Bollywood Fantasy

A well respected industrialist with the perfect family of three sons and a daughter, a palace to house that family and an army of servants to follow their every bidding. Such is the image of a well off Indian extended family that the movie Hum Saath Saath Hain (1999) (We Seven Stand Together) portrays on the silver screen in front of the billion or so viewers.

For the 178 minutes, the audience witnesses this family going through their lives with at most luxury. They are left drooling with the hope that they too could be like the ones in the movie. The hope then fades away to burning jealousy that at this very moment there is such a family that lives in the exact same conditions as portrayed in the movie.

The Indian movie-making machine is notorious for showcasing such abnormalities. I call them abnormalities because no such family in the Indian subcontinent with enough money to live in a palace can be free from legal disputes and other ugly internal confrontations. As my proof for this statement, I take the example of the Ambani Brothers whose father owned the Reliance Industries with the net worth of over Sixty Billion Dollars. The Ambani family disputed over the distribution of wealth for years. This even lead to various court cases that finally resulted in a settlement.

Here is my proof that Bollywood sticks to a fantastical depiction of the Indian rich. This is again because the people want to see the way the rich live and imagine themselves in such a situation. The people want to see how the rich saahabs spend their days. To satisfy this voyeuristic pleasure, Bollywood keeps the fantasy alive.