I am on the open-air set of Yeh Hain Mumbai Meri Jaan, a movie about a middle-class immigrant to Bombay, a.k.a. Mumbai, who makes good while retaining his small-town values. It's around nine in the evening, and there are about 150 people all around me—light boys, sound technicians, actors, assorted assistants, and a sizable group of people who are doing absolutely nothing. "I'm running a giant employment agency," complains the director, who has invited me to watch as he attempts to create fantasy out of this chaos.

The set—on the roof of the Happy Home and School for the Blind, in South Bombay—is supposed to be the hero's bedroom, described in one of his lines as "my open-air Taj Mahal." It has the accoutrements of middle-class success: a bar stocked with Chivas Regal, a TV, a kitchen, a red phone booth "stolen from MTNL" (the phone monopoly), and "a Western-foreign-German-style toilet," with a seat cover that the hero has "stolen from a five-star hotel." Above us, a giant sign comes alive in red—the letters CEAT (for a large Indian tire manufacturer) gradually extinguish themselves and reappear.

Mumbai Meri Jaan, like so many other Indian films, offers a generic Bombay for sale to the provinces: rich people, fast cars, Westernized women, gangsters, policemen, consumer goods. To the immigrant from the sticks of Bihar, this part of the city is unreal, a film set. So astronomical are the prices for the flats in South Bombay that the outsider walking around here does not say to himself, "One day I shall live here." He is wandering in a dreamscape like this ridiculous set, exposed to the elements. If it were real, it would be washed away—the bed, bar, toilet, red phone booth, and everything—with the first rain.

It is no accident that the Hindi film industry is based in Marathi-dominated Bombay rather than in Hindi-speaking Delhi, because film is not about language. It is fundamentally a mass dream of the audience, and Bombay is a mass dream of the peoples of India. The streets of this city, the biggest, fastest, and richest in India, are mythic. Through the movies, Indians have been living in Bombay all their lives, even those who have never actually been there. The wide sweep of Marine Drive, the beach at Juhu, the gateway to the West that is Andheri Airport—all these are instantly recognizable in Kanpur and Kerala. Bombay is mythic in a way that Los Angeles is not, because Hollywood has the budgets to create entire cities on its studio lots; the Indian film industry has to rely on existing streets, beaches, tall buildings. But the Hindi movies have also created their own specific version of Bombay: Bollywood, where all the women are babes and all the men can sing and dance.

Ask an average American to see a Bollywood movie and his response is likely to jibe with the description I once came across in the Village Voice: "MTV for the very stoned." The products of the world's most prolific movie industry frequently clock in at three hours and invariably feature from five to fifteen musical sequences, in which the stars are magically transported to locations that bear no relation to the rest of the plot. Within each number, they may change costumes and personas multiple times.