BOLLYWOOD NIGHT.(tour by Indian film stars)

The other day, Bharat Jotwani, dressed in black leather and carrying two cell phones, was standing on the fifteen-yard line in the Continental Airlines Arena, in the Meadowlands. He was trying to imagine what the arena, which had been set up for an indoor football game between the New Jersey Gladiators and the New York Dragons, would look like once it was pulsing with lasers and suffused with fake smoke. "Not only wild, they'll go very wild," he said, sounding more hopeful than sure.

Jotwani, who is fifty years old, is a compact man with mournful eyes and a slim mustache. Growing up in Pune, a city eighty miles from Bombay, he wanted to join the Indian Army, but his parents, who had seven daughters and only two sons, wouldn't let him. Instead, they sent him to the United States to study law or medicine. Jotwani never got that far, because almost immediately upon landing in New York he was offered a job in public relations with Air India. In this capacity, he met a lot of big stars and developed an interest--partly professional, partly personal--in Bollywood culture.

Every six months or so, a different group of Indian movie stars tour the United States, and Jotwani, who is now the president and also the primary employee of Poojanka Entertainment, tries his best to book them somewhere in the tristate area. (The firm is named after his two teen-age daughters, Pooja and Priyanka.) This spring's tour--"Heartthrobs"--features three starlets and three young studs, the hottest of whom is Hrithik Roshan, who has appeared in such hits as "Kaho Naa . . . Pyaar Hai" ("Say This Is Love") and "Mission Kashmir." Jotwani described Hrithik as "God's gift to Indian people." Then he corrected himself: "Not Indian, all Asians--Pakistanis, Indians, everybody." Hrithik, he added, is "like how Elvis was." In the poster for "Heartthrobs," Hrithik is shown with generously moussed hair, wearing a tight-fitting silver shirt and gazing penetratingly over the top of a pair of yellow-tinted sunglasses. His fans know that he has an extra thumb on his right hand.

"Heartthrobs," which began its tour in mid-May in Atlanta and will windup in mid-June in Birmingham, England, is a three-hour extravaganza in the Bollywood fashion. It's all singing and dancing and pyrotechnics, except that the stars don't actually sing the songs. When Hrithik first appears onstage, in a black fringed outfit covered with sparkles, flames erupt on either side of him. Later, he performs "Bumbro," from "Mission Kashmir," with one of ...