Dear Mister Bollywood: How I Fell in Love with India Bollywood and Shah Rukh Khan

By Rina Golan

Dear Mister Bollywood is a letter to the most famous man in India, Shah Rukh Khan. This letter spins off into Rinas life story of her struggle to survive and her hunger to succeed, but not at any price. Rina is set to make it big her way, without compromising on her principles. She wont sell her soul. She meets adversities and defeat. She is on quest for success, a journey that she has taken to find her destiny in life and make something of herself. This journey brings her to an encounter with her beloved hero Shah Rukh Khan and then to life in Mumbai where she tries to make it big it in Bollywood. Although she fails, she still loves India, Bollywood, and Shah Rukh Khan, but she also realizes that she is actually on a journey to learn to love herself. This book is meant to inspire people to live with passion, pursue their dreams, and never give up on innocence, truth, and justice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Dec 8, 2010
• ISBN: 9781456770907

Rina Golan

Rina Golan was born in Jerusalem, Israel. At the age of seven she moved with her family to New York where she grew up and got her higher education. She has a B.A in Liberal Arts and Creative Arts Therapies from The New School University. She also studied toward an M.A in Drama Therapy at New York University. She currently lives in Israel. Follow Rina on: www.twitter.com/rinagolan

Book preview

Dear Mister Bollywood

How I fell in Love with India Bollywood and Shah Rukh Khan

Rina Golan

missing image file

AuthorHouse™ UK Ltd.

500 Avebury Boulevard

Central Milton Keynes, MK9 2BE

www.authorhouse.co.uk

Phone: [phone]

© 2010. Rina Golan. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 11/24/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4567-0144-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-7090-7 (e)

Back and front cover photo credit: Dabboo Ratnani

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

February 2010

Dear Mr. Bollywood –– Mr. Shah Rukh Khan,

This letter is not about the $20,000 you promised me three years ago when we met in your room at the Radisson Hotel in New York City. Not really. Not yet. It’s about why I still love you and everything Bollywood. It’s about how I fell in love with India, and the city of Mumbai. It’s about why I feel a need to apologize for everything that happened.

I am a fan. You barely know me. We’ve met a few times, but you are a huge star, a mega huge star and you are so important to me, but I’m sure you are barely aware of my existence, if at all. Or maybe not. Maybe you remember me. Do you promise everyone $20,000 in the privacy of your hotel room?

This letter is my attempt to explain my side of the story and apologize. But first, it would probably help if you knew a few things about me, and why I asked you for $20,000 in the first place, and why I now feel the need to apologize for the whole situation that occurred, even though you originally promised to give me money and obviously haven’t delivered.

As I write this letter to you, I am sitting in my room at my parents’ house in Jerusalem, where I should feel at home. After all, this is where I was born, and where I lived for the first seven years of my life. Or maybe, I should feel at home in New York City, where I have lived much longer. Yet all along, I feel that my heart is somewhere else. In India.

I have absolutely no Indian heritage. My parents are from Georgia, in soviet Russia, and I was born here in Jerusalem. I was named me Rina. It happens to be a typical Indian name, and not very common among Israelis. It means joy or happiness in Hebrew. It’s a word mostly mentioned in the Bible, but not too many Jewish parents name their kids Rina. So, could it be destiny that I have an Indian name and should eventually end up in India?

But before I even knew India existed, I moved to New York first. When I was seven, my parents decided to move my sister and I from Israel to New York. Over the next 10 years, I grew very used to it, far away from our extended family and the world I once knew in Israel. By the time my parents decided to move back, I was seventeen years old. I had completed high school and my sister and I felt more American then Israeli.

When we moved back, I was facing the prospect of joining the army as soon as I turned 18. I didn’t want to go to the army. My best friend from New York sent me a one-way ticket back to New York and I was gone. I ran away and my parents did not know. They had expected me to adjust to living in Israel again as if I hadn’t lived the majority of my life in America. I told them that I was going for a weekend trip to Eilat, a resort in the southern tip of Israel, but instead, I took the bus to the airport and flew back to New York. That was 1993.

I lived with my best friend Oritt for almost a year. We were young and had no direction. We went out to clubs and got drunk, did some drugs, and enjoyed the money her dad was splashing on her. He did it out of guilt. Her mom had died years ago from cancer, and that was the only way he knew to cover up the loss.

At some point, I realized that the partying has to end. I stopped going to clubs and decided to enroll at Queens College. But Oritt’s partying was getting out of control. One night, she came home and told me she had started working in a strip joint. I was in religious schools all my life and had no idea that there were even places like that, where girls dance naked for money.

Oritt was only 15 years old. But she already looked like a woman. She had big breasts and wore a lot of makeup. She colored her hair dirty blond and dressed in very skimpy clothes. She didn’t need the money. Her father gave her anything she wanted. She did it for the attention and power.

One night, Oritt’s father barged into my room and asked me where all this money was coming from. We had drawers full of single dollar bills that Oritt brought home every night. He slapped me across the face and blamed me for what she was doing. After nine months living there, I had to leave.

I had no money. I never really had a job. And now I was homeless. I remember sitting in an Israeli pizza place with my bags not knowing where I would sleep that night. And then guy behind the pizza counter asked if he could help. I told him I need a place to live. He jumped over the counter and took me to his home. He had an extra room for rent.

I found a place. Now I needed money. Not having any other reference in mind, I followed Oritt’s foot steps and went to a local strip joint. It was sickening, walking into that small club in Queens for an audition. I went onstage, danced for one song, and got the job. In the first half, I danced with my dress on, and in the second I had to strip down to nothing but a g -string. The first few times were tough. I think I even cried in the beginning. But after a while it felt fine. I would go onstage and collect money from all the people watching me.

But I knew this job was not for me. I didn’t want to become another statistic. I forgot to mention that I had come from an abusive home. I didn’t want to go to the army, but the real reason I ran away, was because life at home was hell. My dad beat my mom for years, and he was verbally abusive toward me. I knew that falling into something like stripping or drugs could be the outcome of growing up in an abusive home, but I was determined to fight the odds.

I kept thinking of other ways to make money. When Bashir, one of my clients in the strip joint who had become a friend, told me that we can import garments from India and sell them in New York, I jumped at the idea. Traveling to Delhi felt very intriguing. I knew it would be different than any place I had ever been. That was 1994.

We landed in the middle of the night, and coming out of the airport we got into a rickshaw. I had never even seen a rickshaw, let alone been in one. We passed cows in the streets on our way to the hotel. I knew I was not in the west anymore. It was all a bit shocking, especially at three in the morning.

After a good night sleep, the next day it looked a bit better, and I got used to this new world of no driving lanes, cows walking through traffic, and seeing a monkey on a leash with some guy making him dance for money. After I got over my initial culture shock, I really started loving Delhi –– your hometown, Shah Rukh Khan –– which I found out years later when I became a fan of yours.

India was new to me but I felt very close to her. I bought some Indian clothes and loved walking around in them. I thought they were so much better than my usual western clothes, and in that atmosphere, they made more sense.

I took pictures everywhere, and one photo has become very special to me. It’s a photo of a huge advertisement bill board I saw along the road, featuring a few movies that were in theatres, and you happened to be in one of the movies. When I took that photo, I had no idea that in another ten years I would be back in India, and fall in love with Bollywood and you.

After a quick week in Delhi, I returned to New York and when the business of selling garments with Bashir didn’t pan out, I never thought of returning to India. One of Bashir’s friends told me that Bashir was not interested at all in doing a garment business with me. He took me to India for the purpose of planting diamonds on me and using me to get those diamonds to the U.S. without my knowing.

Till this day I don’t know if it’s true or not. Either way, I had to find a better way to survive in New York, because stripping was just not for me. All the girls there were addicted to the money and the drugs. Making a thousand dollars a day can become very addictive. I didn’t want that to happen to me. It was enough that I had fallen as far as I did into that unwholesome environment. It was dark

Reviews for Dear Mister Bollywood

[asha bora · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Hats off to you for your courage. It shows the reality of the Bollywood. All that glitters is not gold !!