BANGALORE, India—“Vasant. Say it isn’t so.”

“It is. Sad, but true.”

“Unbelievable. You are such a loser.”

That was a recent phone conversation with my brother. You see, the unthinkable has happened. I have become addicted to a Hindi movie song.

Don’t be alarmed. This should only be temporary and is simply the result of my present circumstances as an intern for General Electric in Bangalore, India. At least the worst is over—last week, I kept the headphones on at work, listening to an MP3 of “Denewala,” a hit from the year-old movie Hera Pheri. At the guest house where I stay, I continually watched MTV India for the music video version of the song. For nearly seven days I had “Denewala” stuck on “repeat” in my head. I even memorized the words, and I don’t even understand Hindi.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. For my first month in India, I had avoided any contact or reference to “Bollywood,” the Indian entertainment industry based out of Bombay. At first mention you might think, “Bollywood. Very cute. A cheap imitation of Hollywood.” That is, until you realized that Bollywood churns out hundreds more movies, songs, and music videos per year than its American counterpart and runs circles around Tinseltown in terms of gross revenues. Hindi movies constantly sell out theatres, and their soundtracks are the chart-toppers at music stores around the country. The differences between the fortunes of of the two entertainment industries are especially acute during a summer in which the American box office tries to squeeze profits from such gems as The Mummy Returns and The Animal. (Rob Schneider, your game’s up. Either you have long realized that your movies just plain suck, or you actually do have animal parts where human organs should be.)

And yet Hindi movies are the very embodiment of cheese, with rambling storylines, one-dimensional characters, and melodramatic monologues that stretch into oblivion. Each new Hindi movie is simply a variation of a previous Hindi movie, with a few modifications. (For example, villain with mustache becomes villain without mustache.) The repetition is so blatant that there is a popular email circulating at work concerning the “rules” that all Hindi movies must abide by. Some of the more entertaining ones are:

#2. There are only two classes in society: very rich and very poor. There is no middle class.