Half a lifetime ago, I was a recreationally professional poker player trying to subsidize my writing habit with my card habit. Given that feeding one’s habits rarely makes the best business model, that worked out about as well as you’d expect. But from the detritus of my failed poker career emerged the cottage industry of writing about poker, which endeavor at least partly subsidized my other ongoing heavy addiction of the time: beating my head against Hollywood. For years I toiled in the magazine mines, pulling down double-digit paychecks often enough to keep a tar paper roof over my head and my rattletrap Chevy Citation in o-rings and oil.

In 2003, poker got hot, like flu epidemic hot, and I parlayed my magazine cred into six poker strategy books, plus one on home poker and one on strip poker. Did I really have that much to say about poker? I wasn’t sure, but I sure wasn’t going to let the opportunity slide by, for I had no illusions. Poker was a breaking wave that likely would never break so large and shapely again. I caught that bad boy and rode it for all it was worth. We poker players (even we abortive recreational professional ones) have a saying: Never leave money lying on the table. That’s why I wrote all those poker books.

The one on strip poker, too.

Do I sound savagely avaricious? I think I sound practical. By then I’d identified the habit I was really trying to support – not poker, not writing, but just pure freedom. I’d become determined to spend my days as I saw fit, and how would that happen if I didn’t seize such opportunities as come my way?

Bollywood Weddings is ultimately a compilation of real-life stories describing how people fall in love, what they look for in a potential partner and how popular culture, in this case Bollywood films, influences their conceptions of love, romance and marriage. Ironically, Bollywood never entered my mind in the four months of library research, reading and prep work I did before interviewing approximately twenty married couples. The original dichotomy I was working with was America’s modern, love marriage versus India’s traditional arranged marriage. However, while conducting my interviews and attending twenty weddings, Bollywood kept popping up as a recurring theme. The second-generation Indian-American women I met couldn’t relate to the fitted, strapless white wedding dresses worn by models in mainstream wedding magazines since white is traditionally considered the color of mourning in Hindu culture and displaying one’s sensuality is frowned upon in Indian families. However, these same men and women I interviewed couldn’t relate to the way their parents married: none of the couples I met had arranged marriages. Instead, many of them had “arranged meetings” where they were introduced to prospective marriage candidates who were ethnically, religiously and regionally compatible, people they were then “allowed” to date and with whom they could fall in love and marry.

In interviewing married couples, I was surprised, needless to say, by learning how significant a role the Bollywood film industry is in young Hindus’ conceptions of India, love, romance and weddings. Just as Hollywood movies may influence bridal trends for American Christian and Jewish brides, Bollywood movies serve as a source for wedding planning and learning about Hinduism, information Indian-American Hindus seek at such a significant rite-of-passage. Although the young men and women I interviewed were professionals (doctors, engineers, or finance professionals), well educated at the best universities and lead cosmopolitan lives in fast-paced New York, they seek religiously “accurate” information about Hindu wedding customs. Bollywood cinema emerged as the answer to their desire for information.