Sunday, August 9, 2009

Bollywood

I have never really watched a Hindi movie before which is kind of strange since I have many brown friends.

So I decided to have a Bollywood night and invited some girls over.We ordered pizza and baked some caramel walnut chocolate chip cookie bars (the remainder is sitting next to me as I type this heh). Junk food to the max ya! My Indian friend brought a selection of movies and I assigned my experienced Desi friends to choose a movie they thought the bollynewbies would enjoy. So they chose Khabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham.

They failed to inform me the movie was three and half hours long.

Seriously that is SO long. But overall it was a cool experience. I'd probably say my favorite part about it was the colors!! There are so many pretty colors of clothes they wear during the 10 minute long choreographed songs to tell each other they can't live without one another or how they missed the sound of their pattering feet or something silly like that and rub up against one another in prolonged sensual movements close enough to kiss but never actually touching lips. Seriously what is with the nose rubbing the neck syndrome?

In a nutshell the movie was about the adopted child of a multi-millionaire who loved the wrong girl from a lower class and was therefore disowned. He moved to London with his wife and years later his little brother finds out the real story and sets out to reunite the family.

It helped to have my friends from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan there to translate weird parts and explain some cultural background throughout the movie. Apparently many Muslims in India don't really show [or act] like they're Muslim.

I found it kind of strange that throughout the movie the actors would say 'by Allah' or 'oh Allah.' They even had a whole song saying Allah at random intervals. A scene in the movie showed two engaged people agreeing to marry by an Imam. And then immediately after there would be a scene with the same people praying or chanting to some gods with incense and the works. This is probably not the case in reality, as you cannot be Muslim if you practice shirk or polytheism.

I also noticed there were some Hindi words that sounded just like Arabic words! For example, problem = mushkeela or store=dukan or aunt=kala or sir=ustadh. That was pretty sweet.

Will I be investing time in the future watching more Bollywood movies? Most likely not. I think I've had enough drawn out drama and cliche lines to last a lifetime.



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