At the end of Pedder Road in Cumballa Hill, uptown Bombay, there is an advertising hoarding site that rises up over six lanes of traffic indigestion below. Once a month one or two boys climb up bamboo ladders, the rungs tied together with fraying rope, and they paint advertisements for the next Hindi film that is going to be hitting the big screens of India. They spend days teetering above the fug of exhaust, lovingly caressing and recreating the curves and curls of their favourite celluloid heroines.

I have sat on a bench on the other side of the road and watched them painting one of the biggest stars of Hindi film, first her naked breasts, and then a token diaphanous layer of wet sari. I was transfixed as a spindly boy painted in the nipples with such loving tenderness. As he added the final touches the grid-locked traffic below honked in orgasmic symphony, and a bunch of bristling pubescent boys next to me moaned in echo. It is cinema as living art. The Hindi film industry of Bombay is as buxom and beloved as the hand painted hoardings on Pedder Road.

Bombay is the cash cow of India’s huge film industry. Bollywood is the Hindi movie capital pumping out at least twice as many films a year as its box office Mecca, Hollywood. Out of the Bombay film industry come chappati westerns, Saturday Night Fever sari thrillers, desperate tales of murder thick with twirling disco divas; in short the formula is referred to as the masalamovie. It is modern Indian, art mirroring life, spicy, loud, bright, over-acted, heavily bosomed, heavily censored, full of high camp dance scenes and trilling playback songs, and each and every one carrying a heavy-handed subtext about how Indian family life should be.

To the rest of the world it is a film formula that defies logic. How can you break all the rules and get away with it, mixing poignant family tragedy with car chases, death scenes with disco,chappati-making with sky-diving, and all this stretched out to approximately three hours a pop?

Let’s look at the formula in all its glory. Boy meets Girl. Girl plays hard to get. Boy falls in love with Girl—big flirty dance number. Cue the bad buys, who have many varied ways and means of scuppering Boy’s love chances. They fail and Boy gets Girl—big sexy dance number. Girl gets remorseful about:

a) Other boy back home in medium-sized town who her parents have lined up for an arranged marriage. These home boys always have nice sensible jobs but are not very hot on the dance numbers. This means the audience knows for sure that they are very boring and will not give our heroine a romantic and exciting life.

b) Her mother is dying and needs her beloved daughter’s constant nursing and attention. This is a potent symbol of the dutiful daughter scenario.

c) Her unmarried older sister makes it very clear that she will be disowned by the family if she tries to get married before number one sister.

Boy gets angry and frustrated, aided and abetted by the bad guys in dark glasses, black jeans and with Eurotrash arm candy girlfriends—big aggressive dance number. Girl gets huffy and says that Boy has changed. Boy swears undying love and gives 100% guarantee that he will change his ways, this entails promising never to see the bad buys again—big dance number with Girl shunning Boy and Boy making big hip swinging promises. Exit bad guys. Boys gets Girl back. They kiss in chaste fashion. Big end dance number with lots of glitter and costume changes. The End.

And the actors who play the roles are as gloriously technicolored as the parts they play. A whole magazine industry is based on their day to day shenanigans, much of it fabricated to create the necessary hype to kick the relevant star’s next film into gear. Every month the filmi magazines lead off their star stories with such sumptuous introduc