Bollywood rides the blogging wave

I recently wrote about the blogging boom in Asia. It is a report on a panel discussion on blogging in the region organised by IDC in Singapore the last week. Click on the link and you can read the report.

In this post, I want to talk about blogging by Bollywood’s celebrities.

Do you know of any Hollywood biggie who blogs? I have never heard of the likes of Tom Cruise or Robert De Niro blogging.

But turn to Bollywood and you would be surprised to see how many big Bollywood actors and filmmakers have taken to blogging.

In this case, Bollywood has adopted Web 2.0 with great alacrity.

Top actor Aamir Khan has been blogging for some time. He has been doing it quite successfully, with thousands of his fans interacting with him online. This was an important development as Aamir is seen as a very sensitive person–he is not your normal Bollywood actor and yet he is one of the top 3 actors of Bollywood: he largely stays away from the mainstream and film gossip media, does one or two films a year and completely avoids all kinds of Indian film functions (he is okay with the Oscars though).

Recently, India’s most respected actor Amitabh Bachchan also took to blogging (he is 60 plus, mind you). It made quite a splash in the media. I checked his blog yesterday and he had received more than 800 comments on his latest post.

Even Bollywood’s reigning superstar has got a blog. Shahrukh Khan blogs on Intentblog.com but some have expressed doubts if he does his own blogging. SRK, as he is lovingly known, is a tech savvy guy and was one of the earliest Bollywood personalities to have started a web portal. He wrapped up this venture after his home production, Asoka, bombed on the box office.

Bollywood’s other celebrity bloggers include Rahul Bose, Anupam Kher, Rahul Khanna, and Bipasha Basu.

Among directors, on top of my list is director Shekhar Kapur, who sort of straddles between Hollywood and Bollywood. His blog is as much about cinema as about life, death, mythology, spirituality, etc. It’s a great read.

There are a lot of younger generation Bollywood directors and writers who blog in a blogging community, Passion For Cinema, led by director Anurag Kashyap.

All these blogs are helping these film personalities directly connect with their fans all over the world. Lets them have direct feedback from them. Not only that, they can also clarify baseless rumours in trade magazines and MSM which is the staple of film journalism. Things..they are a’changing!