Word: manhattanization
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...the 1890s, New York City was unrepentantly wide open. Day or night, a man with a thirst or a letch or the urge to gamble could satisfy his cravings with ease. Long past midnight, small bands played in dozens of Manhattan concert saloons while prostitutes in floor-length dresses trawled the tables. Streetwalkers divvied up the various corners in the Tenderloin, and touts handed out cards for $1-a-date Bowery brothels. Bettors wanting action could wander into Frank Farrell's crystal-chandeliered casino on West 33rd Street. Tourists could smoke opium in no-frills dens in Chinatown...
...collective known as Subway Cinema. Back around the turn of the millennium, they were just five guys with a dream. They loved Hong Kong action movies and wanted to see more, and share them, especially as the theaters that showed them were shuttering. The last Chinatown movie house in Manhattan, the Music Palace Theatre, went out of business in June 2000. Not only did the U.S. venues for Hong Kong cinema close down; so, pretty much, did Hong Kong cinema. Fewer movies are made in the Special Administration Region, certainly far fewer good ones...
Today Bollywood is on as many screens in midtown Manhattan as in an Indian neighborhood in Queens. The literary world has learned to pronounce Vikram and Amitav and Jhumpa, and an Amrita Sher-Gil can fetch as much as a Warhol at auction. A click on the Internet instantly conveys the burgeoning scope of South Asian cultural confidence, yielding details of hundreds of art galleries, concerts, readings, plays and indie films. When I was invited back to Harvard for a South Asian night in 2001, I was ushered into a hall brimming with 1,500 heads of shiny black hair...
...that India arrives only when the West says it does? Our movies have nourished half the world for a century, as every Russian cabdriver in Manhattan will tell you. And if the West is now waking up to our energy and confidence, will we be tempted to change? Will Oscar fever mean we temper our spice to suit Western palates? Will the few Indian actors and directors cherry-picked by Hollywood shove the khadi and brocade under the carpet and make chick flicks on Fifth Avenue...
...counting, the city, formally known as Mumbai, is projected by 2015 to be the planet's second most populous metropolis, after Tokyo. But it's already a world of its own. Walk down its teeming streets, and you'll encounter crime lords and Bollywood stars, sprawling slums and Manhattan-priced condos, and jam-packed bars where DJs play the music of the Punjab, bhangra--a pulsating sound track familiar to clubgoers in London and New York City. Bombay is where Wall Street gets equities analyzed, where Kellogg, Brown & Root sources kitchen staff for the U.S. Army in Iraq, and where...