More than a T-shirt

I don't know about you, but if I hear Shekhar Kapur saying once more that when Spiderman takes off his mask in the future, it will probably be an Indian or Chinese face, I will sue him for intolerable cruelty. In the past two years, Kapur has repeated this statement in practically every city in the world which has ever hosted a seminar on entertainment.

And you know what? Bollywood still has not arrived in Hollywood.

Despite Aishwarya Rai's waxwork being installed at London's Madame Tussaud's, as a publicity gimmick for Miramax's forthcoming film Bride and Prejudice. Despite the Bollywood hoochy-koochy which western reviewers say seems to have been shoe-horned into Mira Nair's Vanity Fair. And despite the fact that Bollywood's most successful export, Kapur, has not made a film in the two years since The Four Feathers.

But Bollywood crossing over may well remain our ultimate fantasy, the eternal Bombay Dream. The truth is elsewhere. Madame Tussaud's "honour" to Rai probably has a lot to do with the brown pound-15 per cent of the waxwork museum's two million-strong annual visitors belong to the Indian subcontinent. Vanity Fair opened at No. 8 in the US box office in a week when the two-year-old Chinese film, Zhang Yimou's Hero, was a topper, for the second time in a row. And the $60 million (Rs 276 crore) The Four Feathers was one of Miramax's biggest debacles in 2002, earning just $18 million at the box office.

My point is why are we so eager to be one of the big boys of global entertainment? If Hollywood prefers Australian Baz Luhrmann's remix in Moulin Rouge to the Indian-born Nair's multi-culti reinterpretation of Georgian England, so be it. If US audiences feel more comfortable with all the po-faced wirework of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, so be it again. And if Lagaan did not win a Foreign Language Oscar, at least it popularised the game of cricket.

Bollywood is not a fashion statement. It is a state of mind and it is doing very well in India and the diaspora, thank you. When it chooses to go international, it should do so on its own terms, not as a flavour-of-the-month appendage borrowed by US and UK-based directors who are doing to it what English designer Matthew Williamson did to the image of Lord Ganesha-convert it into a faddish T-shirt.