Some weeks ago, it happened again. At the fag end of doing jury duty, along with five others, to select the best Indian feature films that would make it to the international film festival (IFFI), inaugurated in Goa yesterday, I was stopped in my by-then weary tracks by a combative comment from a well-known documentary film-maker, serving on a parallel jury: Oh, I feel so sorry for you, for having to go through such trash.

Instantly, I stopped feeling sorry for myself, because this is just the kind of sweeping statement I have to confront each time there’s a gathering of ‘cinema literate’ people. Okay, give me the names of ten good Bollywood movies you’ve seen in the last ten years, he says, completely convinced about the trashiness of all things Bollywood. Knowing the futility of what I’m about to embark on, I bring up a recent release. Have you seen, I ask him, Manorama, Six Feet Under?

Of course, he hasn’t. But that doesn’t stop him from carrying on. “Isn’t Manorama... a copy of (old Hollywood classic) Chinatown? When will we start making the kind of cinema that Europe, or Iran does?” With that, he heads off, leaving me, and the others at our table, feeling like we are in a time warp: for too long, this sort of derisive remark has informed debate around all mainstream cinema, and particularly movies made in Mumbai.

We all know that it isn’t as if Bollywood makes these wonderful films all the time. Too much of what comes out of mainstream assembly lines is trashy. But, and this is the thing, it is our trash. Those who dismiss our movies in so cavalier a fashion never mention trashy European cinema, and there’s a lot of that. Or those complete no-brainers that Hollywood churns out with as much enthusiasm as our own rip-off factories.

... contd.