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The girl tapping madly on her BlackBerry in the back of a chauffeur-driven Mercedes has all the hallmarks of your standard off-duty Hollywood starlet: lean black leggings, poreless skin, and a headline-making romance with a certain scruffy-faced young costar. Chances are you’ve never heard of her. Meet 24-year-old Priyanka Chopra, one of Bollywood’s hottest properties. She’s zipping through Bangkok—as much as that’s possible in this city’s obstacle course of Barbie-size tuk-tuk taxis—en route to a last-minute rehearsal for tonight’s International Indian Film Awards (IIFA).
This being a Bollywood event, Chopra isn’t just showing up to run through some teleprompted lines. She’ll be harnessed 40 feet in the air, belting out (well, lip-synching) the theme to LoveStory 2050, a sort of futuristic Antony and Cleopatra epic, while dozens of sequined dancers—including said scruffy costar, Harman Baweja—shimmy their hearts out beneath her. Safety seems to be the least of Chopra’s concerns. After all, she has an audience of roughly 500 million TV viewers worldwide—bigger than that of the Oscars—to consider.
“Films are like a religion in India,” Chopra says. “Stars are almost revered. The popularity is insane.” Whether it’s traditional, melodramatic epics—tear-jerking love affairs that extend for three and four hours—or more up-to-date, socially conscious (but still song- and dance-laden) fare, like this year’s smash about religious discrimination in professional hockey, Chak De!, movies are India’s national pastime. And for the country’s immense diaspora—some 25 million people of Indian origin live elsewhere in the world—getting a whiff of home is as easy as popping in a DVD. (Hence our non-Indian locale: The IIFAs deliver Bollywood to its worldwide audience from a different city every year.) With its economy expanding at a steady clip, India churns out more than 800 movies a year. The Bollywood film industry, currently growing by 13 percent annually, is expected to double in size by 2012. (The ripple effect is already being felt on our shores: Steven Spielberg and David Geffen are in talks about new projects with India’s Reliance Entertainment, which itself has inked deals with Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and Jim Carrey, and has plans to erect a $10 billion U.S.–India crossover entertainment company.)
All of which is excellent news for anyone with a taste for disproportionate amounts of embellishment, science-fiction-worthy human perfection (Chopra’s astonishingly perfect, heart-shape face looks CGI-enhanced even in real life), and, well, makeup. “I thought I knew makeup, and then I came to India,” says Vimi Joshi, a senior makeup artist for M.A.C Cosmetics, who has been working in India for three of her 14 years in the business. Tonight, Joshi will lead a team of 25 M.A.C artists from Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Middle East, and India in beautifying IIFA’s 110 performers and dancers. They’ve got 30 minutes per face, a feat that is all the more impressive when you understand just how major makeup is in Bollywood.
According to Joshi, Indian stars take maintenance to atmospheric heights, including employing full-time personal hair and makeup artists to ensure utter perfection all day, every day—even when they’re off duty. “When you see a star, look for the guy trailing her with a little bag,” she says. “That’s the makeup bag.” Just as Bollywood films are not particularly concerned with grit or realism, their devout followers aren’t interested in the latest edition of Stars, They’re Just Like Us. They expect 24/7 gloss. Indian actors aren’t contending as much with invasive paparazzi as with fans themselves, who can be maniacal—it’s not uncommon for entire families to camp outside a celebrity’s house for days. When I asked Chopra what it was like to never have an unscrutinized moment—what if she just wants to pick something up at the grocery store?—her publicist guffawed in the front seat. “Grocery store?!” she sputtered. “You have to see the frenzy when people see a star. The bodyguards are not for show.”