OK, so I’m stretching the ”newcomers to Scotland” line a tad. Or maybe you could see Bollywood as a relative newcomer to these shores. Can’t say I remember many Hindi-language movies gracing cinema screens near me when I was growing up. Now a globe-straddling cinematic colossus, Bollywood has well and truly made its mark in our little corner of the world. Hell, they’re even using it to sell Irn Bru.

Weighing in with a budget of just over £17m, Anthony D’Souza’s Blue is small compared to its Hollywood counterparts. Yet it’s one of the most expensive Bollywood flics to date and confirms the ever-growing reach and power of India’s most high-profile cultural export.

Happily, initial wobbles were overcome and, in Scotland, the film has prime-time slots until Thursday at the main Cineworld complexes in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

For want of anything better to do and having never seen a Bollywood film, I went along to Saturday night’s screening at Cineworld Renfrew Street – and what a revelation! This has to rank as one of the most uplifting and enlivening cinematic discoveries I’ve made this year! No, seriously…

A brief plot synopsis: Sagar and Samir Singh (played by Sanjay Dutt and Zayed Khan) are brothers living continents apart. Sagar works for fishing and shipping magnate Aarav Malhotra (Kumar) in the Bahamas while little bro is a bike racer in Bangkok. A bit too cocky for his own good, Sam accepts a dodgy assignment from the shady Gulshan (Rahul Dev). He fails the assignment, losing a precious package and landing himself with a $50m debt he must repay if he wants to stay alive. 

After high-tailing to his brother’s home in the Bahamas, Sam proceeds to large it with Sagar and Aarav on the beach and in the local nightspots. Always on his mind is Nikki (Katrina Kaif), the beautiful love interest he left behind when he fled Bangkok. Unfortunately for Sam, Gulshan soon catches up him and a desperate race to avoid death ensues – one that culminates in the brothers and Aarav risking life and limb to find a teasure trove imprisoned in a sunken ship.  

OK, so Blue is plagued by clunky, redundant plotting; credibility isn’t just stretched, it’s snapped over and over again.

Blue: the cast

That minor quibble aside, I left the cinema in fits of laughter and feeling refreshed and renewed. Roll on my next Bollywood fix. Hell, even “Chiggy Wiggy” is growing on me…

We all know something about the pernicious effect of corporate power on freedom and diversity of expression in news media.

Well, spare a thought for the brave individuals striking out by themselves in UK book publishing. It’s a David and Goliath world out there - without the miraculous sling! Yet some are taking the plunge and doing everything they can to publish serious work and remain solvent enough to feed, clothe and house themselves. The struggle, though, looks set to become even harder. Many smaller, experimental and alternative-minded publishers – no matter how determined and innovative – will go to the wall or be forced to scale back their ambitions. 

Some facts to put the situation in perspective: there are around 8000 book publishing enterprises in the UK, yet four

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UK book publishing has in recent years enjoyed healthy growth rates which have put it ahead of counterparts in the rest of Europe. Earnings have increased from roughly £2.5bn in 2001 to almost £3bn last year (complete stats here). The 2009 recession, however, has sunk its teeth in. Current sales are down around 11% on 2008 and deteriorating conditions have forced some of the industry’s most powerful names to make tough choices: Penguin announced 100 redundancies earlier this year and – shock, horror! – the Richard and Judy Book Club made its last ever recommendations (actually more serious than it sounds - R & J did loads to raise the profile of reading and they didn’t just promote guff). See Cahal Milmo’s feature in The Independent for the full picture.

For Scottish independent Two Ravens Press, market concentration and declining demand have conspired to make life pretty much intolerable. This is sad and serious. Forget Canongate - TRP is far more deserving of the epithet ’on the edge’. Run from a lochside croft in the north-west Highlands by Sharon Blackie and David Knowles, it has garnered praise as one of the most radical outfits in Scottish and UK publishing. Its aims are simple: to provide a home “for writers of original, innovative and challenging work” who are having difficulties ”in the increasingly conformist world of British publishing”. Its authors include Alasdair Gray (who has a new collection of poetry out next year), Suhayl Saadi and Kevin Williamson (founder of Rebel Inc and the man who can claim most credit, after Irvine Welsh, for giving the world Trainspotting). 

I’m hoping to talk to Sharon and/or David at some point in the near future about what it takes to survive as a small, remote publisher of material with little or no mass market appeal. How do they do it? Read more