Page 161 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

148 << Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media

Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and “I am Legend’s” [sic] Will
Smith all declared that I am, in fact, Bollywood. Steven Spielberg recog-
nized that Reliance Entertainment’s capital actually comes with a poten-
tial consumer base of 1.2 billion new ET fans. And we read in the now
prophetic words of Fortune magazine that one should short Facebook and
buy Bollywood.

Bollywood did, in fact, dominate proceedings for the rest of the day. While
one panel (Bollywood Meets Hollywood) brought together a Bombay-based
producer-director (Rohan Sippy) and executives from Disney, Sahara One,
and Gotham Entertainment to discuss relations between Indian and Ameri-
can media corporations, a second panel (It’s Not Your Dad’s Bollywood)
focused attention on diasporic entrepreneurs who had established digital
media companies with the goal of creating new trajectories and models of
circulation for Bollywood films and film music outside India. In addition,
convention organizers had roped in Pradeep Guha, former CEO of ZEE
TV, to deliver a keynote address that would provide an overview of ongoing
changes in the Indian media and entertainment industries.
Further, it was clear from the schedule of panels and list of attendees that
South Asian-origin media professionals were no longer working within the
confines of “ethnic” media companies. Several panelists and speakers at the
SAMMA-Summit held prominent managerial and creative positions within
mainstream media companies and, pertinent to the present chapter, a grow-
ing number of young South Asians were turning into entrepreneurs and
establishing digital media companies that revolved, in one way or another,
around Bollywood films and film music. The extent of Bollywood’s hold
on the imaginations of these diasporic media entrepreneurs became even
clearer when I began looking through the package that I had collected at the
registration desk for the SAMMA-Summit. Along with a conference badge,
notepad, pen, and a brochure with details of panel sessions and keynote pre-
sentations for the day was another artifact: a dark blue “Passport to Bolly-
wood.” Setting the “passport” on an empty chair beside me, I scribbled on my
notepad: “Bollystan.”
My note was a reference to a widely circulated article titled “Bollystan:
The Global India,” in which the author Parag Khanna reflected on how pro-
cesses of globalization had reframed relations between India and the vast
Indian diaspora. Khanna wrote: “Increasingly linked by culture and tech-
nology, they form a Global India, which I call Bollystan. ‘Bolly’ connotes
culture (e.g., Bollywood), and ‘Stan’ (Farsi for “land”) represents the tran-
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scendence of borders and sovereignty.” Khanna’s neologism first appeared in