Meet Your Favorite Bollywood Celebrity…Online
Bollywood Celebrities + Internet + Fans = Bollywood Blogging BY AMANDA SODHI
While Bollywood has been slow to catch up with technology in terms of animation and special effects, Bollywood celebrities have to be super-fast to catch up with innovations in technology…what am I alluding to? Blogging!
Gone are the days when fans in India had to desperately wait in lines outside of celebrity's homes, hoping to catch a glimpse of their favorite actors and actresses. Gone are the days when Bollywood obsessed NRIs had to break through tight security at heavily priced Bollywood concerts to say "hello" to the celebrities performing. Gone are the days when Bollywood fanatics had to rely solely on the media for interviews answering (and sometimes not answering) burning questions. Here are the days when all it takes to interact with your favorite celebrity is the Internet.
While Bollywood blogs offer something to all types of cinemaobsessed beings, NRIs are an audience segment in particular which benefits immensely from such platforms. Oz, the founder of PassionForCinema.com, mentions "Being away from India, festivities & Cinema are the two things that connect us back to the country I was born in. But, PassionForCinema.com has helped me move beyond, simply enjoying the love of a product on screen. It has brought me the opportunity to converse with the talented filmmakers who bring in such a deeper fresh perspective of India and its various stories embedded in the small and big towns, the busy streets, the country side... it is refreshing and motivating. Cinema before PassionForCinema.com was purely akin to enjoying window shopping. Now it's much more than that."
However, it's not just fans of Bollywood films and artists who benefit from Bollywood blogging. Actually, the celebrities blogging gain a lot from it, as well. In fact, "…the medium offers them the opportunity to directly communicate with the outside world. So things like ‘I'm misquoted' etc. may become an extinct statement pretty soon," explains Oz.
Well, with the Internet sometimes seeming like a maze of way too much information easy to get lost in, a list of these Bollywood celebrity bloggers and their blogs would certainly make life a lot easier for those of you who are star-struck. No worries…today I present to you readers a list of Bollywood Bloggers and their online homes…umm blogs…at which you, too, can mingle with them online...
1. Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy: This rocking musical trio's official Web site, www.shankarehsaanloy.com has a special forum section in which you can not only interact with other SEL fans, but you might also be lucky enough to exchange a few comments with Ehsaan Noorani, who regularly answers questions from people posted on the forums. Interestingly enough, even though SEL's popularity is immense, there are currently only about 400 registered users who have access to the forum.
2. Aamir Khan: The actor-turned-director's blog http://aamirkhan.com/blog.htm is the perfect way to get in touch with the Bollywood perfectionist. In fact, many of his entries solicit over 1500 comments! Now, that's what's called a real fan-following, isn't it?
3. Amitabh Bachchan: Wanna talk to Big B?—well, you can! Visit his blog at http://blogs.bigadda.com/ab/. Surprisingly, not only is Amitabh the king of cinema, but he is also the king of blogging…you'll be amazed to see how he actually goes through most of the user comments and refers to them in his sincere and wellthought- out posts.
4. Sudhir Mishra, Anurag Kashyap, Onir, Shilpa Shukla, Hansal Mehta, Paval Kaul, Navdeep Singh, Santosh Sivan and many more: Passion For Cinema— http://www.passionforcinema.com/—is heaven for all lovers of cinema. This blog is visited by many cinema enthusiasts all over the world. It features meaningful blog entries and discussions by many authors, including blog entries by the above mentioned celebrities. If you love cinema and even more than that, love discussing cinema in a thoughtful manner with others all over the world, Passion For Cinema, or PFC as it is commonly referred to, is the place for you to be.
5. Amrita Rao, Anant Mahadevan, Aamir Khan, Dino Morea, Emraan Hashmi, Koena Mitra, Kunal Kohli, Milan Luthria, Pavan Kaul, Robby Grewal, Sherlyn Chopra, Vishal Dadlani, Vivek Agnihotri: all of these celebrities have been blogging…although, not so regularly…on IndiaFM.com. While it does not appear that most of these people are actually interacting with fans, recently, Emraan Hashmi did end up replying to quite a few comments from his fans.
6. Yahoo! Groups such as Worldwide Film Distribution, which has 7088 members, and Indian Film Industry, which has 2391 members, also offer plenty of networking opportunities for journalists, film distributors, filmmakers, musicians, and so on and so forth.
No, no—this list is not comprehensive. I was recently told by a friend that even Ashutosh Gowarikar was recently blogging around the release of Jodhaa-Akbar. Now that I think about it, even Akshay Kumar, Sowmya Raoh, Prashant Chadha, Paresh Rawal, Rakshanda Khan and many, many others have Facebook pages. What can I say? Keep your eyes open online…who knows who might be blogging next…Hrithik Roshan, Shahrukh Khan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, A. R. Rahman…are you guys listening?
