Is it possible to be homesick for a three-hour film?
I am prepared to argue that it is, because Bollywood is not merely an industry; it is an emotion. And Ithaca, with its gorges and gray, is not an obvious place to go looking for it. But look past the snow and stone, and the crowd turns out to be far more crowded with the world than its size suggests.
Ithaca has a population that wouldn’t fill a football stadium, yet on any given evening in the Ithaca Commons you can hear Mandarin, Spanish, Korean and Hindi being spoken within meters of each other. This is a town of arrivals. Nearly one in five residents were born abroad, and Cornell alone enrolls thousands of international students from around the globe, many of them from India.
Most of Ithaca’s population, and nearly all of Cornell’s, come from elsewhere: students from other states and countries, professors and researchers drawn here for a few years. They live alongside the townies, the Ithacans born and raised here, who remain while the student population turns over every few years. Together, the town is a potluck, and everyone brings something from somewhere. For newcomers, the side effect is that they must hold onto home somehow — through food, language, music or, for many, cinema.
If you didn’t grow up with Bollywood, understand this: it isn’t a genre, but a culture, one that stretches across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the rest of the South Asian neighbourhood. It’s why entire countries can finish the same dialogue in unison and why weddings are incomplete without ambitious dance numbers. Bollywood has never met a feeling that couldn’t be made bigger. A man can never simply be in love; he must be in love in a mustard field in Punjab or a rooftop in Udaipur.
Yet, the spectacle is not why these films feel like home — the company is. Anyone raised on Indian cinema knows that a film is never simply watched, it is attended in a small room with family and food and a running commentary. You don’t watch these films as much as you inherit them. By default, the first thing to go quiet when you land in a new country is that room.
That is why I was surprised by how seriously Ithaca takes the whole business. This weekend, the biggest Hindi release of the year hit theatres across Delhi and — give or take a timezone — Ithaca the same day. On Oct. 2, Drishyam: The Conclusion (2026) opened in theatres across India, and Regal Ithaca’s listings carry it too. Out on Catherwood Road, between the superhero films and romcoms, you will find Hindi films with English subtitles, with Tamil and Telugu as well. It makes sense, in a town of arrivals, that the theatre would screen for two audiences: those who want whatever Hollywood is selling and those who want what the rest of the world is watching.
What I love about such nights is how much they resemble home and how little they ask of you. Nobody around you is asking for the jokes to be translated, in fact the laughter arrived a couple seconds early — just because everyone has already heard the punchline before.
It helps that Ithaca is the kind of town where this feels necessary. By December, the sky is gray and the sun is gone before five, and a loud, bright room full of people long for home, people who are aware that every laugh and every dialogue is a sort of rebellion against the gloomy weather (which is a fairly worthy opponent).
Still, the room is not only full of people like me. Anyone can walk in curious and walk out with a Bollywood-loving heart. That’s the quiet generosity of a potluck town: you don’t need to be born into a culture to become part of it.
So, is it possible to be homesick for a three-hour film? I think so. However, I’m realising that it was never the film that I was homesick for; it was the room around it, and in a town where nearly everyone is from somewhere else, maybe it's possible to make that room portable.
Delisha Gupta is a member of the Class of 2030 in the Duffield College of Engineering. She is a contributor for the Arts & Culture department and can be reached at dg825@cornell.edu.
