Bollywood boondoggle
March 29th, 2016
A Boston-born, New York forensic scientist named Elanna Forsythe George is hired by the Bollywood starlet, Simryn Gill, to investigate the oddly under-publicized death of Rajesh Sharma, a Bollywood director who supposedly died of a heart attack two years previously. She travels to Mumbai and begins to unravel a cult that controls the Bollywood film industry, herself becoming a screen performer at age thirty-three, in N.K. Johel’s two-volume novel, Bollywood Storm–that includes five Bollywood song ‘n’ dance numbers. Johel is a pseudonym for an Indo-Canadian writer born in Duncan, B.C. on August 15, 1959. She attended Lake Cowichan Secondary School (1972-1977) and Vancouver Island University (Theatre 1983-1985), as well as Emily Carr Institute of Art & Design (1987-2002). Her grandfather was a Sikh who immigrated to North America during the first decade of the twentieth century. She credits Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Michael Ondaatje’s Running In The Family as strong literary influences.
BOOKS:
Bollywood Storm, Book I: New York (Surrey BC: EFG Publishing Dec 2015). $19.99 978-0991797738
Bollywood Storm, Book II: Mumbai (Surrey BC: EFG Publishing Dec 2015). $19.99 978-0991797783
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