"Whether they're making art films or masala films solidly in the mainstream, the people in the movie industry are all the same: big dreamers. In India, their dreams have to be bigger than everybody else's. In India, they're making collective dreams; when they go to sleep at night they have to dream for a billion people. This distorts their personalities. It also accounts for their egos: the demands of scale. The Bombay movie-makers are afflicted by megalomania. 'This is the beginning of a shift in orbit of Planet India, the ultimate revenge where the Indians are going to take over the Western mind. Welcome to the cultural aggression of the twenty-first century,' writes the producer Amit Khanna in a newspaper column. The Indian entertainment industry at the beginning of the twenty-first century is worth three and a half billion dollars, a minor part of the global three hundred billion dollar entertainment industry. But it is the world's biggest movie industry when it comes to production and viewership. The thousand feature films and forty thousand hours of TV programming and five thousand music titles that the country produces are exported to seventy countries. Every day, fourteen million Indians see a movie in one of thirteen thousand theatres; worldwide, a billion more people a year buy tickets to Indian movies than to Hollywood ones. TV is galloping in; the country has sixty million homes with TV, of which twenty-eight million are cabled, bringing to city and hamlet alike a choice of around a hundred channels. 'There are now more TV channels available in Mumbai than in most US cities,' Bill Clinton noted on a trip to the city in 1999."
-- Suketu Mehta, "Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found"
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