• But I believe besides the commercial angle, there is always a convenience angle to NRI films because you’ve got everybody in one hotel for a fixed number of dates.

There is that too. You know, you go for a three-month-long outdoor and it’s really a great shoot. And you shoot together. No one has anything else to do. So they land up shooting for you. So there is also a convenience issue.

• But how did this fascination come to be? The letter K we’ll talk about later. But now, let’s talk of the NRI setting. Did you figure out that there was going to be this big NRI market?

Not at all. I never planned it. It just so happens that my sensibilities match the sensibilities of the viewing audience there. I never planned even when I wrote my first film Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. It just so happened that it found a huge audience outside of the country. And thereon, every time I made a film, it was basically me. It seemed to have matched the sensibility of an NRI audience. I make films for Indians. They could be living anywhere. They could be living here, they could be living in Bihar.

• But there is an NRI market now, and very lucrative.

Yes, and it’s very strong. More than an NRI market, there is an emerging non-Asian market. There are Germans, there is a French audience, there’s a Polish audience. There is an audience in Korea and Japan that are watching our films and contributing tremendously to the economy of our cinema. And they’re actually loving the soul and the content of (Indian) cinema, which makes me very proud.

... contd.