Bollywood, as you will all be well aware, is the informal name given to the popular Mumbai based Hindi-language film industry in India. It is a comical combination of Bombay (the fomer name of Mumbai city) and Hollywood. The term is often incorrectly used to refer to the whole of Indian cinema. Bollywood is only a part of the Indian film industry.

To me, the word has always sounded awfully tacky, and because it is so blatantly ripped of ‘Hollywood’, it automatically gives a sense of a film industry which lacks originality and confidence. It is hard for a film industry to be seen as anything more than a comical bunch of wannabes when its very name is ripped off so unashamedly.

This may sound harsh, but I’m not the only one who thinks so. In recent years a number of actors, directors and producers from the Hindi film industry have voiced their discomfiture with the term. No less a star than Amitabh Bachchan has gone on record to say how much he detests this term, which conveys second best to Hollywood. And he’s right.

So how did the term come to be in the first place? It was Amit Khanna a filmmaker and former president of the Film & Television Guild who gave birth to the contentious term in the mid seventies. He coined the term in one of his columns and the term quickly went on to spread like wildfire. A fire which unfortunately has not yet been extinguished!