12/21/2003 » Film

(via Not Really Indian) Bollywood films are tailoring themselves for the UK and U.S. markets. It's that old bugaboo, the exchange rate:

Bollywood's latest export ['Kal Ho Naa Ho'] boasts easily the highest per-screen average of any movie currently playing in the UK. .. "The export market for Hindi films is especially important ... A ticket in London is 10 times the cost of a ticket in even the most upmarket theatre in India."

Though groan-out-loud, soap-opera histrionic, KHNH is emotional in a way that Hollywood films rarely are, its Manhattan shots golden, its instrumental theme soaring. Like Romance language countries, Italy-Spain-France, Indian culture aces texture; yet precisely for that reason, for its value for family, warmth and what's generously known as a relaxed sense of time, Indian industries kowtow to people of Indian origin overseas with twice or thrice the spending power of natives.

On the one hand, the dollar vs. rupee differential lets us second generation whippersnappers go to India and hang with movie stars; it lets us spend a month of a Mumbai i-banker's salary on fancy Indian clothing without a second thought, it lets our parents retire in India and live as wealthy. It powers call centers and R&D campuses owned by U.S. companies.

On the other, it upends the familial balance of power. It's painful watching elder visitors from India count and re-count every penny when shopping; lions should never be reduced to little children, noses pressed against the glass of a candy store window. It is a very particular humiliation to watch people converting prices into rupees and realize that much of what you take for granted is out of their reach, unless purchased in India itself. It's nice that the KHNH crew filmed in my daily hangouts, but they shouldn't have to. They should be able to tell their own stories.

It's tempting to shrug and say it's purely currency arbitrage, which currencies anonymous traders decide to invest in on any particular day, that lecherous invisible hand. But it's more than that-- the exchange rate is rooted in an economy's strength, which is rooted in culture, individual priorities writ large. And so, perversely, it's that old beauty-brains, work-fun, yin-yang tradeoff: that which makes Indian pop culture so tremendously satisfying, also makes it fiscally weak.

The exchange market isn't restricted to Bollywood, of course. The hierarchy of cool has been with us for ages, boring i-bankers have bought and funded great music, films and books in a patronage tradition dating to the Medicis, the Mughal empire's court poets, the spice and textile trades. Those who work long hours and are fiscally well off often have a functional, utilitarian aesthetic and are intrinsically uncool; those who ooze cool are often starving artists. But once a market is made, a frenzied trade commences. The wealthy want to be associated with cool; once artists get why anyone wealthy funds an indie film or a Broadway show, they milk their newfound understanding with abandon.