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global finance is rooted “in two inscrutables: a faith in probability (itself a
notoriously poor way of predicting the future from the past) and a monetary
system that depends for its existence on ‘confidence,’ a chimera knowable,
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tautologically, only by its effects.” If anything, this realm of speculation
involving global financial institutions, transnational media conglomerates,
and the Bombay film industry is just as magical, unreal, and unpredictable
as, say, the shadowy world of “black” money that linked Bombay’s media
world with other transnational circuits of capital.
Moreover, as we will see in the next chapter, modes of speculation in Bol-
lywood are intimately linked to production rituals such as the mahurat (an
auspicious date and time for launching new ventures) that invoke the divine
even as they conjure economic performance at the box office. It is precisely
this intimate relationship between global speculative capital and vernacular
practices that we are reminded of in the film Luck by Chance as Zoya Akhtar
cuts from the mahurat for Rommy Rolly’s production to a Hindu astrologer’s
home where Rolly is involved in an altogether different practice of risk man-
agement. In the presence of various Hindu deities, Rolly adorns his fingers
with rings set with different gemstones to help him deal with the pressures,
vagaries, and risks of production in a rapidly changing media world.
Further, Vishesh Bhatt’s outburst suggests that the fashioning of Bol-
lywood as a global media industry, approached by the Indian state and
institutions like FICCI as a problem of corporatization, was not merely
about financing and accounting practices. Rather, it was also concerned
with transforming the culture of production in the Bombay film world in
such a way that the purportedly rational and globally recognizable lan-
guages of risk and modes of speculation would, gradually, supersede the
predominantly kinship-based logics of trust and long-standing interper-
sonal relations that had shaped the workings of the film industry in Bom-
bay for well over five decades. As Madhava Prasad has noted, “pre-capitalist
ideologies in which relations based on loyalty, servitude, the honor of the
khandaan (clan) and institutionalized Hindu religious practices” have for
long structured social relationships as well as the production process in
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the Bombay film industry. Not surprisingly, then, “diversification,” “inno-
vation,” “optimizing margins,” “leveraging IP,” “brand differentiation,” and
“balanced portfolios” were the words and phrases that appeared frequently
in the PowerPoint slides that Kheterpal and Kapur used for their presen-
tation, signaling their distance and difference from people like Vishesh
Bhatt, while also framing the challenges facing the film industry in a period
of transition in terms of a struggle between two distinct and seemingly
incommensurable cultures of capitalism.