I watched my first Bollywood movie out of sheer boredom. Trapped in an airplane seat for 14 hours from Chicago to Delhi and unable to sleep, I reluctantly tuned in to the subtitled Hindi-language film on the monitor in front of me. The movie was called Baabul and it starred heavy-hitters Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, Rani Mukerji, and John Abraham. It was everything I expected it to be—long, silly, melodramatic—everything I thought I didn’t like. Except I loved it. The way those qualities came together was perfect chemistry. I laughed, I cried, and if I hadn’t been crammed into a window seat, I would have jumped up and joined the Indian kids dancing in the aisle. That’s the essential appeal of Bollywood movies—they make you feel like nothing else. A few days into the trip—my first to India—I got to watch a film shoot at the hotel where I was staying. The movie was Dhokha, starring the sizzling Muzammil Ibrahim. After that, I was hooked, and so began my giddy obsession with Bollywood and everything Indian.