The movies have come home. The stars have stepped off the big screen and here they are, so close you can almost touch them. Which star is it? Karishma Kapoor or Shahrukh Khan, depending on which rumor you believe. The film is called Sangharsh, and it is directed by a slight, confident young woman named Tanuja Chandra. Her last movie did not do well but this one will be different, because, she explains to me, “In this story the hero is integrated into the plot.” It is a Hindi version of Silence of the Lambs—with songs. Preity Zinta is the Jodie Foster character, a trainee CID inspector who falls in love with a gangster. And I have introduced Tanuja and her famous producer, Mahesh Bhatt, to Madanpura in darkest Bombay and found real gangsters to protect the making of this gangster movie. Anees has rounded up forty of his boys for crowd control. They are controlling the crowd by thrashing it. In front of me, a tall man named Farid slaps a gawking bhaiyya back and forth across his face, four times.
