It is the super glue binding doctors, grocers, engineers, artists and professors. For Indian-Americans, it is the potion dissolving the compartmentalized bubbles in which South Asian immigrants often find themselves.

It can be summed up in one word and a multitude of possibilities--Bollywood.

Bollywood is the monolith that churns out Hindi language movies by the thousands every year. Based in Mumbai, India, its name is a combination of Bombay, the British name for Mumbai, and Hollywood. Bollywood is the largest film industry in the world, producing the most films and attracting the largest audiences.

For those who have been raised on a steady stream of cinematic images from Hollywood and Europe, Bollywood cinema may appear bizarre, at best. Yet, the surrealistic escape from the din of everyday life is a huge part of the appeal.

The rich and successful are the only people who exist in Bollywood films. These multimillionaire jetsetters make frequent shopping trips to Paris and London. They drive Ferraris on bumpy Indian roads. No brides are burned in dowry deaths.

In this world, people break into song-and-dance routines when they are angry, sad or happy.

“How can spoken words be enough?” asks Koninika Patel, a sales manager at National Instruments in New Jersey. “We want to see a reflection of ourselves in the movies. The Indian immigrant is getting very rich. A song can take me to the Alps in a jiffy.”

Patel recognizes that the ideals depicted in Bollywood films are far removed from her own life.

“Yet, the memory of the real India is fading, and Bollywood gives me a very palatable India of here and now,” she says. “Bright and shiny. Optimistic.”

The world Bollywood conjures up is often untouched by complexity. These are formulaic movies presenting formulaic solutions to life’s ordeals.

“It’s life on a neat platter, like nothing else,” says Ankush Goel, an electrical engineering doctoral student at USC. “Bollywood believes in true love, the triumph of good over evil, marriage, motherhood, and love for the country.”

In a Bollywood film, a girl may realize she is in love only when she sees her lover’s form lit by the light of a lamppost in the dark of a rainy winter night.

For all of their quaint conventions—virtually no kissing until recently, for example—and predictable outcomes, Bollywood movies influence nearly all aspects of South Asian life in the United States.

“Everything from our cell-phone ring-tones to fashion is dominated by Bollywood,” says Tannishtha Chatterjee, an Indian actress working in Mumbai, London and Los Angeles.

At Indian-American weddings, “men and women reflect the fashions of the latest Bollywood blockbuster and jive to the latest Bollywood songs,” Patel says. “Even the marriage ceremony is like a scene out of one of the wedding-video Bollywood flicks.”

These films do not signify all Indian cinema, but Bollywood “is synonymous with globalized India,” says the University of Minnesota’s Jigna Desai, author of “Planet Bollywood and South Asian-American Youth” (2004) and “Beyond Bollywood” (2004).

“Bollywood music pervades youth culture as music does with many youth subcultures,” Desai says. “Here in the United States, it is often remixed by DJs or featured as part of youth ethnic identity at student group events or nightclubbing.”

The Diwali Celebration held at USC every year commemorates the Hindu festival of lights and features Indian students in a variety of performances.

“Every year, the most popular performances are always the Bollywood song-and-dance routines, even though Diwali has nothing to do with Bollywood,” says Harish Krishnaswamy, an electrical engineering doctoral student at USC.

For the youth of the Indian diaspora, Bollywood music is “a way of articulating their identity,” says Priya Jaikumar, associate professor of critical studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.

“While they live in the U.S. (or the U.K. or elsewhere), they do not find as much inclusion within mainstream culture, partially because their parents have raised them to not forget their ‘Indianness,’ and partially because they find few role models or icons that look like them within mainstream U.S. media,” says Jaikumar.

For Indians born in the United States, “lapping up everything Bollywood is an effort to create an identity,” says Krishnaswamy. “Bollywood provides the strongest link to India.”

Desai maintains that Bollywood “is appealing precisely because it is not Hollywood. It is an alternative narrative of modernity for youth who seek to identify themselves as racialized and ethnicized in the U.S.”

Aside from a trip to India, Patel says the only other times “I feel like I am doing something Indian is when I watch a Hindi film in a theater in New Jersey, surrounded by other Indians and munching on my samosa. That is my Indian time.”

Actress Chatterjee says she understands “the first-generation nostalgia-driven love for Bollywood. It is the only available cultural connection with India.”

And that is a connection Goel grasps.

“What alternative do we have?” Goel asks. “I’d rather have some bond, however tacky or far removed from life, than none at all.”

This lasting need for familiarity in a foreign land is one of the factors driving international sales of Bollywood films.

It is no surprise that many children in the South Asian diaspora grow up learning popular Hindi movie dialogues and songs in the hope of making it as a star in Bollywood some day. This has sent throngs of Indian-American aspirants to fulfill their dreams in Mumbai. But very few make it.

“One of my co-actors, a Bangladeshi immigrant in London, dreamt of becoming a Bollywood star,” Chatterjee says. “She thought of Hollywood as unreachable. She imagined that Bollywood was her easiest ticket to stardom. The truth is far from that. Bollywood is as competitive as Hollywood.”

Yet, the Bollywood dream lives on.

Reigning over more than a billion hearts and minds, the Bollywood culture is becoming a global commodity and source of pride for Indian-Americans.

“As prestigious a film festival as Cannes invited the ‘queen of Bollywood’, Aishwarya Rai, as a jury member,” Chatterjee says. “Bollywood’s popularity prevents it from succumbing to the economic prowess of Hollywood. This triumph, real or perceived, is a source of Indian pride.”

Just like the stamp of Hollywood goes beyond movies, “the term ‘Bollywood’ has become a trade-mark of sort,” says Krishnaswamy.

“The reason the term Bollywood is more prevalent today – a term that is obscure in origin, but that was originally meant to convey some of the superiority that the English language Indian press felt toward the mainstream Indian film industry – is symptomatic of Indian cinema’s current reconfiguration within the global market,” says Jaikumar.

As the memory of India is kept alive through Bollywood, for Indian-Americans, Bollywood is India.

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“[Bollywood] does not signify all Indian cinema, but a certain form of Indian cinema…that has gained visibility in the global market through wide international distribution… Bollywood is not really a term by which Indian films are referred to within India as frequently as they are abroad. In general the term erases historicity and heterogeneity, but raises Indian cinema’s profile as a commodity abroad. ” says Priya Jaikumar, associate professor of critical studies at the School of Cinematic Arts, University of Southern California.