'Bombay Velvet' is my first film in a trilogy about Bombay, before it became a metropolis.
More dreams are realised and extinguished in Bombay than any other place in India.
Most of the top actors and actresses may be working in ten or twelve films at the same time, so they will give one director two hours and maybe shoot in Bombay in the morning and Madras in the evening. It happens.
Well the Bombay film wasn't always like how it is now. It did have a local industry. There were realistic films made on local scenes. But it gradually changed over the years.
'Salaam Bombay' didn't put a halo on the poor. Instead, it said that they will teach us how to live.
Having plenty of living space has to be the greatest luxury in a city, and I guess in some sense Bombay is the antithesis of what living in Canada must be.
Even in India the Hindi film industry might be the best known but there are movies made in other regional languages in India, be it Tamil or Bengali. Those experiences too are different from the ones in Bombay.
My films play only in Bengal, and my audience is the educated middle class in the cities and small towns. They also play in Bombay, Madras and Delhi where there is a Bengali population.
Sometimes a director is making three films. Perhaps he is shooting a film in Madras and a film in Bombay and he can't leave Madras as some shooting has to be done, so he directs by telephone. The shooting takes place. On schedule.
The thing about Mumbai is you go five yards and all of human existence is revealed. It's an incredible cavalcade of life, and I love that.
A city like Bombay, like New York, that is a recent creation on the planet and does not have a substantial indigenous population, is full of restless people. Those who have come here have not been at ease somewhere else. And unlike others who may have been equally uncomfortable wherever they came from, these people got up and moved. As I have discovered, having once moved, it is difficult to stop moving.
George Bernard Shaw of England stopped over just long enough to make one speech in Bombay, India, started a war and 100 Indians killed each other. That's what I call good speech-making. The only enthusiasm any of our speakers can rouse is a demand to kill the speaker.
Let me explain something to you. Look around here. How many people do you count? Sixty, eighty, eighty people? Greeks, Germans, Italians, French, Americans. Tourists from everywhere. Eating, drinking, talking, laughing. And from Bombay - Indians and Iranians and Afghans and Arabs and Africans. But how many of these people have real power, real destiny, real dynamic for their place, and their time, and the lives of thousand of people? I will tell you - four. Four people in this room with power, and the rest are like the rest of the people everywhere: powerless, sleepers in the dream.
I'm drinking here break motor oil and Bombay gin, I'll sleep when I'm dead.
When I was in college, my brother, B.R. Chopra, who is everything to me, was a director in Bombay. He taught me filmmaking. What I am today is because of him.
I was becoming addicted to Bombay. There was squalor and poverty, but I had begun to realise my good fortune and would never again forget it.
India's way is not Europe's. India is not Calcutta and Bombay. India lives in her seven hundred thousand villages.
Traffic in the streets of Bombay is chaotic at best. Riding a bicycle is a dangerous occupation. However, there are hundreds of them on the streets competing with the cars and buses and lorries because it is the poor man's mode of transport.
Here is the full list of the banned words I used: active homosexual; career women; Third World; blacks; Asians; Australasia; Bangalore; primitive African tribes; crippled; in a wheelchair; hare lip; ethnic minorities; handicapped; spinster; committed suicide; gypsies; Bombay; illegitimate daughter; air hostess; Siamese twins; Calcutta; deaf ears; illegal asylum seeker; province of Northern Ireland; grandmother; bachelor.
All I did was write it down, one word after the other, beginning and ending with the same one, Bombay.
I do think of Bombay as my hometown. Those are the streets I walked when I was learning to walk. And it's the place that my imagination has returned to more than anywhere else.
I was very happy in Bombay. I was good at school. There was no reason to change anything. I suppose it must have been some spirit of adventure, of wanting to see the world.
In writing 'The Satanic Verses,' I think I was writing for the first time from the whole of myself. The English part, the Indian part. The part of me that loves London, and the part that longs for Bombay. And at my typewriter, alone, I could indulge this.
In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.
Some would assert that Providence was at work shaking out its pockets in Humanity's lap. Other would argue for that mindless choreographer, Chance. Either way it was a simple thing: a lost diary fell into the hands of a soul-sick war hero on a train from Bombay to Jaipur just when he'd grown tired of the scenery and needed something to keep his thoughts from the minefield of his wretched thoughts. In such mild ways is the groundwork laid for first kisses and ruined lives.
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