Elixir Magazine India Edition Bollywood (Vimal Verma)

It is often said, India has two religions, Cricket and Bollywood. The name Bollywood is derived from the city of Bombay, now known as Mumbai, where the Hindi motion film Industry is centralized. Bollywood is one of the largest centers of film production in the world. In recent years it has overtaken Hollywood in terms of revenue earned.

The most popular genre in Bollywood since the 1970s has been the masala film, which freely mixes different genres including action, comedy, romance, drama and melodrama along with musical numbers. Alongside masala films, a distinctive genre of art films known as parallel cinema has also existed, presenting realistic content and avoidance of musical numbers. In more recent years, the distinction between commercial masala and parallel cinema has been gradually blurring, with an increasing number of mainstream films adopting the conventions which were once strictly associated with parallel cinema.