(CT#1)
It's funny how important walking down the Mall to look for guys is to everyone here. Maybe because real relationships are so constricted (the normal reason for two teens to break up is "her parents found out, now her brother's probably going to come and try to beat me up," as Rahul Nidhi's friend put it, and the idea of a girl calling a boy or vice versa is almost unheard of) so things that to me seem fit for middle school - crushes, friends-as-messengers, code words ("one-four-three" means "I love you", for example), etc - are common among 17-18-year-olds here. And relationships that actually do occur are far more low-key than at home - many people won't even kiss before marriage, and the farthest you'll go is maybe seeing a movie together and (*scandalous!*) holding hands. So girls will walk slowly up and down the Mall for hours waiting for their secret -or not-so-secret - crush to pass by and then when he does, not say anything except maybe "Hi". It all seems very juvenile to one who comes from a culture of 14-year-old mothers and abstinence being prudish, but I guess it makes sense here.
(CT#2)
At Nidhi's friend's house, we watched an amazing movie called (translation) "Color Me in Saffron" (Saffron is the color of sacrifice in India) about a British woman who goes to India to film a documentary about the freedom fighters of the revolution. In the process of filming, the actors (a bunch of carefree and careless college students) begin to understand the passion of the revolutionaries they're acting, and then when one of their friends is killed in a government oversight they follow their characters footsteps to fulfill the words of one of them: "Our country isn't perfect, no country is. We have to work to make it perfect." It's the most Hollywood-ish Bollywood movie I've ever seen, and it was really powerful.
But I'm enjoying Bollywood more and more here, it's truly a completely different genre than Hollywood and can't be judged by the same standards, because the mentality of the people is different. While with Hollywood we want something that will remind us of our own lives, the Indians crave an ideal world where the only troubles are who's marrying whom and when they'll realize that they're in love. (Ok, that's an oversimplification, but in general, the world of Bollywood is more idealized than that of Hollywood) Almost exclusively the movies end happily with a marriage or two, even if the movie isn't supposed to be about love, so the term "Hollywood ending" seems pointless - it should be Bollywood Ending, because Hollywood doesn't end like that nearly as often. And since every movie is peppered with songs and dances, it's more important for an actor to be a good dancer than a good actor, and (for guys at least, sigh) looks come third on the list. There are maybe seven actors of each gender that do basically all the movies, so you see the same combination of actors many times playing different characters. Many of the stories are universal, cheesy romantic comedies in Bollywood are basically cheesy romantic comedies in Hollywood - except they're probably about 5 x up on the cheese factor - but the story's the same. I love Bollywood style though, and I'm going to miss it when I get back to a Hollywood-dominated culture.
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