Page 57 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

44 << Media Industries and the State in an Era of Reform

included television, print media, radio, music, outdoor media, animation
and special effects, and gaming.
It is also not entirely surprising that the IT and software services sector
was invoked as a model for imagining Bollywood as a global media industry,
given that it was taking shape within the broader context of India’s rise as an
economic and political power on the world stage. For instance, the day after
his production company Mukta Arts successfully went public and listed on
the Bombay stock exchange, producer-director Subhash Ghai commented,
“You’ve seen what India has done with IT. We’ll make the same leap with
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Indian cinema.” And at the 2005 FRAMES convention, Narayana Murthy,
CEO of one of the most well-known software companies, Infosys Technol-
ogies, offered a “5-point plan” outlining how the film industry could learn
from and replicate the successes of the IT industry. Suggesting that the film
industry could easily adopt business and management practices that had
served the Indian IT industry very well and enabled companies like Info-
sys Technologies to benchmark themselves with global competitors, Murthy
went on to reinforce the idea that “corporatization” was a necessary first step
to going global:

To have a global mindset, you need to produce where it is most cost-effi-
cient, source capital from where it is the cheapest, and sell where it is the
most profitable. When we (Infosys) set out, we knew that India had the tal-
ent and the markets were in the West. The Indian film industry is similar
to the IT industry. The film industry is knowledge-based, where talent is
crucial and creativity very high. The rules of globalization apply very well
to the film industry and media. 57

I do not wish to suggest that the idea of corporatization was normalized in
a matter of months or even a couple of years, or that the “rules of global-
ization” were, or could be, clearly defined. Several stars, directors, produc-
ers, and other persons and groups in the film industry expressed reserva-
tions about the feasibility and indeed, even the necessity of corporatizing the
film industry. However, in March 2003, following a disastrous year in which
124 films out of 132 reportedly flopped at the box office, when Ravi Shankar
Prasad, Union Minister for Information & Broadcasting (I&B) at the time,
inaugurated FRAMES by asking filmmakers to “introduce an element of
corporate governance” and “respond to the demands of present competitive
business,” corporatization seemed just the tonic that the industry needed. 58
Without a doubt, the long and complex history of state-cinema relations
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does bear on this moment of transition. Ashish Rajadhyaksha focuses on