Directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2007 Sony Pictures’ "Saawariya(Beloved)" is based on Dostoyevsky's short story "White Nights." Sonam Kapoor & Ranbir Kapoor starred in the film. Two souls arrive in a small town, one on vacation, the other to meet a lover. They spend the most magical dream-like days of their lives in that town ... with each other.

Hollywood’s march has been relentless. Much like the Coke and the Mac, the American movie industry has captured just about every bit of the world with its neat scripts, amazing production values and often wonderful direction and performances. One of the greatest masters of cinema, Satyajit Ray, was never ashamed of admitting that he learnt the technique from Hollywood. But, of course, he used it to tell Indian stories and in his own distinct way. The Ray touch was unmistakable in his films.

The importance of local flavour cannot be ignored. The Germans would like to make their cinema with the German stamp. The Italians would, the French as well and for that matter anybody else. Therein lies the clash between Hollywood — with its big bucks, catchy publicity stunts and, well, sometimes muscle power – and other movie industries.

In the early 2000s when I was in Japan researching into its cinema, I found to my utter horror that Japanese motion pictures were poorly patronised. There were times when cinemas screened brand new films for just me! I was all alone in the hall. But when I walked a few blocks away to another theatre showing an American work, the queue of people armed with bags of popcorn and cans of Pepsi seemed endless.

In fact, the Hollywood invasion of Europe began to threaten the European movie industry to such an extent at one point of time, that France, Italy and Spain among others sought their respective governments’ intervention to save their own cinema. Such a protectionist policy worked to an extent.

However, in India, the story was entirely different. Hollywood found an invincible force in India with its massive cinema industry. About 1,300 films were made here in 2008 alone. The big American studios have been trying hard to take over the enormously lucrative Indian market for many years. India is a movie-mad country, where more than three billion tickets are sold every year. In 2008, the country’s film industry registered a 13.4 percent increase over 2007.

But unlike most international markets, foreign movies are an afterthought in India, accounting for a meagre five percent (35 percent in France, 33 percent in Japan and 12 percent in the U.K.) of the total market share. India’s 1.3 billion people find cinema to be the cheapest form of entertainment that helps them escape the dreariness of their own lives.

However, when Tom Cruise or Nicole Kidman or Brad Pitt or Scarlett Johansson came on the screen, sometimes even talking in one of the innumerable Indian languages that were dubbed on their own English voices, the average Indian was not quite happy. He wanted his own desi heroes and heroines to play out titillating songs and dances or engage in unbelievable fight sequences and illogical arguments.
Dubbing cannot woo a billion Indians, Sony realised after Hollywood went on that spree. A film in English can attract five million viewers. Dubbing pushes it to 30 million, but that is still a mere fraction of India’s cinema-obsessed populace.