“If you take all the pieces of Bollywood out of our lives – the celebrities on the billboards, the songs in the nightclubs, the stars on Page 3 – Indians would find their lives to be completely empty,” said Shuchi Pandya, a jewelry merchandiser in Mumbai. “It’s subconscious. Even if you don’t enjoy Bollywood movies, it becomes a part of your life.”
[The concluding lines from an Iinternational Herald Tribune article “Can Hollywood make a Bollywood movie?“]
I don’t have a very high opinion of the Indian masses (and that goes for the vast majority of humanity — Indians are not special) but this is simply untrue. Shuchi Pandya should speak for herself/himself and not generalize that all Indians lead lives of such pathetic and unrelieved shallowness that the only matter animating them is Bollywood movies. The writer of the article is an idiot sensationalist willing to convey the impression to his firangi readers that all Indians are empty-headed morons.