Forget Raj Kapoor fans in Russia. An international fan club now stalks Bollywood online, says NISHA SUSAN
WHEN BIRGIT PESTAL stumbled upon a film shoot in India she called Barbara Skoda in Vienna. “They are shooting a song sequence. It’s for a movie called Shaadi Ke After Effects with two actors called Arbaaz Khan and Malaika Arora. Do we know them?” “YES! We do.
They are Salman´s brother and sister-inlaw. You might know him from Hulchul and her as the item girl with SRK in Kaal,” replied Barbara, a 36-year-old manager at a media-technology college but is better known online as Babasko, author of the effervescent blog Baba Aur Bollywood. She and half-a-dozen others from across the world who have formed the group blog Bollywoodbloggers.com are the most visible online presence of non-Indian fans of Indian cinema.
Perhaps it’s not so surprising that Pestal, a German journalist wrote a book on Bollywood (the title roughly translates to Fascination Bollywood: Numbers, facts and background in the German-speaking countries). But one can only imagine Yash Raj Films’ reaction if they knew their big 2008 release Tashan has been most closely tracked by a 20-year-old Finnish girl. Since 2006, Sanni’s been following Tashan, the latest manifestation of her favourite Bollywood phenomena ‘Sakshay’: movies in which Saif Ali Khan and Akshay Kumar appear together. As an annexure to an extensive manifesto on her blog (So They Dance) she writes, “The thing you should know about Sakshay is that they haven’t done a single honest good movie. You have good Sakshay movies (and bad ones), but you don’t have good Sakshay movies. The distinction is very important… Sakshay has previously been cheesy, unintentionally amusing, vaguely homoerotic and undeniably entertaining. Sakshay has previously been 90’s. Now Sakshay is sleek and cool, 2000’s Bollywood… That’s what’s going to make Tashan the best movie ever.”
Neither Sanni nor Barbara are among those newly seduced by SRK’s bravura appearance at the Berlin Film Festival in 2007 alongside the release of Om Shanti Om (with 50 prints OSO was the biggest Bollywood release in Germany yet). Many may have been hooked by slick, global Bollywood a few years ago, but they stuck around for Indian cinema. Greta Kaemmer works for American Express in Boston. She watches 3-5 Indian films per week, blogs at Memsaabstory and would kill to meet Shammi Kapoor. She “prefers the romantic comedies and silly spy thrillers of the 60s and 70s.” Others like Barbara and Michael Langhans, a German advocate, love Tamil and Telugu cinema. Barbara says “Rajni Superstar rulez” and that “None of the 2006 Hindi releases made my heart ache the way Surya did in Sillunu Oru Kaadhal.”
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