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Diasporic Entrepreneurs and Digital Media >> 159

ND: So right, ’97, I think that was the year. Cornershop made an album
called When You’re Born for the 7th time. Have you heard it?
AP: Yes, I have. And I could be wrong, but I think Channel [V] or MTV-
India did play one of their music videos.
ND: Ok, so you know what I’m talking about. When I heard that, I remem-
ber, specifically, I was actually on a VH1 floor. And they used to have
these piles of CDs that people didn’t like, thrown away because they
had two copies or whatever. So I was walking by and I saw two cop-
ies of this new album lying outside somebody’s door and I picked it
up. I had this little Discman and I listened to the entire album on my
way home. It’s one of the first albums that meaningfully, substantially,
integrated South Asian influences and other types of influences like
Allen Ginsberg reciting one of his poems, Paula Frazier singing a duet
with Tjinder Singh. So the next day I looked up our system, our video
library system and I found that they had a video but it wasn’t being
played on the channel. So I actually walked into the programmer’s
room and said, why aren’t you playing this stuff? I was talking about
“A Brimful of Asha,” which had a cool video. A few months later we
started playing the video, but only after we heard from elsewhere that
this is cool. I’m relating this particular incident because it has stayed
with me. I yearned to do something, but I didn’t have the power to do
anything at the time.

Durrani went on to talk at length about other diasporic artists and groups,
including Talvin Singh, Fun-Da-Mental, Nitin Sawhney, and others associ-
ated with the Asian Underground, a music and cultural formation involv-
ing primarily second-generation British-born youth with ties to different
countries in the Indian subcontinent. His immersion in this diasporic cul-
tural phenomenon during the mid-to-late 1990s shaped his understanding of
diasporic youth culture and its location between and betwixt “national” cul-
tures. However, despite Durrani’s efforts to position and brand MTV-Desi as
a uniquely diasporic space, MTV Networks entered into a distribution deal
with DirecTV and located MTV-Desi firmly within an India-centric pro-
gramming package. This decision was partly a function of television industry
professionals grappling with a changing distribution landscape in the United
States, and certainly spoke to their uncertainty about a channel like MTV-
Desi reaching audiences via satellite television. As Durrani explained:

When the project was green lit, the distribution landscape was kind
of weird. We were still living in the world of linear TV and traditional