The Great Bollywood

The Great Bollywood

Motion pictures have been around for a long time. They are popular all over the world. When people think of motion pictures, Hollywood always pops in their heads. As great and as popular as Hollywood is, there is a larger film industry in the world, and it’s not in the U.S. The largest film industry in the world is called Bollywood and it is located in Bombay, India. Bollywood puts out on the average eight hundred movies a year, which means two movies are cranked out every day. (Ninian pg 1)
The movies are shown to a eleven million people, usually ages twelve to twenty- five, everyday in over 13,000 movies theaters across India. And those numbers don’t even count other countries. All of the movies that are produced and made in India are exported to other countries, including America, England, Russia. Indian people, however, watch these movies a lot more because they are so important to them. (Ninian, pg 1)
Now the big question is why is Bollywood so important to India? Well it’s a few reasons. First off, it does supply a lot of jobs for people, Bollywood supplies jobs for more then three hundred thousand people and is India’s sixth biggest industry. But this isn’t all of why Bollywood is important to India. India is proud of Bollywood and what the industry creates, since motion pictures is very important to the country.

Motion pictures started to become big in India back in around back in the early 1900's. All the movies that were shown up until the end of the twenties were silent movies. Silent movies were popular because nothing had to be translated and different languages didn’t matter when it came to watching a movie. Hollywood made all the silent movies that were shown, although a lot of them were shot in India. Finally in the 1930's sound came around for movies and India started to produce and make movies. Since now language in movies was a big deal it was hard to know what to use, so they made most of there movies in the widely used language of Hindi- Huru. All the movies that were made all had about the same themes focusing on song and dance from India and also some different social iss...

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...dance in it. Because that is something that is so major to Indian culture and Bollywood wants to make sure that they have in that in each and every movie, it’s almost like a calling card.
So why is Bollywood so important to India? Yes it provides jobs and is very good for the economy but what is more important is that what Bollywood produces, motion pictures means so much to people of India. It’s just like what Lewis Simons from the Smithsonian says:
“For most Americans, a movie is just part of an evening out, a break between a day at the office and dinner with friends. For Indians, a Bollywood extravaganza is a means of escape, however transitory from the harshness they must endure day after day. This need for relief , say those who make and follow such films, largely explains the seemingly inexplicable hodgepodge of melodrama and music, mad cap and mayhem, terror and travvelogue that characerizes them.
Lewis Simons- Smithsonian

Bollywood will always be around as long as motion pictures are and they will always be making people happy and making their days better with a new movie.