they have backed their efforts with an investment of $ 100 million, but considering that one of the backers is Lakshmi Mittal (the zillionaire steel tycoon), there's probably lots more where that comes from. What is most intriguing, however, is B4U's vision. Whereas, so far, everybody has defined the international audiences for Bollywood movies - logically enough -- as a/overseas Indians and b/Afro-Asians (who, after all, speak the same emotional language as ourselves), B4U is a helluva lot more ambitious. They are, they claim, ultimately, targeting the Western audiences: the Americans, Brits, Italians, etc. And their rationale is this: Western audiences are by now tired of the sex-and-violence themes that Western cinema is typically dishing out. What they are now ready for is to come back to the good old family values and traditional themes that Bollywood has to offer; the kind of values and themes that Hollywood itself thrived on, back in its in its heyday, with blockbusters like Gone With the Wind or Sound of Music. Or, to put it slightly differently, what was Titanic, but a nice, slick Hindi movie, albeit rendered in English? Are they just being naïve? Maybe. But, then again, maybe not. After all, when Shekhar Kapur was asked by someone how he'd prepared himself for directing Elizabeth, he said, hey, it was no big deal, he'd treated it like just another Bollywood masala movie. Cinematic legend has it that back in the early '50s, Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani was released in New York with great expectations. Everybody expected it to do very well there, and then quickly roll out to theatres all over the US. Unfortunately, the first four days of its release coincided with one of the worst rain-storms in New York's history, and the movie got washed out, quite literally. On the fifth day, it closed. And that was the end of that. Nearly 50 years later, Taal opened in the US … and went on to become a big hit with white audiences. Is it that our time has come again? Well, B4U seems to think so. And, what's more, they're putting their money where their mouth is. Let's just see what happens. After all, if I told you 10 years ago that India was soon going to become a global power in IT, would you have believed me? Tell us what you think of this diary
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