Books

Bollywood FAQ (Applause Theatre & Cinema Books)
All That’s Left to Know About the Greatest Film Story Never Told
DR. PIYUSH ROY

Bollywood, a popular nomenclature for India’s “national” film industry in the Hindi language, along with the Taj Mahal, yoga, Buddha, and Mahatma Gandhi, is one of the best-known introductions and universally recognized associations with India across the world today. Despite its predominant narrative styles not confirming to the First World European and/or American cinema structure, Indian cinema is increasingly viewed as the world’s second-most important film industry, after Hollywood, with box-office influence crossing over with European cinema.

Bollywood FAQ provides a thrilling, entertaining, and intellectually stimulating joy ride into the vibrant, colorful, and multi-emotional universe of the world’s most prolific (over 30 000 film titles) and most-watched film industry (at 3 billion-plus ticket sales). Bollywood blockbusters are simultaneously screened in theaters and cinemas in over 100 nations from the USA to Japan, New Zealand to the Netherlands, and Peru to Pakistan.

It introduces India’s maharajah-like stars and their cult-commanding stardom. Movie buffs will find a ready reckoner on iconic Bollywood films, with a bonus must-watch listing of the cinema’s most spectacular song-and-dance moments, highlighting the pleasures and popularity of a national cinema that has come to be a genre in itself.

This book is a reader-friendly reference to everything one has ever wanted to know about the spectacular, robust, humongous, colorful, and dramatic multi-generic cinematic being called Bollywood. The narrative is enriched with insider insights culled from its author’s long career as a film writer and critic in the city of Bollywood, Bombay (now Mumbai).

Alexander – An Epic Love Story (Historical fiction, Magna Publishing Pvt. Ltd., India, 2007).
Never Say Never Again (Fiction, Frog Books, 2007)

REVIEWS
Never Say Never Again The book takes the idea of love beyond the strictures of acceptability and definition and places it within a mature circle of attachment, compatibility, trust, friendship and sacrifice. (The Free Press Journal, India)

Roy’s work is removed from pseudo-fiction in the way the characters provide for the usual ingredients — romance, suspense, loss and happy ending — of a novel while at the same time, construct their actions and reactions in relation to London’s heterogeneity and globality… Roy’s use of his own transnational experiences to bear on national/cultural identity issues, and, of slang, in-jokes and slurs like ‘Paki’ to cast the characters as Londoners, is trendy. (Sanaa Riaz, Dawn, Pakistan)

‘Introduction’ chapters of four classic English novels – Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island – and the Aesop’s Fables, re-printed by Magna Publishing Co. Ltd. in India in 2010.