It has taken over 100 trucks of sand to create a mini-Rajasthan on top of a hill in Mumbai's Film City. The afternoon sun is beating down as Shah Rukh Khan, clad in an angarakhi and readymade dhoti, and Rani Mukherji, in a brocade choli and lehnga, act out a puppet dance. The makeshift curtains flap in the hot breeze as cinematographer Ravi K. Chandran takes aim with his camera and choreographer Farah Khan hollers into the mike. "Has your camel bitten you?" she asks a lax dancer clad in Rajasthani regalia. "Or has he died?" Everyone, including the unfortunate dancer, cracks up.

PICTURE SPEAK
BUNTY AUR BABLI Director: Shaad Ali Sahgal Actors: Abhishek Bachchan, Rani Mukherji and Amitabh Bachchan Cool Factor: It fits in with the film's retro styling. The train is a recurring character with a song dedicated to it. Abhishek and Rani meet at a station. He is from Fursatganj, she is from Pankhi Nagar. They both end up in a series of cons, the most outrageous being selling the Taj Mahal. Watch out for Amitabh's seedy inspector in gamcha and bomber jacket.	PAHELI Director: Amol Palekar Actors: Shah Rukh Khan, Rani Mukherji, Amitabh Bachchan, Juhi Chawla Cool Factor: Two Shah Rukh Khans. The reigning Bollywood rani. Amitabh Bachchan as the wise, old shepherd who resolves the paheli (puzzle). Juhi Chawla as Mukherji's sister-in-law, playing the Jaya Bachchan character in Sholay. Suniel Shetty as her missing husband. Plus Anupam Kher. As in last year's Main Hoon Na, there is a star born every 20 minutes in this remake of Mani Kaul's 1973 Duvidha.

This is Bollywood's desi moment, where you need to know the feeding pattern of camels, the current of the Hooghly river and the rhythms of small-town Uttar Pradesh. Disco dates are for wannabes as are chiffon-clad sequences shot against the Swiss Alps. Eating golgappas outside Victoria Memorial in Kolkata is as cool as going down on your knees to kiss the pregnant belly of your ghunghat-clad bride in 1860s Rajasthan. In a world of ripped-off Hollywood clones, top filmmakers have decided to opt for some ethnic chic. Accents, clothes, aromas hitherto submerged in the overwhelming nri-Punjabification of the industry have broken free, creating a new genre of desi cool. Big, fat Punjabi weddings have been replaced by an intimate Parsi reception and the Yash Chopra winding staircase has been transported to a haveli courtyard at Toda Rai Singh in Tonk district of Rajasthan. As Radhika Chopra, reader of sociology at the Delhi School of Economics, puts it, "Bollywood's early rhetorical mockery of the rural and small-town Indian is now being turned on its head to express a certain Indianness. It is not the pan-Indian, one-size-fits-all monolith of the past. It is a kind of Indianness which allows regional inflections and provincial ideas to travel. In an odd way, it is actually making the Indian identity more plural."

So, over the next three months, there is Shah Rukh mastering the nuances of the Rajasthani dialect in the Rs 10 crore Paheli, Amol Palekar's adaptation of Vijay Dan Dheta's Hindi novel is set amidst rich Rajasthani merchants. There is Saif Ali Khan burrowing through his mother's treasure of memories growing up at the height of anglicised, post-Independence Kolkata in Pradeep Sarkar's Rs 20 crore Parineeta. Saif can also be seen creeping around an old mansion in Mumbai's Fort area in what is possibly the first Parsi noir to come from Bollywood, the Rs 6 crore English language Being Cyrus. And then there is this year's first full-fledged think-global-act-local movie, Shaad Ali Sahgal's Rs 12 crore Bunty Aur Babli, in which Rani Mukherji plays a Pankhi Nagar Sikh girl who wants to become Miss India and Abhishek Bachchan a railway ticket collector's son who wants to become an Anil Ambani or a Kumar Mangalam Birla.

PICTURE SPEAK
PARINEETA Director: Pradeep Sarkar Actors: Saif Ali Khan, Sanjay Dutt, Vidya Balan Cool Factor: Afternoon races, evening balls and a sultry night club song by Rekha. Boat rides on the Hooghly, vintage cars outside Victoria Memorial, songs at the piano, dhanuchi dance at the puja pandals. It's 1962 Kolkata and in Vidhu Vinod Chopra's production, it is shot lovingly by Rituparno Ghosh's cameraman.	BEING CYRUS Director: Homi Adajania Actors: Naseeruddin Shah, Dimple, Saif Ali Khan, Boman Irani Cool Factor: Dimple is Katy Sethna who wears frocks a size too small for her cleavage. Naseeruddin is a potter who is also a pothead. Saif is a prospective student. The 87-minute film is disturbing and funny. Cameos from the oldest lift in Mumbai, Adajania's mother's bungalow and an ancient Fiat.

After the done-to-death DKNY of the 1990s, the Indian film industry of the post-it, BPO boom has decided to use its ethnicity as more than an embellishment. As director Karan Johar puts it, "This is the land of the kundan, Kohinoor and kitsch. When the West is comfortable sporting a Herve Leger gown with kundan jewellery, why should we look anywhere else but at our roots?"

It is a different matter that his next film is set in his second home, London, but the small town or rural is no longer just an item song aimed at truckdrivers. It is as relevant to the multiplex audience seeking novelty. And if it seems more than just a coincidence, it is because of the enormous influx of talent from outside the charmed circle of south Mumbai's second generation movie makers-like 33-year-old Homi Adajania who watched schoolmate Farhan Akhtar growing up to make Dil Chahta Hai. After an extraordinary amount of time being a layabout in some very exotic parts of the world, he decided to make a movie on what he knew best, the Parsis. Or like Sarkar, at 49 a veteran of 1,500 ad films, who could not have thought of a geographical location more appropriate than 1962 Kolkata for his adaptation of Sarat Chandra Chatterji's Parineeta. Or his one-time colleague at Delhi's Contract ad agency, former engineer 35-year-old Jaideep Sahni, who has crafted the small townie smarts of Bunty Aur Babli after spending his adolescence in a Punjabi-dominated housing colony in Delhi and his early professional years as a salesman for NIIT in Uttar Pradesh.

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