In Bollywood, every cliche is true. The script doesn’t matter, only a proposal does. The song and dance is everything. Packaging counts and marketing delivers. Everything revolves around a handful of stars. Much of the funding is from unorganized and sometimes even questionable sources. But Bollywood, a derivative name for the Hindi film industry that is a loose agglomeration of old-style film families and newly established studios, of venerated stars and tough-talking directors, often defies the cliches it embodies. Since 1995, a fantastic year which saw three different genres of cinema Aditya Chopra’s diaspora-meets-desis romance Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge; Ram Gopal Varma’s ironic comedy Rangeela; and Mani Ratnam’s contentiously political Bombay there has been a tectonic cultural and commercial shift.  A new breed of filmmakers has taken over, altering age-old artistic conventions and business norms. The three filmmakers are just some of the characters who walk in and out of the frames of this book. What drives and how they drive the multi-million rupee industry, whose impact on society in India is as wide as its influence among the increasingly vocal diaspora, is what makes this book the picture-perfect beginner's guide to current Bollywood.