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Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform >> 37

a point 2000, in the endless duration of time . . . arriving in the 21st cen-
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tury meant arriving into a utopian future.” It is also important to note the
influence that political leaders and technocrats’ life experiences had on their
vision of progress and development. Figures like Rajiv Gandhi, who had
studied and lived abroad, and Sam Pitroda, a Chicago-based entrepreneur
who played a key role in effecting changes in telecommunications policies
during the 1980s, had actually “spent a large part of their lives in lands
35
where that future was actually the present.” This new vision of develop-
ment articulated in the mid-1980s did not just mark a decisive break from
older notions of self-reliance and an abiding belief in the necessity of public
sector undertakings and protectionist policies for a postcolonial, developing
nation. While the Nehruvian idea of a self-reliant nation fixed the Non-Res-
ident Indian within a narrative of brain drain, this new vision of a nation
that would soon be part of a global economy included the NRI as a crucial
resource. 36
In other words, in inhabiting the space and time of the future in countries
like the United States and the U.K., the NRI did not only come to be seen
as someone inhabiting India’s present-to-be. As someone who inhabited the
time-space of global modernity and was playing a part in shaping the global
information economy in sites like Silicon Valley in the United States, the NRI
emerged as the model citizen-consumer who could address and bridge the
disjunctures and anxieties that lay at the heart of India’s efforts to participate
fully in a global economy and redefine citizenship in the language of con-
sumption. As Mazzarella has argued through an analysis of advertising cam-
paigns in post-liberalization India, “progress through pleasure” emerged as
the new “aesthetic teleology” that supplanted a developmental imagination
that was defined in terms of self-sacrifice and austerity. 37
To grasp this shift in the terms of Bombay cinema’s mediation of the
national family and the figure of the citizen-consumer, consider the differ-
ences between Raj Kapoor’s articulation of a cosmopolitan self in a newly
independent nation in Shri 420 (1955) and that of Hrithik Roshan in K3G. A
quintessential 1950s social film, Shri 420 laid bare the enormous difficulties
of sustaining a vision of postcolonial development while a vast majority of
the population was struggling to make ends meet. In the film, Raj (played by
Raj Kapoor) migrates to the city of Bombay from the town of Allahabad, is
drawn into a world of deceit and dishonesty, and eventually regains his inno-
cence and his integrity (imaan). In a long speech delivered toward the end
of the film, Raj admits his mistakes, points out the nation’s problems, and
asserts that the only “solution to poverty and unemployment is courage and
hard work . . . the nation’s development and people’s unity.” Following this