Bollywood

This is the informal name for the vast Hindi-language film industry (one of the world's largest film industries) in the world's largest democracy (India, for those of you playing along at home). The name is a portmanteau of "Bombay" (the former name of Mumbai, where it is based) and "Hollywood" created by white people, notably a Variety journalist. There are also non-Hindi film industries based on other Indian languages such as Telugu ("Tollywood") and Tamil ("Kollywood"). Although these industries are huge, they don't receive much press and are not well known outside of India.

Hindi films tend to be musicals. The average Hindi movie is three hours long (some are much longer) because most of them draw inspiration from old-school Hollywood epics as well as the narrative epics of Hinduism. Many movies will incorporate themes from India's major religions (such as Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Sikhism) as well as values common to Indian society to illustrate how they might clash with individualism or Western values. Many of the Hindi films are a form of escapist entertainment.

See also:
 * Useful Notes On India
 * Bollywood Movies
 * Bollywood Actors

Not to be confused with Bollywood Nerd, although both come from India.

Tropes

 * Almost Kiss
 * Anvilicious
 * Arranged Marriage
 * Parental Marriage Veto
 * Child Marriage Veto
 * Perfectly Arranged Marriage
 * Badass
 * Bash Brothers
 * Be Yourself
 * Big Lipped Alligator Moment - Almost every Hindi film has a big musical number (sometimes more than one), and often doesn't even feature the stars of the film. For an exhaustive list, see on the other wiki.
 * Can't Live With Them Can't Live Without Them
 * Chorus Girls
 * Cloudcuckoolander
 * Crowd Song
 * Dance Sensation
 * Dancing On a Bus
 * Dramatic Thunder
 * Drunken Song
 * Epic Movie
 * Fan Service
 * Bare Your Midriff
 * Belly Dancer
 * Foot Focus
 * The Item Number
 * Wet Sari Scene
 * Filmi Music
 * Foreign Remake
 * Forgiveness
 * Getting Crap Past the Radar - Due to India's censor policy, Indian filmakers use rather... imaginative ways of getting their point across. This is the reason for the use of the Almost Kiss and Kissing Discretion Shot tropes, as noted elsewhere. Bollywood films adopt Hollywood's fair acceptance of violence (in age-appropriate contexts) and fair taboo against sexuality and magnify both conditions.
 * Gorgeous Period Dress
 * Gratuitous English
 * How We Got Here
 * "I Am" Song
 * Impractically Fancy Outfit
 * Incendiary Exponent
 * I Have No Son
 * I Want My Beloved to Be Happy
 * "I Want" Song
 * Kick the Dog
 * Kissing Discretion Shot
 * Lost in Translation
 * Long Lost Sibling
 * Meet Cute
 * Melodrama
 * Mistaken Identity
 * My Girl Is Not a Slut - There has been a progression (or regression) in morality in Bollywood movies that reflects Indian culture. Older movies(pre 80s) usually showed both male and female leads as virgins until marriage. 80s-00s movies usually had male-slut-female-virgin leads. This has carried over into the 21st century, although it is more common that movies that are targeted towards the middle-to-upper-class/younger/NRI crowd show the female lead character is not a virgin.
 * Pimped-Out Dress - Many movies have at least one scene where the female lead is wearing a ridiculously awesome sari.
 * Plagiarism - Bollywood films are famous for being "inspired by" American movies, European movies, movies from other Indian industries, and even older Bollywood movies (see Bawarchi inside Hero No 1, for instance).
 * Reincarnation
 * Reincarnation Romance
 * Relationship Upgrade
 * Sad Bollywood Wedding
 * Separated At Birth
 * Sibling Team
 * Side Story
 * Story Within a Story
 * The Musical
 * The Power of Friendship
 * The Power of Love
 * Triang Relations
 * "Well Done, Son" Guy
 * Why Waste a Wedding