Free Sideways on a Scooter by Miranda Kennedy Page B

myself of the Indian families I saw who seemed content simply sitting together, even if they didn’t talk at all. With my own friends and family, I’d always felt I had to be dynamic and funny, and to prove myself by announcing fantastic plans for the future. Geeta and Nanima freed me from that pressure: We rarely did more than sit around watching TV. Since my hippie parents had essentially banned TV during my childhood, this was a great luxury in itself.
    I’d join Geeta downstairs in her apartment when she got home from work, relieved to escape my dusty
barsati
, which by the end of the day often felt like an isolated prison cell. When I wasn’t traveling, I worked alone up there. One night Geeta whipped up a batch of frothy Punjabi milkshakes called
lassis
, and we settled in on Nanima’s sofa to channel surf. Geeta flicked past a CNN report, a grave-faced mullah ona Pakistani prayer channel, and a hyperbolic anchor on an Indian news show.
    “Look at all this. It’s amazing how much India has changed in my own lifetime.” Geeta seemed to consider it her duty to impress on me the breadth of her country’s advancement in the last two decades, as if she was doing her bit to ensure that the transformed India would no longer be ignored by the developed world. India had only one TV channel when she was growing up, she said. The state-owned Doordashan network had held a complete monopoly on the airwaves since the first television broadcast in India in 1959.
    “It was just endless footage of government ribbon-cutting ceremonies. You wouldn’t believe how dull.” As a child she’d lived for Wednesday evenings, when Doordashan would broadcast a half-hour show of film songs.
    It wasn’t until 1995 that the Supreme Court declared the government monopoly on broadcasting unconstitutional and private broadcasters flooded in. By the time I moved to India, you could watch hundreds of shows—news, reality TV, and prime-time soap operas—in dozens of Indian languages, all for a cable fee of four dollars a month. But even in its improved state, television takes a secondary place in Indian pop culture to film. Some twelve million people a day go to the movies, whether to a multiplex in a big city or to a village temple where new releases are projected on a sheet on the side of the building.
    In India, the movies mean Bollywood, the film industry whose name conflates Hollywood with Bombay, where the first Hindi-language film was made. Even after Bombay was renamed Mumbai in an effort to free the city of its colonial legacy, Bollywood stayed Bollywood. It churns out at least two hundred films a year, each costing less than a million dollars—a sixth of the average price tag of a Hollywood film. Prolific, popular, song-filled, and sentimental, Bollywood films almost always swoon over the three-hour mark. As a result, they all have intermissions, during which theater concession stands rake it in selling spicy veggie burgers, samosas, and “American snacks” such as caramel popcorn.
    Movie soundtracks are Bollywood’s best promotional tool. In the weeks before a big studio release, music videos of the songs take over the TV channels. The songs are recorded by an army of unseen “playback singers” but are associated in perpetuity with the actors who have lip-synched them. I’d hear Geeta humming a new film tune, and later that day, Joginder’s cell phone would announce itself with the same song. India’s star culture is even more obsessive than our own. Hollywood has the celebrity website TMZ, but in India, Bollywood gossip isn’t relegated to the niche media: it is often a top story on the nightly news. Many movie stars have actual, real-life shrines erected to them, and when they are not literally being worshipped, their faces are everywhere, from well-produced TV ads for toothpaste to hand-painted movie billboards on rural unpaved roads.
    Bollywood’s biggest romantic hero, Shah Rukh Khan, is best known as “King