Bollywood is the biggest cultural export from India and it’s popularity is rising like petrol prices across the world. It is yet to give Hollywood a run for the money but it certainly has started to make Hollywood producers take note of the appeal of Indian films across the Indian subcontinent & among the Indian diaspora elsewhere. All that’s for the sake of giving a foundation to the story, the point I really want to make is that it’s high time that Indian film industry start marketing itself as a unit to create a brand. Bollywood is a bad name to market as it tries to portray Indian film industry as a poor cousin to Hollywood. Remember that froogle can never be as successful as google just because the latter overshadows the former with its sheer recall value & impact. I don’t remember any instance when a company has become more successful with a name which sounds like an already successful company doing in the same sector. There has to be a Pepsi for Coke not Poke.

The first thing that Bollywood should do is to change its name to a more apposite one like Nutanki which actually popularized the performing arts in India and became an inspiration for people to capture it on screen. The name has become a kind of joke these days but it still is much better than ‘Bollywood’. The name change would definitely bring in free publicity from across the world while they can do something spectacular for advertising their new name. Hollywood did that by building Hollywood Sign on the hills of Los Angeles. Indian film industry should do more spectacular than that. It could be anything but serious. Indians must retain the tradition of story telling in their films with songs and music mixed in. Musicals are the strength of Indian film makers and they should not buckle under any desire to compete with Hollywood films by manipulating the Indian art of story telling. And to end my viewpoint I would like to add that Indians should keep the true meaning of cinema alive i.e. celebration of life.

I hate when people ask what it is every time i say “i love Asian Underground”. So I was planning to write a blog on this music genre which i simply adore and also make people understand what is it. Wikipedia defines it as a sub genre of electronica but it has made quite a niche for itself in the music scene around the world. Unlike other underground genres it has extended itself quite successfully into the mainstream music scene. Now coming to what exactly is this: It’s a high bit rate music embellished with South Asian or more specifically Indian sounds. If you are listening to something which has bhangra beats amidst all the energy of guitar and synthesizer then it’s probably Asian Underground music. It was actually started by the children of people of South Asian immigrants who moved to England. Asian underground turned into a phenomenon in early 90’s and continued to rock till now. What is really amazing is that people do relate to the artists of this genre but not the genre. A cyber friend with whom I was chatting some time back knew who Bally Sagoo is but didn’t knew what Asian Underground is. May be it’s because of the minuscule amount of publicity it has achieved in India. So for once I decided to make things easy for people who are new to this kind of music. So dude just search about these artists and if possible do get some of their music which I believe you wont regret buying.

Artists like Nitin Sawhney ,Susheela Raman, Dj Cheb i Sabbah,Karsh Kale,Talvin Singh are just fine to start your journey into an all new world of music. And yes, if you guys have seen the movie “The Namesake” then this might interest you that music of the film was composed by Nitin Sawhney. In fact he’s my favorite so he gets the special recommendation while I would like you to see his videos on youtube as well. There’s one video on youtube where Jeff Beck shares the screen space with Nitin. Equally cool is Dj cheb i sabbah who became a musician accidentaly. Karsh Kale had an album with anoushka shankar which is a must buy. The album is called Breathing under water. This is just a light intro of this genre but i promise you i’ll keep bringing about it whenever somebody would ask about asian underground.

The image courtesy amazon.com