Marina U., born in January of 1977, was 16 years old in 1993, when she wrote to me from a little town deep in Russia. She wrote the names of her pets and listed her favourite actors in the letter, blue ink on checkered paper, that came to my little town deep down in South India. Asking for photos seemed to have been the rage then, for she had asked me to send mine, promising to send hers the next time. We never did exchange photographs. I was 10. Circling the names I couldn’t quite pronounce, found in the pages of Misha, the children’s magazine from the Soviet Union that Dad had procured back issues of for me from the old paper mart, I had started corresponding with two girls in Russia. I have all four of the letters that they sent me, including one from a younger sister who got passed my letters when the older went away to study. I cannot remember if more letters were exchanged. Neither do I recollect now why we didn’t continue being in touch.

Every one of these letters talk of how much these girls loved Bollywood movies. Their most favourite actors were listed out. It read: Shah Rukh Khan, Mithun Chakraborty, Aamir Khan, Juhi Chawla, Rati Agnihotri, Govinda, Rekha, Sridevi, etc., a veritable who’s who of popular cinema of those days. I hadn’t thought much about their strange interest in Bollywood until a few weeks ago when one of those random thoughts that spring up out of the blue, catching you unawares, struck me. A cursory scratching the surface of Google-dom threw up virtual realms on the cultural diplomacy of the early 1950s that India, freshly recovering from gaining independence, practised with the then USSR.