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56 << Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform

UTVi, a 24-hour English language business and financial broadcast news channel provid-
ing “live” coverage of the FICCI-FRAMES convention.

companies and organizations that had a presence at the convention, this
magazine included stories about the improbable success of the Oscar Acad-
emy award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire (2008), interviews with promi-
nent personalities attending the convention, spotlights on different sectors of
the media industry in India, a report on the UK Film Council, and an over-
view of the performance of BIG Pictures (Reliance Entertainment), one of
the largest and most well-funded companies operating in Bollywood. These
stories and features were no different from those produced by the trade-press
on a routine basis and as such, were not particularly remarkable. If anything,
they only served to confirm my initial assumption that FRAMES 2009, like
other such media industry conventions, would also serve as an “industrial
consensus forming gathering” where a range of bureaucrats and industry
professionals would, over a span of three days, generate a neat narrative of
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Bollywood going global and becoming “corporatized.” Consider the first
few pages of Picklemag where Amit Mitra, the Secretary General of FICCI,
offered his reflections on a decade of corporatization.
Titled “Framing Indian Media’s Progress,” Mitra’s opening article reminds
us of the instrumental role that FICCI has played since 1998 in “bringing
about several policy changes through consistent dialogue with the policy-
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makers and stakeholders.” Situating changes in film production alongside