Kamin Mohammadi

Bollywood Boy by Justine Hardy Published by John Murray on 18 April, £16.99

this book review appeared in Geographical magazine, April 2002

Bollywood is big. In India, some 20 million people every day attend the cinema. And when you consider that many of these ‘cinemas’ are just a screen erected in the middle of a village, the whole community thronging around the flickering picture, it makes this popularity even more extraordinary. And this year, it is set to make it big in the West too: there are Hollywood films in the pipeline, the Victoria and Albert Museum are staging a Bollywood exhibition this summer and Andrew Lloyd Webber is producing ‘Bombay Dreams’, a musical set to hit the West End in June. So Justine Hardy’s new book, ‘Bollywood Boy’, couldn’t come at a better time.

Hardy’s fourth book delves into the weird and wonderful world that is Bollywood, the subcontinent’s phenomenally successful film industry. Its largely rural audience demands a diet of frothy escapism to take them away from the harsh realities of their everyday lives. And Bollywood provides it in spades, serving up a steady menu of action-packed musicals filled to bursting with fantastical story lines, elaborate song and dance routines, muscle-bound leading men and heartbreakingly beautiful leading ladies. Hardy’s books are characterised by her playful style and a light touch, her customary wit and poignant observation never more acute than when detailing the grimer sides of life in one of the world’s most populous countries (her second book ‘Scoop Wallah’ was nominated for the Thomas Cook and Daily Telegraph Travel Book Award last). In this, her best book yet, she captures the glitz of Bollywood while laying bare the sinister underbelly of a business enmeshed with the underworld, using as her central ploy the year-long tracking of Hrithik Roshan, Bollywood’s brightest new star, down for an interview.

So fully does Hardy recreate the excitement of this world that you should come to the book prepared for a full conversion to this vivid, spangly world. Brilliant fun.