At first the talk of Bollywood's presence at Cannes made the South Asian in me feel proud, but then to realize that it is mostly a publicity stunt, underscored by the fact that not a single desi movie was actually nominated...well, let's just say I was a little miffed.

Nonetheless, if you're in the vicinity, dont be surpised if you bump into Aishwarya Rai, Aja Devgan or Preity Zinta among others.

The piece below does a pretty good analysis of the current situation of Indian cinema and why Bollywood is all set to do this huge marketing gimic right now, with the aid of the Indian government no less.
-Sumita Sheth

India's new cinema has a global script
by Eric Pfanner
CANNES. For a long time, the typical story line of an Indian film has gone something like this: Guy meets girl. They sing and dance. Guy and girl meet each other's families. More singing and dancing. Guy loses girl. Tears. Guy gets girl back. Singing and dancing all around.

It is a relatively simple formula, and it has been remarkably successful. Bollywood, as the Indian film business is often known, churns out more than 1,000 movies a year, and theaters sell more than three billion tickets annually.

Bollywood also has been unusually effective in keeping Hollywood at bay. While American exports dominate the big screen almost everywhere else, they account for less than 10 percent of the Indian market.
There is only one problem with this rosy picture. While films from China, South Korea and other Asian countries, all with far smaller domestic industries, have broken through in the West, only a handful of Indian films have done so.

Often, the only international audiences for these movies are members of the Indian diaspora, an estimated 25 million people of Indian origin who live in Britain, the United States, Southeast Asia and elsewhere...

continue reading here courtesy the International Herald Tribune