Page 81 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

68 << Industrial Identity in an Era of Reform

Consumers paid that much money at box office. So that is real money.
Reports are not throwing numbers. If you are talking about 12,000
crores as revenue for the film industry, you have to take into account
the money that the music industry, home entertainment business,
overseas returns, mobile operators—money that they all paid the film
industry. So these numbers are not cooked up, let me assure you.

Recall Rommy Rolly’s quip in Luck by Chance during his meeting with cor-
porate executives—yahaan property ko hi property kehte hain (here, we only
refer to property as property). Consider also an anecdote that Amit Mitra,
the Secretary General of FICCI, narrates in his reflection on the struggle to
get banks and other financial institutions in India to understand the risks
involved in funding films:

The example given to me was how the Punjab National Bank had lent to
Dev Anand some money for a movie. The movie flopped and Dev Anand
sent a truckload of celluloid back to the Punjab National Bank saying this
was the only property he had and returned it. 23

Here are stories that speak to one of the most crucial dimensions of change
that being part of Bollywood demanded—the ability to speak a new lan-
guage of risk and participate in new modes of speculation. Reports produced
by management consultancy firms each year for the FRAMES convention,
branding and other identity practices, and the FRAMES conventions them-
selves have served as spaces and occasions in which new modes and idioms
of risk and speculation are specified and rehearsed, and since 2000 have
emerged as crucial to the legitimization of a vision of Bollywood as a global
media industry. But there is no guarantee, as the exchange above shows, that
such performances are left uncontested. Indeed, it would be safe to assume
that everyone in this conference room was keenly aware of the disjuncture
24
between corporate identity claims and actual practices. Even as Khanna
finished speaking, another person in the audience piped up: “And we know
how reliable PwC figures are!” A few weeks before the FRAMES convention,
it had come to light that Pricewaterhouse Coopers had been complicit in a
major infotech company’s (Satyam) fraudulent accounting practices. Amid
much laughter from the audience, the moderator brought the panel to a
close, saying: “In FICCI’s defense, this year’s report was produced by KPMG,
not Pricewaterhouse Coopers!”
Amit Khanna’s stern response—the numbers are not cooked up . . . you
probably don’t know how to read the report—may not have been enough to