My favorite Bollywood Music Videos

The dancing! Holy shit the dancing. Did Grease have a forty actor choreographed mid-badminton-match dance-while-hitting-birdies-in-tune number? Nah, only in Bollywood. Skip to about two minutes into this one for the best parts.



A love song.. as far as I can tell.



One of the great Bollywood idols Shah Khan's songs from Om Shanti Om, the same movie as the first video. In case you forgot, Shah Rukh Khan is the Bollywood star who won the government's "Best Indian Citizen Award." Yes that award exists and yes that makes 'King Khan' literally one in a billion. The translated chorus is "My heart is full of the pain of disco / the pain of disco!" I think it's a self parody of Bollywood but that's only cause it's pretty ridiculous itself. This is kinda what I had in mind when talking about some sort of national frustrated sexual tension expressing itself in Indian media, but that doesn't mean it's not an awesome music video!



Same girl as in Om Shanti Om (Deepika Padukone), but I think this one was a box office flop. Skip to like 28 seconds in for the actual start; sorry about the poor quality, best I could find.



Did I mention that Michael Jackson's death saturated the news networks and papers here for weeks (and still appears about every other day in the Jaipur based Times of India)? I know for a fact that he was/is very popular in India and I guess with all the great celebrities here being amazing dancers, you can probably guess why. Whenever I say I'm from the states, about two in three people will say "ah, Michael Jackson!" And I will acknowledge that he was my countryman and agree (while holding in a smile) whenever they console me of his death ("yes yes before death some weeks... great tragedy"). Rick and I saw a cheap souvenier backpack hanging in the shop of some Pushkar current events capatalist with "Micael Jackson" badly printed on the front... too soon?