Iraq film seller rues Bollywood decline

Adil Hamid Khalaf is like many Iraqi traders, with his tiny store stocked to the brim with VCDs and DVDs. What sets him apart is he can extol, in halting Hindi no less, the glory of 1950s Bollywood classics. Khalaf’s high prices for new movies — he charges as much as $ 10 whereas others offer knock-offs for 40 cents — and passion for Indian films from a bygone era mean sales are fewer than ever. Unfazed, however, the 65-year-old wistfully recalls what he believes was a better era for Bollywood cinema, and life in Iraq, while excitedly relaying anecdotes from his latest meeting with Indian film legend Amitabh Bachchan, whom Khalaf refers to as a “good friend.” “Lambu! Lambu!” Khalaf exclaims, using the Hindi word for tall to describe the six-foot, two-inch actor, with blown-up photographs of their near-annual meetings at Bachchan’s Mumbai home plastered across the walls of the three-meter by one-meter shop in Baghdad’s Najah cinema complex. He shows off a Rado watch he says was gifted to him by Bachchan on a recent visit, and quickly pulls out a fading photograph of him standing alongside the actor and his then-young son Abhishek, now 36 and a film star himself. Khalaf originally met Bachchan in 1978, after convincing an acquaintance who worked in another actor’s offices to take him there. He now visits Bachchan as often as he can and speaks to him in Hindi, which he has learned by watching Bollywood films countless times over the years. But after recalling his meetings with Bachchan and other age-old Indian movie stars — photos alongside Rajesh Khanna, Dharmendra, Mithun Chakraborty and Amrish Puri also adorn the walls of his shop — he returns to his lament that Indian cinema has suffered by becoming too Westernized. “Old Indian movies taught you how to behave with others — they taught you manners, they built your character,” he says, speaking in Arabic. “They taught the viewer how to be good to their parents, to touch the feet of their mothers and fathers.” “Nowadays, Indian movies are filled with action, drugs, knives, pistols, bullets. They are teaching people to kill, not teaching people to behave well.” His complaints over Indian cinema mirror those he, and many of his customers, have of modern Iraq. Khalaf’s business began as a venture with four friends who, after enjoying Indian films at Baghdad’s cinema halls in the 1960s, began selling cassettes of movie songs. At the time, movie theaters in the capital did good business broadcasting Arab, Indian and Western films, with some cinema halls dedicated solely to showing Bollywood flicks. Now, no halls dedicated to Indian movies remain and the capital’s movie theaters are widely derided by Baghdad’s residents as dens showing pornographic movies and places for gay men to meet, a reputation the industry has struggled to shed. Khalaf branched out on his own in 1978, setting up his shop, which he named Wassan after one of his daughters whose picture he has also posted on his shop wall. It features her standing alongside, predictably, Amitabh Bachchan.