Word: bombay
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...HELLO, BOMBAY South Asian culture descends on the United States...
...brash young man seizes the stage of Manhattan's Broadway Theater, sings and dances to a vigorous bhangra and, feeling his rock-star-in-the-making oats, shouts, "Are ya with me, Bombay? ... Are ya with me, New York?" This scene from the new musical Bombay Dreams poses the cultural question of the moment. South Asian pop--Bollywood movies, Indian music and dance, the whole vibrant masala of subcontinental culture--not only enthralls a billion Indians at home but also spans half the world, from Africa and the Middle East to Eastern Europe and the Indian diaspora in Britain...
...international cuisine, Indi-pop culture could become a new part of American pop culture. It certainly has the energy and glamour to curry favor with more than those who favor curry. It might even gain the hipness it has in Britain--where, as Meera Syal, the original librettist of Bombay Dreams, boldly said, "Brown is the new black...
This process, notes writer Hanif Kureishi, "is inevitable, because culture moves forward by taking new and original voices from the margin and moving them into the center. You saw it with Elvis. You saw it with Toni Morrison." If Bombay Dreams is a hit, you may see it with Indian composer A.R. Rahman. You can already see it in the critical and commercial success of novelists like Kureishi, Jhumpa Lahiri, Michael Ondaatje and Arundhati Roy. Their success has led the way for a slew of South Asians, including Michelle de Kretser (from Sri Lanka), Monica Ali (from Bangladesh) and Mohsin...
Then there's Bollywood--Hollywood in Bombay and, by extension, all the country's dozen separate film industries--producing the Indian musicals that nearly everyone in America has heard of and practically no one in America has seen. Bollywood films provide the primary entertainment for half the globe; the top films earn millions more in U.S. theaters catering to Desi audiences. But Bollywood has not dented the mass, or even the class, movie public. The Oscar-nominated Lagaan took in 10 times as much in the Desi houses as it did when Sony Pictures Classics gave it a general release...