Talk:Hindi cinema/Archive 2

message: Some anonymous poster (the webmaster?) put up a new link in the external links section. I followed it and my immediate reaction was that the site was commercial, not informative. So I removed the link. 
I haven't actually checked out all the links there, and I suppose I should.  Adding links is one of the ways people try to use Wikipedia for advertising.  Zora 10:12, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: I just saw someone add the link (Bollywood Masti) back in. I followed it, and while the page is of mediocre quality, it does have large amounts of pictures of Bollywood stars, lyrics of filmi songs and several other cheap bolly-thrills without the exhortation to whip out one's credit card. I am going to leave this up to you and anon, however.--LordSuryaofShropshire 20:06, Sep 14, 2004 (UTC)
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I checked ALL the links. One was dead, one was just for one film, and several were the ring-tone/wallpaper/celeb pics sites on the order of Bollywoodmasti. I deleted all of those except Planet Bollywood and Bollywood Mantra. I'm not even sure about keeping those. They seem to be fairly informative but ... they're still more fluff than information. 
When I want to know what's hot, what's the gossip, etc., I usually go to rediff.com. But I'm not sure that's solid enough for inclusion. 
IMHO, links should be to sites with useful information that goes beyond the Wikipedia article. By that standard, only the sound article and the Bollywhat site qualify, I should think. Zora 21:05, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed Bollywoodmasti link 

message: Some anonymous IP has removed a sentence saying that plagiarism is diminishing, and added a para citing two movies as blatant plagiarism.
I'm prepared to accept the first deletion, since I usually see only the hits that make it to Netflix and my local Indian grocery/spice/video store. I can't speak from experience re plagiarism diminishing, since I would imagine that it's the B-movies that are the most likely to be cheap xeroxes of Hollywood movies. If someone else here feels strongly that plagiarism IS diminishing and can make a good argument for it, please reinstate that sentence. 
However, the added para doesn't work well with the rest of the section (it reads like an interpolation) and it's not clear that TWO movies (neither of which I've seen) constitute an argument for plagiarism. 
The problem, as always, is defining plagiarism. Someone can lift a general IDEA and make a new film out of it and it's not plagiarism. (Shakespeare did it all the time.) 
Frex, Akele Hum Akele Tum (did I get the title right? I loaned my copy out) has clearly taken the plot of Kramer vs. Kramer and given it an Indian twist. Wife runs away, leaves child, father and child bond, wife returns and wants child, court case ensues. However, the Indian version takes care to make the wife more sympathetic, gives the entire story of the marriage, changes the outcome of the court case, and changes the ending. I'm not SURE that this is plagiarism. However, there's one scene in the movie that I would regard as plagiarized: father attempts to cook eggs for the child and fails miserably. 
As I've watched the arguments for and against plagiarism surge back and forth, I've noted that they seem to reflect a pervasive anxiety about the WORTH of Bollywood versus Hollywood. On the one hand you have the fervently chauvinistic Indians who feel that Bollywood is one of the glories of India, it is NOT a pale imitation of Hollywood, and accusations of plagiarism are personal attacks. On the other hand are the Indians who say, "Hey, look, let's be honest, cut this chauvinism crap, most of the movies are just xeroxes of Hollywood hits." They're reacting against the chauvinism that denies plagiarism and -- IMHO -- falling equally far from the mark. 
I recently read Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture, which is an impassioned defense of the right of artists to take a piece here, a piece there, and mix and match. Most art IS reshuffling the pieces. Discussions of plagiarism that assume that everything must be NEW and ORIGINAL are too much shaped by current copyright anxieties and don't really correspond to artistic practice, in all fields, over millenia. 
Free Culture can be read online, for free. Zora 21:18, 23 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  The plagiarism issue resurfaces 

message: Pas-de-deux is indeed French (dance of two) but it's ballet French, and is now firmly a part of the technical vocabulary of ballet all over the world.   A ballet teacher could probably teach a class to students with whom he/she shared no language, as long as they all knew the French technical terms.
I believe that a great many ballet terms have migrated out into general dance description and criticism, and it was in that sense that I used pas-de-deux. However, if this is misleading or obscure, perhaps a replacement word could be found? I'm struggling to think of one and coming up short. There's duet, but that's for music, not dance!  Zora 22:22, 19 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pas-de-deux 

message: Is there any problem using images of movie posters? Could we get in copyright trouble for doing so? Zora 17:14, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Copyright on movie posters? 

message: An anon editor decided to wipe the para on skin color and substitute a para about skin color not mattering at all in India, Southerners don't tend to be darker, etc. That is just plain UNTRUE, and I won't let it stand. Skin color does matter; I can read matrimonials as well as anyone else. Actors DO tend to be lighter in color than the average Indian. Southerners, on average, are darker than people from northern India -- though it's certainly possible to find dark-skinned northerns and light-skinned southerns. That's the way averages work. 
The above-mentioned observations may not be pleasant; we all may wish that there was NO color prejudice in India -- or anywhere else. But Wikipedia doesn't exist to peddle feel-good pablum. 
I did try to tone down some of observations in the older para, and noted that Amitabh became a superstar even though he's on the darker side of the spectrum. I think the anon editor was spot-on with that one. Zora 02:53, 15 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Skin color 

message: I'm sorry, I really HAD to remove the section on North Indian tradition. It's not at all clear to me that "North Indian" constitutes a unified culture that can be characterized in such sweeping terms. There are just too many films, and too many people, that don't fit the stereotype. 
Also, Bollywood  may once have been dominated by Punjabis and Bengalis, but it's much more eclectic now. How can you say it's North Indian when the top music director, A.R.Rahman, is Tamil? 
I know that I've heard desis talk about Northies and Southies (usually with a denigrating attitude towards one or the other) but we've also had an anonymous editor here who grew apoplectic at the notion that there was any regionalism or regional conflict in India. And played revert war at any mention of same.
We may need to deal with the regionalism issue, but I'm not sure that identifying Bollywood with North Indian tradition is the way to do it. Comments invited. Zora 10:37, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed section on North Indian tradition 

message: I sorted out the commercial sites and put them in their own category. 
I'm worried about linking to them, as we're inevitably going to get folks like the Webmallindia spammer who are trying to advertise their sites on every page possible. But for getting the Bollywood news, I don't know of any non-commercial sites that do the same thing. 
Could the other Bollywood editors comment on this category? Should we just axe all the commercial sites and look harder for good non-commercial ones? Are these the BEST commercial sites? Could we make a good argument for posting these links and turning down others? Zora 02:17, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Sheesh, someone added it, and I thought, hey, why not? I don't even think of it as commercial, anymore than I think of google as commercial. I guess it's how "in your face" the advertising is ... which is terribly subjective, isn't it? If you want to remove it, that's fine with me. Most individual movies have IMDB links, however, so it would be strange to allow it there and not on a main cinema article. Zora 10:58, 20 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Commercial sites 

message: Sepia Mutiny, a lively desi blog, recently had an article on skin color, which provoked some interesting comments. See: . 
I don't imagine that anything as paltry as real information will convince our "there is no skin color prejudice in India" anon editor, but I had to try. Zora 23:10, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Skin color redux 

message: I spose I should have said something here about two sets of changes I made recently: one, I turned the film family info into a list, as more readable, two, I added one link to an informative non-commercial site and sorted the links out into categories.
Two anons went to work on the article. One added something re the Mukerjee family, which was badly written and rambling, and in the wrong place. I reverted it, but I think I probably should have tried to incorporate any new info in it into the film family list. So, later. Another added something about how 90% of all films were plagiarized. That's not sourced and seems a bit dubious. If the anon can come up with credible sources, we can re-insert it. Zora 17:59, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Recent changes, two anons 

message: An anon added apunkachoice.com to the "guides" section of the external links. It's not a commercial site at first glance, but I presume it displays SOME ads to make money. I thought we (an utterly amorphous we) had agreed that it was best to cut out all commercial links. Otherwise we'd be overwhelmed by the hundreds of Bollywood ringtone/wallpaper/etc. sites out there. I'm leaving up the apunkachoice for now, but I'm not sure that it's a good idea. Anyone else have any thoughts? Zora 05:49, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Commercial-noncommercial is binary, but "useful" is a continuum, which is a lot harder to police. I've ended up doing a lot of the policing, so I'm prejudiced in favor of "easy to enforce". I'm willing to give the usefulness criterion a try and see what happens. Other opinions? Zora 20:42, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adding news and gossip sites