The beginner's guide to making an item number.

(1) The Item Girl.


The star of the show. The one who is going to carry the song (or in some cases, the entire film) on her shoulders. Typically, A-grade dancers do not qualify for this job. It is usually given to dancers of grade C, grade D, or ideally, grade DD. Willingness to shed clothes should be proportional to her lack of dancing skills.


(2) The Lyricist.


This is the easy part - It involves two basic steps:


(a) Come up with a cheesy sobriquet for your item girl. It must be sufficiently obscene, yet amply titillating to ensure curiosity levels. Popular examples include Munni, Sheila, Anarkali, Chikni Chameli, Chhammak Challo, Jalebi Bai and so on.


(b) Use the keywords - Jawaani, Kamariya etc to form the base of your song. Further, you can use the following optional add-on language packs:


- 'Chak de', 'Soni', 'kudi', 'Shava Shava' etc to make it a bhangra-style item number
- 'Maula', 'Ya allah' etc to make it a sufi-style item number
- Chyayla, Aila and AiGa to make a Lavani (Marathi) Style
- "Baby", "Chill", "I wanna..", "love" to make a Western-style item number


(3) The Musician


This one requires some luck. If you get a good director and a good item girl, then your job is purely ornamental. Just bang a few utensils together, insert a few grunting and moaning sounds at strategic positions, and your task's more or less finished.


Later, add monotonous thumping rhythms and some alien sounds (Call it a "dubstep" to sound fancy). Get someone to mumble "Yo babay", "Oh Baby", "You baby" like a black rapper and you can convert the song into a "Club Mix", a "Lounge Mix", a "Dhol Mix", a "Rock Mix" and so on.


(4) The choreographer/cameraman


When you have a girl whose movements are worse than a stampeding buffalo, these jobs become slightly challenging. So here are a few thumb rules:


- The worse the dancer, the more the need for skinshow.
- The shot angle change should happen along with the beat, to provide the illusion of rhythmic body movement
- No shot should last more than three seconds. The objective is to expose the girl, not her dancing skills.
- To make the girl look enticing, surround her with a dozen ugly male extras who sniff hungrily around her body to simulate passion.


And with that, your item number is ready to be stuffed into a movie. For best results, stuff it in just after the interval, to keep the audiences from running away after the first half.