From ‘Bollywood Boom. India's Rising Soft Power’ by Roopa Swaminathan

….Syria, where Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan is the only public figure, other than Syria’s political leaders………..

In ‘Bollywood and Africa: A Love Story’, Sylviane Diouf states that Senegal has a history of supporting and watching Bollywood films……Akon, originally from Dakar, the capital city of Senegal, grew up watching, loving and singing Hindi songs…….

What Kunti was to Indian mythology, Mother India was and is to Indian cinema………a pioneering, landmark and a solidly feminist film.

And this movie, till date, remains the most beloved and sought after in all of Africa.

This idealized image of a woman and a mother was and still is revered as ‘the movie’ of all time in the African continent. African women wanted to be and still want to be like Mother India….they have seen it multiple times…..while they may not understand the meaning of the words in the movie, they’ve seen it enough times to be able to mouth the words verbatim……Cultural geographer Brian Larkin shares a comment made by a distributor ….at Kano in 1997: ‘I have been showing this film for decades, and it can still sell out any cinema in the north.’

Bachchan ruled the Bollywood roost as he ruled the African roost. ….African men seethed and simmered with him…….other Indian actors who Africans loved. These were typically male actors who looked tough and acted even tougher….Dharmendra….was nicknamed ‘Sarkin Karfi’ or ‘King of Strength’. ….Sanjay Dutt ……was ….called ‘Dan Daba Mai Lasinor’, a hooligan with a license!

Bollywood’s influence is strongest in Nigeria, especially within the Hausa community in northern Nigeria……. Bollywood arrived in the African continent in the 1950s……became…big in Nigeria in the 1980s ……..Brian Larkin, a communications scholar…in the late 1990s, visited Kano, the capital city of Hausa in northern Nigeria, and was more than a little surprised to find that Indian films were shown five nights a week in the local cinema as opposed to just one night a week for Hollywood cinema. In his extremely illuminating paper called ‘Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities’, Larkin also found that video stores at Kano reserved the majority of their stock for Indian cinema, followed by Hollywood and Chinese films…..Despite the incredible reach of Hollywood films in the African market from the 1950s, it was the much less distributed Bollywood films that found favour with the people of Hausa. Like the rest of the African continent, Larkin attributes Hausa’s obsession with our cinema to the sense of belonging that the Hausans felt with India and Indians…..they ‘connected’ and felt that they were a part of the ‘imagined Indian community’. ….Perhaps the most significant aspect of Bollywood’s extraordinary success in Hausa is that it happened despite the lack of a significant Indian diaspora community to either support, spread or popularize Bollywood cinema, and neither is there any evidence that the Indian government at the time even knew or flexed their soft power in Nigeria…..happened before the rise of the Internet…..Nigerians did not read, write or speak any Indian language ……Increasingly, the predominantly Muslim women in Hausa, who practiced the veil, loved Bollywood movies, because despite the extremely paternalistic and patriarchal nature of Bollywood films at the time, the films also showed how well the main male leads in the movies treated their wives or girlfriends. ….where the men would do anything – all in the name of love – in order to win the women they fell in love with. From caste and class differences to taking on parents and potential in-laws to societal norms, they took on all of this and more and did it with flamboyant flair. ….These somewhat overwrought themes resonated with the Muslim women of Hausa who then hoped their men would replicate such behavior……..

……Larkin said that the older Bollywood films appealed to the very Muslim, traditional, modest Hausa women, and the chaste representation of love in these films attracted them, dreaming of having such a love for themselves within the confines of a traditional and patriarchal society like Kano seemed very possible unlike the blatant images and content of Hollywood films. The sheer exuberance of Bollywood’s songs and dances also appealed to members of the African society whose culture was representative of such oral traditions of music and dance.

 …..In parts of Africa, Bollywood music was appropriated into what Africans call Bandiri music. The Bandiri musicians in Nigeria added their own words to Bollywood film music, which are typically in praise of Prophet Muhammed. ……Evidence paints disturbingly ludicrous images of Bandiri singers singing Bollywood songs in praise of the Prophet, as pictures of the lead actor in the said film are shown doing push-ups or romancing the lead actress……is robust evidence of the great depth and reach of Bollywood in a state that has otherwise no lingual or religious commonality with India.....Indian films also inspired a small cottage industry of book publishing in Hausa. These books were romances written mostly by women and dealt with themes very common to Bollywood cinema ………They were called littatafan soraya or love stories and they were part Mills and Boon and part Bollywood.

…..Nollywood has grown rapidly, producing more than 2,000 films a year. ….is third in the global hierarchy when it comes to production numbers, next only to Hollywood and Bollywood…….Nollywood films are all made for video and none of them are made for or get a theatrical release.  ………While Igbo is one of the most widely used languages in Nigeria……..Nigeria is populated with people who speak more than 5,000 languages and dialects…. More than two-thirds of all Nollywood films are in English. ……..The rapid rise of Nollywood signaled a simultaneous slide in Bollywood films’ popularity in Africa. One of the main reasons was that the look of Bollywood films from the 1990s changed. Globalization allowed Bollywood to discover its diaspora audience from the West …….This meant Bollywood films needed to be more sophisticated, deal with more universal themes, be less patriarchal, show more kissing and love-making on screen – all of which the still traditional and conservative African audiences felt more and more difficult to identify with. ……Another key reason for Bollywood’s relative decline in Nigeria and other parts of Africa in the 1990s was the closing down of movie theaters in the region ….in Cote d’Ivoire, videos mimic Bollywood stories but instead are in French and Dioula….Women in Mali still love Bollywood films but cannot watch them any more since the movie theatres have closed down……..In Benin, Bollywood….is causing problems for movie theatre owners who feel they can show other shorter, ninety-minute Nollywood or Hollywood films and have more shows a day as opposed to the three hours of an average Bollywood film. In Cameroon, journalist Jacques Mang says that the fervor with which Indian cinema was consumed has perhaps gone down. …….. ‘In the popular imagination, Indian cinema nonetheless remains a cinema of contemplation, of sublimation of love, of the wondrous, of enchantment, but also of magic and witchcraft – themes that are also explored in Nollywood and popular African cinema.’

As the content in Bollywood films changed and started to represent a modern and dynamic image of women in India, so did African women’s perspective and they started appreciating these changes. Larkin points out that the women of Hausa in the 1990s became more self-assured and wanted the men in their lives to acknowledge and appreciate them as well as respect their independence like the men in Bollywood films did.

…..older Bollywood films had worked because they represented a counterpoint to the much more liberal, sexualized world represented by Hollywood. ……..Now women in Bollywood wore modern clothes, danced in discos and were more upfront about what they wanted and went about getting it.

And that was no longer acceptable in a still patriarchal and conservative Africa.

……….top Nigerian producer and director Alhaji Rabi’u Haruna recently came all the way to shoot a Nigerian film in the heart of Bollywood, Mumbai. …….Alhaji claimed that he wanted to learn from Bollywood and how they went from a local industry to becoming a global industry.

Bollywood has and continues to influence Nollywood in other ways as well.

The newly appointed Nikita Khrushchev was looking for ways to allow Russians more than communist propaganda. The answer, part of a cultural period known as “Khrushchev’s Thaw” which began following Stalin’s death in 1953, was to let in Bollywood films. The then Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was tilting towards Moscow…….films from Mumbai were preferable……what was it about Bollywood that appealed to Russians in 1950?

Many Russian intellectuals, commentators and opinion columnists at the time allude to the simplicity of the films that came out of Bollywood. The themes were very simple. Good always won over bad. There were no shades of grey in Indian cinema. The protagonists, who were often middle-class folks trying to eke out a living (much like the Russians themselves), found joy in the smaller, day-to-day activities of their lives, and the song-and-dance sequences were welcome breaks ….also for the audiences watching the movies.

In contrast, the capitalist-propagating, jazzy and glossy-looking oeuvre that came out of Hollywood seemed to rub the Soviets in their faces and was total anathema to the Russians. Indian cinema, with its simplicity and lack of any capitalistic sentiments, was a perfect fit. During the 1950s and 1960s, Russia formally imported up to twenty Bollywood films every year. The movies were dubbed in Russian and had theatrical releases …….Russian movie owners bought a print for a Bollywood movie, played it in their theatre for as long as the movie ran and then sold it forward to another theatre owner. Bollywood films travelled from one end of the country to the other and showed in every major city in the very large USSR….

Awara arrived in russia four years after it was released in India, in 1950, and with it Raj Kapoor became one of India’s most beloved ambassadors to the Soviet Union. …..Why was Raj Kapoor so popular? …..the overwhelming response points to one direction.

Raj Kapoor was a sexy, sexy man!

………..Raj Kapoor and his films came as a breath of fresh air. His films brought innocence and optimism to a country that was yearning for both. The simplicity of the tales appealed to a country that was threatening to cave into despair and cynicism………..

The love affair with Kapoor continued…….there’s anecdotal evidence of Russians who have seen Sangam up to fifteen times and more!

……..Mera Naam Joker ….failed miserably at the Indian box office ……..but the Russians fell in love with it.

……….two other films stand out – both for their intense popularity at the time they came out and for continuing to be popular to this date. The first one is Hema Malini’s Seeta Aur Geeta. …….the individual who perhaps rivalled Raj Kapoor with his massive popularity.

And as with Africa, the actor is Mithun Chakraborty.

From Russia to Africa, Disco Dancer catapulted Mithunda into the kind of stardom others could only dream about. I have more than a few Russian friend who can sing the song, ‘Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy’ in its entirety.

Nope.

They don’t know what the words mean.

………..Unfortunately, the honeymoon between Bollywood and Russia would end. ……the 1980s, the Soviet Union went through a breaking-up-of-their-country……..Hollywood……was finally able to make an entry into Russia. The timing was absolutely right………in a complete turnaround, the younger Russians fell in love with everything that the older generation loathed about America and American culture……..

Matthew Allen in ‘Swiss Strive to Live upto Bollywood image’ says that the Swiss government recently announced that much of their tourism income comes from Indians since almost every Bollywood film has at least one scene shot in Switzerland.

…….Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi …….all of Afghanistan would come to a veritable standstill every night at 8.30 p.m. for that was when Afghani television would broadcast the popular Indian show.

From ‘north of Ithaca’ by Eleni Gage

Other countries may offer you discoveries in manners or lore or landscape. Greece offers you something harder – the discovery of yourself.

-          Lawrence Durrell

….Thitsa Lilia replied …….On one trip from America, Patera brought a toilet seat up the mountain.’

‘But we wouldn’t sit on it!’ Thitsa Kanta giggled. ‘We weren’t used to it, so we just stand on the seat.’

….Epiros, our native province …..In Greek, when you want to say someone is stubborn, you call him or her an Epirote-head.

Of the almost 11 million people living in Greece, 4.5 million of them live in Athens.

….Epiros, the most remote province of Greece ……from the word apeiron, ‘infinity’…….Lord Byron, who visited in 1809, wrote that other regions of Greece were ‘eminently beautiful’, but were ‘nothing to Epiros….Epiros is still the least urbanized, least-touristed region of Greece. It was also the last province to win independence from the Ottoman Empire – 1913, after 460 years of Turkish domination……

He looked like a typical Greek civil servant: miserable. In a country where the average worker is lively to ebullient, I couldn’t help but notice that every government clerk was ashen-faced and unsmiling. In Greece, the waiters are amused, the soldiers are raucous, the priests, jubilant. But the civil servants are grim, harried, work out by the pressures of shuffling papers until two p.m. five days a week ………They’re exhausted by the endless toil of creating hoops for the fearful public to jump through in order to achieve their unrealistic goals of building a house, obtaining a visa or mailing a package.

…..calling his friends masturbators, that most cherished of Greek insults.

Approximately 95 per cent of Greece’s population is Greek Orthodox……

…….the innate Greek suspicion that everyone is out to cheat you….

Epiros is the poorest region in the European Union ……lack of jobs, that drove young people out of the area, emptying villages of all but pensioners and migrant workers ……..Lia was rural, but we had plumbing and electricity, which had arrived in the village in 1967. …….I could tell the villagers weren’t well-to-do….But my neighbours were so generous with their food, drink and company…….with ninety-one major saints’ days and eleven national holidays to celebrate, life became a non-stop party.

……a rather mournful tune, the traditional Epirotic music that Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote in Roumeli was ‘Exactly the kind of long-drawn-out and wailing song in a minor key, whose waverings …..bewildered and irritated Byron’s Western acquaintances’…..

…..a famous – and infamous – ritual that takes place each year near Thessaloniki, when a religious group known as the Anastenarides walks barefoot on burning coals, clutching icons of Saints Eleni and Constantine. Traditionally, in Greece, birthdays aren’t celebrated; you receive gifts and good wishes on the festival of the saint you are named after, without anyone ever mentioning how good you look for your age. …Eleni is one of the most popular Greek names for women, as Constantine is for men. ……anthropologist Loring Danforth quotes serveral articles that insist that anyone can walk on coals as hot as 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit, because coals conduct heat poorly.

…….a middle-aged man…. ‘I was the boy whose umbilical cord your grandmother ate so she could have a son,’ he explained. I nodded, pretending I knew what he meant. …… ‘That’s what they did in those days,’ he explained ……..

………Zagorohoria, a collection of forty-six grey, misty villages which cling to the edge of the mountains ……..scattered around the periphery of the Vikos Gorge, the deepest gorge in the world.

…….most anthropologists do think that since the Sarakantsanis were such an insular community, seldom intermarrying with outsiders, they are the closest ‘race’ to the Ancient Greeks…..Sarakantsani women were so modest they used to dance with their eyes cast downwards, because it would compromise them to look into a man’s eyes.

The Liotes warned me that gypsies would try to cheat me and were known to steal babies…..

‘How come the gypsies are still so poor and nomadic?’ Nikki the innkeeper asked…….. ‘Look at the Albanians – they came here and in ten years they’ve built homes, got jobs, lives. But the gypsies are cursed to roam. I’ll tell you why. Its because a gypsy smith made the nails used to crucify Christ.’

‘That’s funny,’ Antonis Makos replied. ‘In the army, a gypsy soldier told me that the Romans were going to use many nails to crucify Christ, but a gypsy stole a few, sparing him some pain. So Christ blessed the gypsies with permission to steal for ever.’

…..one thing gypsies do not lack is self-esteem……

It was five months since I’d heard the phrase ‘lactose intolerant’. In Lia, old people climbed everywhere and ate everything – the memory of years of starvation had inspired many of them to cultivate Santa-like paunches and force food on me.

….Greek Jews ……about 87 per cent died in the Holocaust. Before the war, there were 78,000 Jews in Greece. Today, Marcia said, there were about 5,000 – 3,000 living in Athens, 1,200 in Thessaloniki, and the rest in small communities elsewhere …..

Greeks are big on patron saints: islands, people, even boats have them ……..

……this joke: ‘Short summary of every Jewish holiday: They tried to kill us, they lost, lets eat.’ I quickly realized that the short summary for every Epirote song could be: ‘I’m miserable, I’m going to die in a foreign land, lets dance.’

…….the expression that Greeks always turn to in times of misery: ‘Mother, why did you give birth to me?’

…….I’d learned in Lia …everyone in Greece is involved in politics – or, at the very least, everyone considers himself an important political commentator …..nightly news broadcasts, which were often as bloody and sensationalized as an American cable TV series.

……..old ladies tend to make up Greece’s 5 per cent illiteracy rate ………

……..Dora won the race for mayor by the largest margin in Athens’s history …… Dora was the first female mayor of any major European city …….her family, who celebrated at her headquarters by Cretan line-dancing in a way I couldn’t imagine the Bushes or Karenna Gore Schiff doing…..

‘Well, I hardly ever get the evil eye, but its because of this,’ Nikki said, pointing to a small scar on her temple. ‘When I was born, parents used to burn a scar on their baby’s forehead with a hot coal or poker.’ …… ‘So the babies would be imperfect and less likely to get the mati.’ Nikki noticed my look of disgust. ‘Of course, no one does it any more!’

This was a marriage-minded society; at every holiday, all the old ladies in my village automatically wished me, ‘Next year, may you be here with a groom!’

…her complaint that ‘No one in Greece says “Have a nice day!”’ Its true that shopgirls often acted as if I was dragging them away from their real job of non-stop gossiping in order to force them to sell me something, but other Greeks I’d met more than made up for the missing ‘Have a nice day’ with continuous blessings. Instead of ‘You’re welcome,’ people respond to ‘thank you’ with ‘May you be well.’ On the first of every month, people wish, ‘Have a good month!’ And when I set off for a trip, everyone would say, ‘God be with you.’ If I actually did anyone a favour ……..then a shower of blessings would rain on me, along the lines of ‘May you live happily for a thousand years, as strong as the tall mountains, and with a good husband.’

I walked over to the fireplace, where the photo of my grandparents stared back at me. I had overseen the rebuilding of their house, and in return the house had stopped time for me, allowing me to live in a village full of grandparents, a place where people treated me like a beloved daughter. As I looked at the photo of my grandparents, who died oceans apart, I realized that every happy family is a tragedy, because it exists for a limited time only. Children grow up to form their own families, parents die, and the original family is lost for ever. Every family is a civilization and all of them decline too quickly. Immersing myself in the village allowed me to extend my family a little longer, and to expand its sphere to include many people who had been there at its beginning.

From ‘Stars of India. Travels in Search of astrologers and fortune tellers’ by Peter Holt

The Indians have a hard task convincing the rest of the world that they were the first civilization to realize that the planets affect our lives…….there is virtually no documented astrological evidence. The country’s ancient history was based on the oral tradition and little was written down. ……the fervor with which her people tackle the stars indicates that the country’s astrological roots are very deep indeed.

Where else but in India will you find so many experts in prediction?

Hindu astrology has so much more appeal than the western variety. In India, your astrologer will give you a precise reading based on events that have happened, or will happen, in your life. Many western astrologers offer little more than a character analysis…the Indian version tends to be more exciting and revealing …..Until the end of the last century, Hindu and western astrology were very similar ……Event-based astrology had long been a problem in the Christian world because it appeared to impinge on free will.

He drove like any other bus-driver on the subcontinent – too fast with little regard for his passengers and even less for the oncoming trucks that he passed with inches to spare….

….Mr Patel had told me there was only one astrologer in the capital who was both highly respected and had direct access to the corridors of power. No visit to Delhi would be complete without seeing a Brahmin called K.N.Rao.

Sixty is regarded by the Hindus as a special age, when a man reaches the peak of his intellectual powers.

….Ujjain….retains a mighty vibrational spirituality….

Astrologically, Calcutta doesn’t stand a chance. Indian astrologers claim that the city’s geographical position means that it has for much of this century attracted the most negative rays that the planets can offer.

K.N.Rao and his Delhi associates believe that Calcutta has no future and that the city will be destroyed. They foretell bloodshed and upheaval.

‘Calcutta occupies about the worst place in the zodiac of anywhere in the world,’ Rao says. ‘It means that whenever any important planetary transit takes place, disastrous things happen there and in the surrounding area of Bengal. The city is in for revolutionary changes and they won’t be good.’

…the city’s Durga Puja festival ….Police commissioner Mr Tushar Talukdar was quoted in a newspaper as saying, ‘Barring a few untoward incidents, the Pujas passed off peacefully this time.’ The same newspaper article reported 1,102 arrests, three incidents of bomb-throwing between organizers and a riot in which the police fired teargas on a fifteen-hundred-strong stone-throwing mob….

Calcutta is so poverty stricken that it seems obscene …..but precious stones are one of the highest luxury expenditures for Calcutta's middle-classes. ……the state of Bengal was once one of the richest gem-producing states in India until the British milked the mines dry. Today, astro-gems are still taken more seriously in Calcutta than in any other city in the country.

………Mr Ramajogeswara Rao, reputedly one of the finest ‘nadi’ readers in India.

…..Keralans take great pride in their land almost to the point of assuming an edge of superiority over the rest of India. The change becomes obvious the moment your bus crosses the state border from Tamil Nadu. Within a mile, the road surface has improved and the housing is better. The villages vibrate with fresh coats of whitewash. The people seem to be happier and more energetic than their Tamil neighbours.

Keralans cheerfully admit that their state is the most superstitious in India

He was recovering from an ear infection which he had cured by pouring vodka into his aural canal, a remedy highly recommended by German travelers.

….the brilliant green of the jungle foliage. It is this green that Kerala is famous for. ….It is a dazzling green, brighter than the clearest emerald, a colour of extraordinary density…….

…….B.V. Raman, India’s most famous astrologer this century…

Rao’s view of the future was particularly gloomy for Europe. He predicted the collapse of the European Union and economic turmoil. Of all the western countries, Britain would face the toughest time.

‘I don’t see the end of the world, but I definitely predict that world culture will undergo a total change and the superpowers will vanish. England will suffer greatly. I don’t see much future for England beyond the year 2000.’