‘Bollywood Diaries’ is a tribute to passionate aspiring actors. It chronicles the journey of three unrelated souls – a guy working at a call centre in Delhi, a middle-aged government servant from Bhilai and a prostitute from Sonagachi, Kolkata. All three of them aspire to become Bollywood actors and the movie captures their journey and struggles.
Imli played by Raima Sen is a prostitute from Sonagachi, Kolkata. Rohit played by Salim Diwan is a call-centre employee who wants to be a part of Bollywood. Vishnu played Ashish Vidyarthi is a retired government servant who wants to join Bollywood after retirement. Delhi BPO employee Rohit Gupta, Bhilai Steel Plant employee Vishnu Srivastava and Kolkata sex worker Imli have nothing in common. But the three are bound by their all-encompassing passion for Bollywood.
They are willing to throw all caution to the wind to get there.The gauche Rohit is a lad so obsessed with Hindi cinema that he barters away everything for that one elusive break as an actor in a movie. The problem is that he is more an enthusiastic mimic than a genuine actor. "Intensity hain, but acting is zero," a judge tells him to his face at a Bollywood talent hunt. Vishnu is the 52-year-old father of a married daughter who, one fine day, announces to his wife (Karuna Pandey) that he has had enough of the drudgery of his 9 to 6 office job. An actor who was forced by middle-class pressures to abandon his dream, he wants to pack his bags and leave for Mumbai to try his luck in films.
In Sonagachi, Kolkata's red light district, 27-year-old Imli, too, nurtures a secret Bollywood aspiration. An assistant director (Vineet Kumar Singh) arrives at her door to research a film on life in a brothel. She pours her heart out to him. The story in place, the filmmaker promises her the lead role. All three stories, in the true tradition of a commercial Hindi film, veer into the realm of the extravagant, with the background score gradually rising to a crescendo to underline the growing intensity of the yearning of the individuals to break free from anonymity.