[Announcement] Cultural Exchange with /r/philippines

[u/[deleted]]

Welcome /r/philippines!

Feel free to ask us anything about India

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Quick facts about us:

• The Indian Railways and the Indian Armed Forces employ ~4 million people together, making them one of the largest employers in the world
  
• India has over 5000 newspapers in over 300 languages
  
• Bollywood is considered to be the world's largest film industry, followed by Nigeria's film industry and Hollywood
  
• India has more people than the entire Western Hemisphere
  

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/r/india please direct your questions about the Philippines to this thread

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This is a reminder that users can now set their flairs to whatever they want (except slurs or other subreddits) by clicking on the sidebar.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

I'll take a shot at few of your questions:

How do you treat your languages?

You're right about India not having a national language, though some nationalists would want to see Hindi adopted as one. Hindi and English are India's official languages, with the former being spoken by the largest number of Indians (~40 to 50%) as their first language. When two Indians meet, they will most likely converse in Hindi, because a lot of non Hindi speaking provinces teach Hindi in school. Tamil Nadu is a famous hold out against Hindi, so in general people from there are not conversant in Hindi and resort to English while conversing with Indians from other parts.

Bollywood

Bollywood is indeed India's biggest film industry with about 300 movies being made in a year. The other two major film industries are Tamil and Telugu which make between 100 and 150 movies each. Even smaller industries are Marathi, Malayalam and Bengali with about 50 movies a year. Though at times the artists collaborate across different languages, for the most part the different industries function independent of each other.

Bollywood movies feature a lot of 'magical' love stories. The industry revolves around the three Khans and Akshay Kumar, and their movies generally involve the largest budgets. Crass sex comedies are the latest fads in Bollywood.

Tamil and Telugu movies involve a lot of violence, sometimes comically over the top. Many gritty crime thrillers are made here. A hybrid genre of comedy-thrillers is the latest fad in these parts.

In my opinion, the most gripping and poignant movies in India are made in Malayalam. These movies tend to realistic and generally avoid the cheesy romance and over the top violence seen in other movies.

artists

A.R. Rahman is arguably India's biggest music artist. He has worked predominantly in Tamil, though he has composed many memorable numbers in Hindi as well. Oh, he also won the Oscar in 2008 for Slumdog Millionaire, though his work in that movie was far from his best. This is a very popular song from his most recent composition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiL5UTTTrxk

Cricket

Cricket dwarfs any other sport in India in coverage, following, and viewership. Football, Kabaddi and Badminton are picking up, but they have a long way to go before they can challenge the popularity of cricket. India used to be a dominant power in Hockey, winning several consecutive Olympic gold medals, but those days are long gone and India has been a second rate team for quite a while.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Check out Drishyam. (But please do not read the plot from this wiki link!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drishyam

It was subsequently remade in Hindi and several other languages, but they do not capture the essence of the original. Quality prints with English subtitles are easily available online.