Prepare for planet Bollywood

Blimey, not another Bollywood article! If I had a rupee for every mention of it this year I'd have, ooh, about £3.62 at the current exchange rate (maybe slightly more on the black market, I'll talk to my contacts, leave it to me).

It's a phenomenon! It's the cultural Zeitgeist! It's probably slightly galling for the thousands who have been working for years in the biggest film industry in the world (around a thousand movies a year), not to mention the millions worldwide who have grown up watching Hindi cinema and can't see what all the fuss is about. Of course the films are brilliant, we watch them, don't we?

So pencils at the ready, no peeking, how many current Bollywood featured events can you name? Well there's the ImagineAsia festival launched this month showcasing the best of South Asian cinema nationwide, there's the forthcoming movies The Guru (USA), Bollywood Queen (GB), apparently two 'Johnny Bollywood' scripts in production (no doubt leading to a titular catfight at some point), Bombay Calling showing at Cannes, Bollywood Women coming soon on C4, Bollywood month at Selfridges, Ashutosh Gowariker's Lagaan bagging an Oscar nomination, Mira Nair's Monsoon Wedding bagging the top gong at Venice, novels by William Sutcliffe (Paperback Raita) and Justine Hardy (Bollywood Boy), and of course, Bombay Dreams, the new Lloyd Webber-produced musical featuring the music of India's brilliant and beloved composer, A.R. Rahman.

Well, OK, it does indeed seem to be a zeitgeisty phenomenal thing - the hugest irony being that the term Bollywood itself is frowned upon by most people who actually work in it. Yes, it rhymes with Hollywood, but it is considered to have a demeaning, diminutive association, the slightly slow but well-meaning cousin trying on its more glamorous, confident relative's clothes. Anyone who has watched even a handful of the classic Indian movies, Mother India, Pakeezah, Awaara, will be staggered by the quality of the acting, writing, and technical accomplishment of the creative team, not to mention the genuine emotional catharsis that the film will always and unapologetically deliver.

On the other hand, anyone who has only come across one of the formulaic 'masala' movies featuring tubby heroes and panting heroines singing and dancing around trees, in fountains, up mountains, thwarting moustachioed villains with a winning blend of moral homilies and kung-fu, couldn't be blamed for being amused and possibly dismissive. Bad masala movies (and there are lots of good ones) have provided Asian comedians with countless hours of material. Oh the campy kitschness of it! The sequins and soaring violins! The obvious stereotypes of virginal good girls and westernised tramps, long-suffering mothers and snarling villains, the complete lack of self-consciousness as our couple enter a waterfall and come out dry wearing different costumes. Oh yes, we laughed - but we were laughing with them, not at them.

These movies have powerful emotional associations for those of us who grew up with them. For many British-born Asians, it was the first time we had seen people who looked like us on any screen and spoke our language.

For our parents, it was an immediate and deep link to their homeland, seeing the stars they left behind singing the same songs in a cramped cinema in Wolverhampton, or on uncle Davinder's squeaky video recorder in his front room. It was a communal family event and it fed us, hungry for affirmation that we, too, had a distinct culture and voice which was alive and vibrant. The world suddenly became smaller. You could ring up a cousin in Canada or Australia or the Middle East and chat about Amitabh's latest movie, which you would all have seen at roughly the same time. The simple, some might say simplistic, morality of the films was somehow comforting, the baddie always got his come-uppance, love won out in the end, and we had some fabulous songs and dancing along the way.

These films are not made for middle-class sophisticates but the millions of Indian villagers who want escapism and spectacle.

However, the real genius of many Hindi films is that they manage to introduce real social issues within what appears a superficial genre - domestic violence, communal tensions, police corruption, gang warfare, all have been a central theme of movies which somehow still manage to entertain and not disappoint their audience expectations. It takes genius to do that. And it's something that's hard to achieve in the West. Indian cinema has achieved effortlessly what other art forms long to do - it has endured as a universal language, reaching a people over barriers of religion, distance and income. No wonder people get narked when someone judges the whole of a genre on one bad movie with the aforementioned tubby hero and implausible plot. That's akin to judging all Hollywood films on the production values of Dumb And Dumber.

So dear reader, this is a journey I also had to travel, looking beyond the obvious dismissive and comic possibilities and coming up with a story for Bombay Dreams which not only celebrated the kitschness and pizazz of the movies, but also paid homage to their power and importance.