Gangsters fund Bollywood's film makers, who make movies about gangsters. The funding is a loan-sharking operation, the profits are laundered money, and the actors hire their "financiers" to rub out rival thespians. It's like the MPAA, only less so.
This two-way attraction has engendered a weird relationship between the films and the real-life villains. "There is a curious symbiosis between the underworld and the movies. The Hindi film-makers are fascinated by the lives of the gangsters, and draw upon them for material. The gangsters, from the shooter on the ground to the don-in-exile at the top, watch Hindi movies keenly, and model themselves – their dialogue, the way they carry themselves – on their screen equivalents." (Suketu Mehta in The New Statesman, Mar 12 2001) Indeed, films like Satya portray mobsters with a curious blend of sympathy and revulsion, one that will feel familiar to fans of Hollywood films by Martin Scorsese.
(via Schism Matrix, which is chock-full-o related links today)
