Page 127 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

114 << Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory

in indiafm.com’s servers crashing. Settling back into his chair, Mobhani went
on to finish his story:

What Sanjay Gupta did was go to the distributors with this information.
He said look, this is generating so much interest from around the world
that Indiafm’s site is not able to keep up, their site is crashing. More than
a million people have logged on to the site. Now you tell me the price for
the film. He got the entire movie funded before it went on the floors. And
he came to me and said, “Brother, because of you I got 25 percent more. I
could tell people I had an overseas audience for Kaante.”

During the rest of the conversation, Mobhani went on to plot a neat, linear
trajectory of Bollywood’s relationship with dot-com companies that began
with this highly publicized launch of the Kaante trailer, went through a
brief period of uncertainty owing to the spectacular and highly concen-
trated boom-and-bust of the dot-com economy during 2000–2001, and
by the fall of 2005, when I met Mobhani and other dot-com professionals,
had become an integral part of the Bombay media world. In his view, as
Bollywood began attracting attention in a number of overseas markets,
film industry professionals realized that “they could do much more with
the Internet.”
By 2005–06, the Internet had certainly become a vital component of every
film’s career, with marketing executives and public relations agents ensuring
that every film had a dedicated website and a tie-in with a dot-com com-
pany. And producers and directors at prominent film production and distri-
bution companies like Yash Raj Films, Eros Entertainment, Reliance Enter-
tainment, UTV Motion Pictures, and Rajshri Productions shared Mobhani’s
view as they explored various online marketing and distribution initiatives
to reach overseas audiences. For instance, Rajshri Productions, an influen-
tial family-run company that has produced and distributed films and televi-
sion programs since 1947, launched its own broadband website in November
2006. Explaining that the site was designed primarily with the Non-Resident
Indian community in mind, Rajat Barjatya, marketing manager at Rajshri
Productions, emphasized that the broadband website would serve as a cru-
cial distribution platform for the film industry and would also make it pos-
sible for Bombay-based companies to combat piracy and begin reaching out
to a large but fragmented audience of non-Indians across Southeast Asia,
Eastern Europe, and Africa. The Web, he declared, would be a “multiplex
with unlimited seats.” 1