For the past two weeks, as I’ve been watching my friend’s little Indian grocery store so she could take a much-deserved vacation in India, I have been asked daily for new movies. True, Bollywood is nothing if not prolific in its capacity to release new titles on a nearly daily basis. And it’s not just quicky 90-minute films, these are 3-hour long epic musicals. And while new movies are released all the time, it is not what was in the theater a month ago that people are asking for, they want the movie that is coming out next week.

I try to tell them that the title isn’t even in the theater yet, their response to that is that the movie is available in Houston, Chicago, or New Jersey – they just talked with their cousin, uncle, auntie, brother, mother, father, friend who all told them that they already saw the new Shah Rukh Khan film that he’s making next year. I don’t understand this idea that these professional people who are engineers, programmers, dentists, accountants, and such would expect the owner of this little shop to jeopardize her freedom with a possible prison sentence and/or egregious fine, just so they can get an illegal copy of a movie that is only hurting their very own film industry and maybe putting my friend in jail. I think tomorrow I’ll go into Blockbuster and ask for Iron Man 3 and then get upset because everyone in Delhi saw it on VHS back in 1997.