It's 7 o'clock on a Saturday evening. In a new dance studio in Dubai, a technolike beat begins playing, accelerating as a high-pitched female voice sings in Hindi: "You are my world. Such is my love."
On the wooden floor, accountants, publicists, and other businesspeople dance with abandon. They shuffle their feet, twist and wriggle their hips, and flail their arms, taking cues for the Bollywood-style number from their dance teacher, Rinku, who until recently was working in Mumbai.
It's common knowledge that the Indian film industry is big business the 800 or so movies released in more than 25 Indian languages each year bring in $1.5 billion in revenue. Bollywood technically Mumbai's Hindi-language-films business accounts for a third of releases and is the most visible and popular segment of the Indian movie industry. And as its worldwide audience, now estimated at 3.6 billion, grows, so does the energetic dance style which mixes folk, classical, and pop influences it made popular.
Bollywood dance studios, which started popping up in India in the mid-1990s, are now spreading across the globe, to cater to some of the 22 million people of Indian origin living abroad. The lessons have been in demand among high-school and college students for years; now, adults are getting in on the craze.
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