Students and teachers learn a valuable lesson from Bollywood

Bollywood

Even as Indian films tried to make a splash abroad with an offering of 65 films in this year's Cannes Film Market, they have been making waves of a different kind at home. Bollywood, which has been ruling the hearts and minds of Indians like a powerful religion, is now entering ordinary schools and colleges all over the country.

People associate Bollywood with colourful, fomulaic song-and-dance melodramas. Even though a few exceptions in the form of songless thrillers (Ek Haseena Thi; Ab Tak Chhappan; Darna Zaroori Hai, Being Cyrus) have been thrown in lately, the fact remains that Bollywood has not been taken seriously, not even in India. It has always been treated as the producer of fairy tale fantasies, as an opiate for the masses. This is despite Bollywood being the world's biggest film-producing centre, churning out as many as 800 films a year, netting revenues of an estimated US$1.25 billion according to 2004 figures by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

But things are slowly changing.

In April this year, India's Central Board of Secondary Education, a premier educational body, announced the inclusion of Sholay (Embers, 1975), one of India's most-loved blockbusters, into an Oxford University Press course workbook for Class V students.

This is a historic development both for the schools and the Indian film industry. With its inclusion in textbooks, Sholay becomes India's first film to be taught in the country's schools.

Sholay has many distinctions to its credit, the latest being the academic one. It is the vaudeville story of two outlaws (played by Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra) hired by an honest police officer to nab a dreaded robber, Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan). Sholay has been loved by generations of Indians, and it enjoys the distinction of being India's first 'biryani western'. It is the highest-grossing Indian film of all time, bringing in US$50 million at the box office.