Books : Bollywood

Discover a land of exotic beauty and inspiring culture with The Rough Guide to India, the most comprehensive guide to India on the market. The 36 page full-colour introduction with stunning photography will whet your appetite for the country''s many highlights, from fast-paced Delhi and the sacred sites of the Ganges plain to the Moghul splendour of Agra and the shell-sand beaches of the south. The guide features three new colour sections on Sacred India, Handicrafts and Bollywood, as well as expert background information on everything from temple architecture to Indian classical music. Easy-to-use maps and extensive accommodation and restaurant listings, plus all the practical grittiness you''d expect from a Rough Guide make this your must-have item for the trip of a lifetime. Make the most your time with The Rough Guide to India.

Shakespeare''s plays have inspired British Oscar-winners and spaghetti Westerns, Bollywood thrillers, and Soviet epics. Covering twenty plays, Daniel Rosenthal''s selection of 100 Shakespeare films spans a century of cinema, from a silent Tempest (1907) to Kenneth Branagh''s As You Like It (2006). Fifty of the films retain Shakespeare''s language, among them Laurence Olivier''s Henry V and Orson Welles''s Othello. Alongside these are forty genre adaptations using modernized dialogue and re-imagined characters: Macbeth as a gangster in Joe Macbeth and Maqbool; Othello as a jazz pianist in All Night Long. Rosenthal also assesses twenty-five foreign-language titles. Presented alphabetically by Shakespeare play, each chapter begins with a synopsis, and the film essays explore cinematography, design, dialogue, music, and performance.

Since 2001, India has gained new attention as an emerging world power with a rapidly growing economy, a world-class science and technology sector, and a huge English-speaking labor pool. After a period of escalating tension with neighbor Pakistan, wide-ranging peace talks are underway. Within India, there is an unprecedented mood of optimism about the future. At the same time, the nation wrestles with difficult questions about the place of secularism in society, the role it sees for itself globally and within Asia, and the reality that millions of Indians still live at the subsistence level. This volume of India Briefing examines India's changing fortunes through chapters that cover the economy; the twists and turns of domestic politics; labor in the large informal sector; the cultural roots of Hindu nationalism; the foreign relations rollercoaster; the business of Bollywood; and a special chapter on the range of new resources about India available on the web.

Broadway, Burlesque, Bollywood, Latin, and MTV: shall we dance? If the sound of music makes you want to move your feet, but fear stops you cold, here's your invitation to step onto the dance floor. No need to worry about not having enough grace, flexibility, or coordination, because these workouts will get your heart pumping, your body jumping, and your physique toned. Even complete beginners can master the superbly photographed and easy-to-follow choreography. Take the first steps with five tailor-made routines, each devised by an expert in the style: they all come in three levels, with information on the dance form; a special funky, killer move; a hot playlist; and case studies of someone who used dance to get fit and fabulous.

Martial arts legend Jackie Chan stars in this mystical, fantasy adventure as an intrepid archaeologist, Jack, who sets out on an adventure that would lead to the greatest discovery in Chinese history. In BC221 Qin Shihuang - the first emperor of China - started to build a royal tomb for himself despite his infatuation with immortality. Through the prodigious endeavors of more than 700,000 forced laborers, the mausoleum was completed 37 years later. Legend has it that to ensure utmost secrecy, all those who worked on the project were buried alive with the dead emperor. Over the next 2,000 years historians, tomb-raiders and happy-go-lucky adventurers alike had been honing in on the royal treasure, however, no one had ever succeeded in location the entrance to the mausoleum...until now. When an ancient sword and a magical gemstone are uncovered in India the booty leads Jack (Chan) and an ambitious scientist to the mausoleum. Through a series of strange and provocative dreams, Jack sees himself reincarnated as Meng Yi, a general who fell for the first emperor's beautiful consort. In order to solve the mystery behind his dream, Jack begins a quest for truth which ultimately gets him lost between the past and the present. Featuring Bollywood actress, Mallika Sherawat (Kis Kis Ki Kismat, Guru).

Gathering into one deeply conscious glance all the beauty scattered so sublimely through that last hour of the fin de siecle, the Italian film diva is both the movie's centre and the movie itself; she is the eye and the hurricane. Indolently we bathe in her fragrant mysticisms and sensualities, while all about her, rent hearts and havoc are strewn with the violence of Armageddon. Guy Maddin is one of Canada's most celebrated and original filmmakers, the director of such delirious films as Tales from the Gimli Hospital, Careful, Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary and the forthcoming The Saddest Music in the World. Few know, however, that he is just as gifted a writer, and his resolutely purple prose, as eccentric and enchanting as his film work, is a true delight. From the Atelier Tovar gathers, in one volume, the best of Maddin's writing: his journalism (originally published in the Village Voice, Cinema Scope, Film Comment and points beyond), unpublished short stories and film treatments (including the riotous Child Without Qualities), and selections, both lurid and illuminating, from the filmmaker's personal journals. Here are Maddin's feverish musings on hockey, the Osmonds, divas of the Italian silent cinema, Bollywood, his own twisted biography, and much, much more. What emerges finally is both a fragrant potpourri and a treasure trove, a singular portrait of this very unique artist.

The dancing girls of Lahore inhabit the Diamond Market in the shadow of a great mosque. The twenty-first century goes on outside the walls of this ancient quarter but scarcely registers within. Though their trade can be described with accuracy as prostitution, the dancing girls have an illustrious history: Beloved by emperors and nawabs, their sophisticated art encompassed the best of Mughal culture. The modern-day Bollywood aesthetic, with its love of gaudy spectacle, music, and dance, is their distant legacy. But the life of the pampered courtesan is not the one now being lived by Maha and her three girls. What they do is forbidden by Islam, though tolerated; but they are gandi, unclean, and Maha's daughters, like her, are born into the business and will not leave it. Sociologist Louise Brown spent four years in the most intimate study of the family life of a Lahori dancing girl. With beautiful understatement, she turns a novelist's eye on a true story that beggars the imagination. Maha, a classically trained dancer of exquisite grace, had her virginity sold to a powerful Arab sheikh at the age of twelve; when her own daughter Nena comes of age and Maha cannot bring in the money she once did, she faces a terrible decision as the agents of the sheikh come calling once more.

This volume brings together a group of international scholars to analyze the globalized networks of Indian cinema. It provides a critique of a common scholarly tendency in the field of popular cinema of defining Indian films in terms of their modernity and desire for nationhood. Bollyworld argues that Indian cinema cannot be understood in terms of this national paradigm, and must be more properly described as a field of visual and cultural production that interlinks sites as diverse as the cosmopolitan city of Bombay, the provincial region of Maharashtra, and countries such as Nigeria, Germany, South Africa and the United Kingdom. The twelve essays track the intra-national and trans-national movements of Bollywood cinema. Divided into three sections, the first discusses the technology and aesthetics of India's commercial cinema as it developed in the period that spans the silents from 1913 to the advent of the talkies in 1931. The second section studies these films as 'local', 'intertextual' manifestations of globalization and highlights the changes in post-liberalization cinema. Against the backdrop of economic liberalization, the institutionalization of multiculturalism and a strong voice of migrant Indian populations, the third section focuses on the overseas reception of Indian films.

World Music: The Basics gives a brief introduction to popular musical styles found around the world. Organized by continent/region, and then A to Z by country, the book features both background information on the cultural and musical history of each area, along with succinct reviews of key recordings. The reader can quickly find out enough about each musical style to appreciate its subtleties, and is also directed to the best available CDs for further listening. Unlike the massive Rough Guides or MusicHound volumes, this book is designed to be concise and easily digested, covering the essentials on each style, rather than encyclopedically listing every possible recording. It is a perfect introduction for the student, scholar, or general listener.Some of the music styles include Rai, Trance, Juju, Soukos, South African Township, Celtic( including Galicia, Bretagne, Wales; Flamenco, Catalan Rhumba, Italian Roots, Tarantella, Bal Musette, Fado, Nova Cancao, etc.) Rembetika, Laiko, Thrace, Ladino, Arabesque, Gazil, Sufi, Gypsy/Romani, Wedding, Klezmer, Scandinavian, Raga, Bollywood, Japanese, Dijeridou, Samba, Bossa Nova, MBP, Tango, Neuva Cancion, Son, Danzon, Rumba, Salsa, Reggae, Ska, Dub, Merengue, Compas, Soca, Mariachi, Ranchero, Tejano, Cajun/Zydeco, Bluegrass, and American Indian

Fandom pushes the boundaries of fan studies in bold directions, incorporating high culture fandoms, global fan cultures, fan technologies, and antagonistic anti-fandom, while rethinking the core tenets of fan studies concerning aesthetics, place, intellectual property, and interpretive communities-all presented with a lively, accessible, and engaging writing style.--Jason Mittell, Middlebury CollegeWe are all fans. Whether we log on to Web sites to scrutinize the latest plot turns in Lost, stalk our favorite celebrities on Gawker, attend gaming conventions, or simply wait with bated breath for the newest Harry Potter novel-each of us is a fan. Fandom extends beyond television and film to literature, opera, sports, and pop music, and encompasses both high and low culture.Fandom brings together leading scholars to examine fans, their practices, and their favorite texts. This unparalleled selection of original essays examines instances across the spectrum of modern cultural consumption from Karl Marx to Paris Hilton, Buffy the Vampire Slayer to backyard wrestling, Bach fugues to Bollywood cinema and nineteenth-century concert halls to computer gaming. Contributors examine fans of high cultural texts and genres, the spaces of fandom, fandom around the globe, the impact of new technologies on fandom, and the legal and historical contexts of fan activity. Fandom is key to understanding modern life in our increasingly mediated and globalized world.

Fandom pushes the boundaries of fan studies in bold directions, incorporating high culture fandoms, global fan cultures, fan technologies, and antagonistic anti-fandom, while rethinking the core tenets of fan studies concerning aesthetics, place, intellectual property, and interpretive communities-all presented with a lively, accessible, and engaging writing style.--Jason Mittell, Middlebury CollegeWe are all fans. Whether we log on to Web sites to scrutinize the latest plot turns in Lost, stalk our favorite celebrities on Gawker, attend gaming conventions, or simply wait with bated breath for the newest Harry Potter novel-each of us is a fan. Fandom extends beyond television and film to literature, opera, sports, and pop music, and encompasses both high and low culture.Fandom brings together leading scholars to examine fans, their practices, and their favorite texts. This unparalleled selection of original essays examines instances across the spectrum of modern cultural consumption from Karl Marx to Paris Hilton, Buffy the Vampire Slayer to backyard wrestling, Bach fugues to Bollywood cinema and nineteenth-century concert halls to computer gaming. Contributors examine fans of high cultural texts and genres, the spaces of fandom, fandom around the globe, the impact of new technologies on fandom, and the legal and historical contexts of fan activity. Fandom is key to understanding modern life in our increasingly mediated and globalized world.

The dancing girls of Lahore inhabit the Diamond Market in the shadow of a great mosque. The twenty-first century goes on outside the walls of this ancient quarter but scarcely registers within. Though their trade can be described with accuracy as prostitution, the dancing girls have an illustrious history: Beloved by emperors and nawabs, their sophisticated art encompassed the best of Mughal culture. The modern-day Bollywood aesthetic, with its love of gaudy spectacle, music, and dance, is their distant legacy. But the life of the pampered courtesan is not the one now being lived by Maha and her three girls. What they do is forbidden by Islam, though tolerated; but they are gandi, unclean, and Maha's daughters, like her, are born into the business and will not leave it. Sociologist Louise Brown spent four years in the most intimate study of the family life of a Lahori dancing girl. With beautiful understatement, she turns a novelist's eye on a true story that beggars the imagination. Maha, a classically trained dancer of exquisite grace, had her virginity sold to a powerful Arab sheikh at the age of twelve; when her own daughter Nena comes of age and Maha cannot bring in the money she once did, she faces a terrible decision as the agents of the sheikh come calling once more.

In 1977, Jeremy Tunstall published the landmark The Media Are American. In it, he argued that while much of the mass media originated in Europe and elsewhere, the United States dominated global media because nearly every mass medium became industrialized within the United States. With thisprovocative follow-up, Tunstall chronicles the massive changes that have taken place in the media over the past forty years--changes that have significantly altered the balance of power within the global media landscape. The Media Were American demonstrates that both the United States and its massmedia have lost their previous moral leadership. Instead of sole American control of the world news flow, we now see a world media structure comprised of interlocking national, regional, and cultural systems. From a relentlessly global point of view, Tunstall looks closely at China and India--and at their rapidly burgeoning populations--and also at the rise of the mass media in the Muslim world. He considers the role of the media in the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ascendance of the Brazilian andMexican soap opera, the increasing strength of Bollywood --the national cinema output of India--and the relative decline in influence of U.S. media. Reconsidering the very notion of global media, the book posits a reemergence of stronger national cultures and national media systems.

International Communication examines the profound changes that have taken place, and are continuing to take place at an astonishing speed, in international media and communication since the turn of the new millennium. Building on the success of the first edition, the second edition maps out the expansion of media and telecommunications corporations within the macro-economic context of liberalization, deregulation, and privatizeation. It then goes on to explore the impact of such growth on audiences in differentcultural contexts and from regional, national, and international perspectives. Each chaper contains engaging case studies, on for example Al-Jazeera, the global reach of Bollywood, and the globalization of reality television, which exemplify the main concepts and arguments. InternationalCommunication, 2nd edition, is essential reading for all communication and media studies students. * The only single-authored volume which deals coherently with the complex global political, economic and technological context in which media and culture operate. * Fully updated to include developments since the turn of the new millennium.* Brand new case studies throughout, including the Murdochization of media, the al-Jazeera phenomenon, mobile communication and China and global media. * Brand new pedagogical features, including discussion questions, further reading and notes on key terms, to ensure accessibility.

Even before M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam) debuted in 2005 with ARULAR, the blogosphere was already abuzz about her, engaging in the kind of discourse normally reserved for academic dissertations. Whether hailed as a canny postmodern pastiche or dismissed as inauthentic cultural pirating, the music, a lively pan-global mash-up of regional dance music styles, seemed to be emanating simultaneously from every ghetto, favela, and council-flat within earshot. As if to call out her detractors, M.I.A. returns for another shot of explosive, politically charged and globally conscious dance music on her second album, KALA. Lacking the patchwork quality of the debut, KALA is a more cohesive and polished affair, though it matches its predecessor for shear visceral thrills. Recorded across several different continents, and featuring the production talents of Timbaland, Switch, and Blaqstarr, as well as longstanding collaborator Diplo, the globetrotting beat makers mine sources as varied as funk carioca, Baltimore bounce, and the occasional ludicrously placed sound-effect (a squawking chicken). The gloriously bombastic lead single, Boyz, kicks off the party with a blaring horn loop, carnival percussion, and a stuttering Bollywood vocal sample, while M.I.A. merrily chants the chorus in her sing-song faux patois. The twittering, beat-heavy Bird Flu sounds a bit like what you might expect--jagged beats create syncopated poly-rhythms, while birds chirp feverishly against Arulpragasam's bratty invective. But the irreverent cultural re-appropriation doesn't stop at her borrowing from the third world; clever nods to the Clash, New Order, and even Jonathan Richman appear in unexpected and cheeky combinations, offering further proof that M.I.A.'s potent cross-cultural grab bag is as sonically audacious as ever.

From the Publisher: It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortured. So begins this epic, mesmerizing first novel set in the underworld of contemporary Bombay. Shantaram is narrated by Lin, an escaped convict with a false passport who flees maximum security prison in Australia for the teeming streets of a city where he can disappear.Accompanied by his guide and faithful friend, Prabaker, the two enter Bombay's hidden society of beggars and gangsters, prostitutes and holy men, soldiers and actors, and Indians and exiles from other countries, who seek in this remarkable place what they cannot find elsewhere.As a hunted man without a home, family, or identity, Lin searches for love and meaning while running a clinic in one of the city's poorest slums, and serving his apprenticeship in the dark arts of the Bombay mafia. The search leads him to war, prison torture, murder, and a series of enigmatic and bloody betrayals. The keys to unlock the mysteries and intrigues that bind Lin are held by two people. The first is Khader Khan: mafia godfather, criminal-philosopher-saint, and mentor to Lin in the underworld of the Golden City. The second is Karla: elusive, dangerous, and beautiful, whose passions are driven by secrets that torment her and yet give her a terrible power.Burning slums and five-star hotels, romantic love and prison agonies, criminal wars and Bollywood films, spiritual gurus and mujaheddin guerrillas--this huge novel has the world of human experience in its reach, and a passionate love forIndia at its heart. Based on the life of the author, it is by any measure the debut of an extraordinary voice in literature.

By bringing queer theory to bear on ideas of diaspora, Gayatri Gopinath produces both a more compelling queer theory and a more nuanced understanding of diaspora. Focusing on queer female diasporic subjectivity, Gopinath develops a theory of diaspora apart from the logic of blood, authenticity, and patrilineal descent that she argues invariably forms the core of conventional formulations. She examines a range of South Asian diasporic literature, film, and music in order to suggest alternative ways of conceptualizing community and collectivity across disparate geographic locations. Her deft readings challenge nationalist ideologies by bringing to light that which has been rendered illegible or impossible within diaspora: the impure, inauthentic, and non-reproductive. Gopinath juxtaposes diverse texts to indicate the range of oppositional practices, subjectivities, and visions of collectivity that fall outside not only mainstream narratives of diaspora, colonialism, and nationalism but also most projects of liberal feminism and gay and lesbian politics and theory. She considers British Asian music of the 1990s alongside alternative media and cultural practices. Among the fictional works she discusses are V. S. Naipaul's classic novel A House for Mr. Biswas, Ismat Chugtai's short story The Quilt, Monica Ali's Brick Lane, Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy, and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night. Analyzing films including Deepa Mehta's controversial Fire and Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding, she pays particular attention to how South Asian diasporic feminist filmmakers have reworked Bollywood's strategies of queer representation and to what is lost or gained in this process of translation.Gopinath's readings are dazzling, and her theoretical framework transformative and far-reaching.

Many cultures have myths about self-imitation, stories about people who pretend to be someone else pretending to be them, in effect masquerading as themselves. This great theme, in literature and in life, tells us that people put on masks to discover who they really are under the masks theyusually wear, so that the mask reveals rather than conceals the self beneath the self.In this book, noted scholar of Hinduism and mythology Wendy Doniger offers a cross-cultural exploration of the theme of self-impersonation, whose widespread occurrence argues for both its literary power and its human value. The stories she considers range from ancient Indian literature throughmedieval European courtly literature and Shakespeare to Hollywood and Bollywood. They illuminate a basic human way of negotiating reality, illusion, identity, and authenticity, not to mention memory, amnesia, and the process of aging. Many of them involve marriage and adultery, for tales of sexualbetrayal cut to the heart of the crisis of identity.These stories are extreme examples of what we common folk do, unconsciously, every day. Few of us actually put on masks that replicate our faces, but it is not uncommon for us to become travesties of ourselves, particularly as we age and change. We often slip carelessly across the permeable boundarybetween the un-self-conscious self-indulgence of our most idiosyncratic mannerisms and the conscious attempt to give the people who know us, personally or publicly, the version of ourselves that they expect. Myths of self-imitation open up for us the possibility of multiple selves and the infiniteregress of self-discovery.Drawing on a dizzying array oftales-some fact, some fiction-The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was is a fascinating and learned trip through centuries of culture, guided by a scholar of incomparable wit and erudition.

A brilliantly illuminating portrait of Bombay and its people-a book as vast, diverse, and rich in experience, incident, and sensation as the city itself-from an award-winning Indian-American fiction writer and journalist. A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us a true insider's view of this stunning city, bringing to his account a rare level of insight, detail, and intimacy. He approaches the city from unexpected angles-taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs who wrest control of the city's byzantine political and commercial systems . . . following the life of a bar dancer who chose the only life available to her after a childhood of poverty and abuse . . . opening the doors onto the fantastic, hierarchical inner sanctums of Bollywood . . . delving into the stories of the countless people who come from the villages in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks-the essential saga of a great city endlessly played out. Through it all-as each individual story unfolds-we hear Mehta's own story: of the mixture of love, frustration, fascination, and intense identification he feels for and with Bombay, as he tries to find home again after twenty-one years abroad. And he makes clear that Bombay-the world's largest city-is a harbinger of the vast megalopolises that will redefine the very idea of the city in the near future. Candid, impassioned, funny, and heartrending, Maximum City is a revelation of an ancient and ever-changing world.