Page 137 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

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

two prominent India-based companies—rediff.com and indiatimes.com—
that went on to define themselves as portals targeting Indians worldwide,
especially those residing in the United States. As Mallapragada has shown,
through a series of financial and strategic alliances, companies like rediff.
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com were quick to define themselves as “Indian American.” In March 2001
rediff.com acquired a U.S.-based portal, thinkindia.com, and shortly there-
after, launched its U.S. edition. In August that year, rediff.com went on to
acquire two more U.S.-based companies—a long-distance telecom company
that enabled NRIs to call India (Valuecom Communications Corporation),
and India Abroad, one of the oldest and most profitable Indian Ameri-
36
can publications. As rediff.com’s CEO and Chairman Ajit Balakrishnan
explained,
It is our mission to make rediff.com the online portal of choice for Indians
worldwide. We will do this by helping all Indians living outside India to
connect with their community, both in India and in the countries in which
they live. 37

Competing with rediff.com for NRI eyeballs, executives at indiatimes.
com also went on to frame their website as a portal for “global Indians.”
On August 15, 2001, indiatimes.com proclaimed its goal of reaching out to
American NRIs in full-page advertisements in India’s leading newspapers,
with the slogan: “Quit USA, Enter India.” As Rajesh Sawhney, CEO of Times
Internet at the time, declared: “We are an Indian portal for Indians world-
wide. That’s our biggest USP (unique selling proposition).” This diasporic
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bias of the dot-com sector and specifically, the construction of the American
NRI community as the prized user commodity of the Internet, was a crucial
factor in enabling companies such as indiafm.com to imagine and represent
themselves as uniquely positioned to reconfigure the vaguely understood
overseas territory of diasporic Indians into a well-defined “NRI audience.”
However, this also meant that this narrowly construed audience had come to
stand in for a heterogeneous and uneven terrain of circulation and consump-
tion of Bollywood films.
To illustrate how indiafm.com was framed as a company that could forge
an “NRI audience,” let me turn to my interview with its cofounder, Saleem
Mobhani. Toward the end of an hour-long conversation, Mobhani opened a
folder and pulled out a press kit. “Here, let me show you a couple of things,”
he urged and handed me a brochure which explained how indiafm.com had,
since its launch in 1997, emerged as the “only site trusted by the Entertain-
ment Industry and consumers.”