Unlike what most of my non-Indian friends believe, India is not just Bollywood. Bollywood refers to the Hindi-language Movie Industry of India. But Hindi is rarely spoken in many parts of the country, and hence there are numerous regional movie industries. The Bengali movie industry is called Tollywood, because of its location in Tollygunge, West Bengal. Chollywood refers to the Chattisgarhi movie industry. Mollywood refers to the Malayalam movie industry of Kerala, where I hail from. Jollywood refers to the Assamese movie industry, located in Jyoti Chitraban, Assam. Hell, there is even a Sandalwood, which refers to the Kannada movie industry, which is located in Karnataka, famous for its sandalwood trees.

 

And then, there is Kollywood, which refers to the Tamil movie industry, because of it being located around the Kodambakkam area of Chennai.

 

Frankly, Kollywood is a lot more developed than Bollywood in terms of technical brilliance, and they have a few good versatile actors and directors whom I have followed over the years. But I have never seen a Kollywood movie shooting location till now. Until today.

 

So, they were shooting some kind of scene where the hero looks melancholily into the ocean and beyond, and the heroine comes to him romantically. I am not sure if there was much acting involved, because all that the pair did was to try and look good. And I think the crew was thinking the same too.

 

There was some drama in the offing too. The cops came down soon enough, because the shooting crew did not get some kind of permit to shoot in a public location. There was some talking between the production controller and the cops, who finally relented to agree to the shooting as long as the huge reflector boards were not used.

 

That was a happy ending, for sure.

 

 

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