Why Amitabh Bachchan hates the word 'Bollywood'

While Bollyood is the most preferred term used to address Hindi film industry by many within the industry, one actor who absolutely despises it is Amitabh Bachchan. The legendary actor hates the word ‘Bollywood’ and prefers to call our industry as the Indian film industry. And he has a good reason for doing so.

Explaining his hatred for the word Bollywood, Amitabh says, “The Indian film industry is quite big, important and sufficient in itself to describe our industry. I don’t think we need to borrow any sentiments from other parts of the world to describe our cinema.”

Amitabh, who has been a part of this industry for four decades, now takes great pride in representing the Hindi film industry which he thinks is ahead of Hollywood in some ways.

“I take great pride in the fact that I am a very small member of this wonderful fraternity. I think the Indian film industry is whether we like it or not become a parallel culture of our nation today. Many believe that it is Hollywood that is seen by a large number of people. Now I may be wrong but some statistics that were given to me sometime back actually stated that 3.2 billion people watch Hollywood and 3.8 billion watch Indian cinema. So in some ways we are ahead of them and I hope we can continue be that way.”

This is precisely the reason why Amitabh feels words like Bollywood copied from Hollywood shouldn't be used while describing Indian cinema.

“I feel that why imitate somebody else,” asks Amitabh before adding, “When u see my film Shamitabh, you will find a similar incident too."