One hungry nation

On my twitter timeline, while I was scrounging for the IPL results (because CricInfo refused to open quickly enough), I saw a tweet by a person I was following: “9 million rand for children’s education. 18 million rand for the fireworks. #ipl” I wouldn’t like to mention the person by name here because I don’t think he knows I’m writing this; anyway, I find something fundamentally wrong with his statement. 

Everyone knows it’s easier to question than to answer. Anything can be questioned – from motives to massacres. But answering to them and correctly requires information, knowledge and wisdom. Not every question has a right answer, but wrong answers will always exist. Questions are free from that constraint. A question can never be wrong unless it is a waste of time, and in this case, that’s what it seems to be to me. Mr. K here has obviously referred to the South African government’s decision to spend R 18m ($2.2m) while its national expenditure on education is half of that. 

I now ask Mr. K to step into the shoes of the government’s head and answer a few questions from me, the first one being “Would you rather make sure that all that you spend in every other sector of development in your country is always less than or equal what you spend on eradicating hunger or educating your children?” If Mr. K answers in the affirmitive, then that is agreeably a bad decision. 

All dollars are dollars. The money spent on education is no different than the money spent on tourism. The money spent in trying to make rich people happy does not have to bow down to the dollar spent in getting a little kid his first story book. It is a fact, and people have to learn to make peace with it. Eventually, it is the rich man’s dollar that will be paying for the little kid’s lunch. As soon as a nation is erected from the mind of a leader and the soil of the earth, it will be like every other nation that has been born so. Hunger and illiteracy will attempt to strike it down. What will you then do? Pour all your money into alleviating the suffering of the victimized or divide it between the people who need it and the people who are capable of giving you more? 

The rubber band effect

The business logic depicted above is a familiar sight to all of us. Like everything in this universe, the global economy bears a semblance to the source and sink model of being. When the currency is money, the source becomes the ‘source of money’ and the sink becomes the ‘consumption of money.’ The consumption of money is not literal: the reason money is a currency is because it is one fundamental unit that can comparatively measure up one object against another with great convenience. For example, say an apple costs Rs. 5 and orange costs Rs. 2.50. In the previous barter system of goods-exchange, the traders would have to weigh them against each other and then begin the transfer of goods – as many apples would be given as oranges that weighed the same amount. But, with money on a third scale, it’s easier to see that twice as many oranges need to be given to obtain a said quantity of apples.

So, as an extension of that logic, we have the researchers, the manufacturers, the logisticians, the warehouses, and the retailers between the source of money and the sink of money. Although fairly general, the above chart can be made to specific for a given set. Different sets exist today. An advertiser for Adidas’ deodorants will target the youngsters in the local population; that would make the set ‘demographic’. In another example, Nokia’s 1100 series of mobile phones were designed and built for users in India: they came cheap (target: large middle class), had a rubber cover (target: rough users) and had anti-slide sides (target: people living in humid areas). In this case, the set would be ‘geographic’. However, these sets are confined to the consignment of products. The money that goes into all of this, it needs a completely different classification. Combining money and politics, we have different currencies. By employing one currency as being the benchmark (ex. Gold, USD), even they could eventually be purchased and sold.

Later on, as the concept of taxes, duties and customs built up around such original principles, money itself became a commodity. With the advent of this commoditization, nations began to safeguard their economies more carefully as their respective currency became a strong determinant of their progress and development. This was when someone in some corner of the world, most probably from one of the first world countries, suggested the opening up of local markets to international competitors. Now, according to me, this suggestion has 3 aspects.

1. The local manufacturer is now exposed to a very large number of competitors, some of whom are MNCs and veterans of aggressive marketing, fuelled all the more by fat wallets. (BAD)
2. The local consumer now faces many more choices than he originally bargained. In place of just the Nike shoes, the consumer will now see Adidas and Power as well. As an added bonus, the encroachers will now sell at prices similar to those of Nike’s just to stay in the loop. (GOOD)
3. The knowledge pool.

Points 1 and 2 I’m sure you would have read about a million times, over and over again. The prioritization of one over the other is the core of most persisting disputes on globalization today. However, point number 3 struck me some time back when I was talking to a friend, and his ideas about micro- and macro-communities, within the framework of an open market, which work together (as parts of a network) to minimize the adverse effects of the business idea.

Let me take up a suitable example here. Consider the local weaver in a secluded region in south India. Prior to the advent of globalization, the weaver would have enjoyed the presence of a small, but sufficiently loyal, local market. However, when the doors of this market opened to foreign investors, an MNC begins to infringe on his share of the sales, thereby leaving the weaver at a loss. The consumer cannot be blamed for it is not his decision; the government of the nation can, however, be blamed only to a partial extent. Although it is an unsaid duty of theirs to protect their local talents, the opportunity will be seized which delivers more for less at some point of time – it is inevitable. However, over a period of time, the market (i.e. the pool of consumers) is bound to become accustomed to the variety. Most people will begin to be able to identify their needs and wants, and the corresponding products, more accurately. This is because, in a market with a monopoly, the customer will have to suffice with what the company can make. If there are too many companies and too many competitors, the generated variety of the products itself will become self-allocated – as that which one needs, that which one wants, and that which one desires.

At this juncture, if the weaver was to emerge again (with supplementary governmental funding to restart his business), he will now be exposed to a larger version of his small-and-loyal market which was present earlier. Thus, if one were to wait for the effects of globalization itself to dissolve into a pool of information, the knowledge pool thereby generated will condense all of the world’s peoples into one large market without altering the response they had earlier on. It’s just like a rubber band: if there is a stiff one, you stretch it as much as you can without snapping it, and when it gets back to its original position, it will be more flexible than before. The only bad thing about this idea is that no one knows for a fact as to when this condensation will occur, and therefore how long the local talent will have to live off the local government’s money.  

When cricket lost

CSK’s victory march has been well plotted over the last few days, with their successive toppling of the Royals (Rajasthan), Chargers (AP), Daredevils (Delhi) and Kings Eleven (Punjab) allowing them to jump to the top of the standings table aided solely by their solid run rates. As with the 2008 season, MS Dhoni, the captain of India’s international cricket team, is leading the Super Kings. The team is owned as a franchise by India Cements, and was known in early 2008 for their generous bids for recruiting Dhoni and English all-rounder Andrew Flintoff into the side. When the Indian Premier League was held in India last time round, the burgeoning expectations of the local crowd itself allowed for the game (a shortened version of the one-dayers) to assume an elevated position in the sporting calendar of the nation. Money people never knew existed exchanged hands as elaborate auctions were setup for “purchasing” sportsmen. The country’s then prevalent cricket scenario suddenly assumed the face of a slave market, wherein players were being pushed around by those with the fatter wallets, fortunately or unfortunately being tied to their respective teams by a contract that existed solely on paper, bound to serve just for the money rather than for the love of the game.

The goal of the IPL, so said the authorities, was to “expose the local cricketer to international competition” [paraphrased]. The Twenty20 format was chosen just so the tournament could be done with quickly enough, at the same time ensuring that money was not lost anywhere in between – money that was present in the one-dayers as advertisements. As the popularity of the Twenty20 grew, so did that of the IPL. People no longer seemed patient enough to wait for the results of a 5-day Test match. Although it seems too late to appeal to them that there’s a reason it was called a “Test”, one apparently cannot resist quick results. The crowd has become fonder of the effects rather than the cause itself; for the players on the ground, it is the game that matters, the sportsmanship that they found exhilarating as youngsters. But for the man, woman and child behind the fence, all of this is unpalatable, ergo unfathomable, ergo impossible. When they could have sit at home and watched everything play out on the television, why come to the stadium? Does it make a difference?

Ars Artis Gratia

The definition of art, to me, would be something of an abstraction. I have never been able to define art for what it is. When i call writing an art, it has become an art only after i have put it down, and so, writing as an art form in itself didn’t exist till then. Is everything so? We like to call those things art which we find that we ourselves are proficient in. We cannot simply come to terms with the fact that art forms which we don not know of do not exist. Frankly, i am ashamed by this, and when i say i’m ashamed, i would like to think of myself as speaking of this world of men and women who practice what they think are arts. An art is which is for the sake of art. The paintings we draw and the stories we write are not truly beautiful and deserving of an absolute praise when they are being manufactured in our minds solely for the money. I agree that money is an incentive, but today, money itself seems to be the end. We begin with money in our mind, we permit money to influence our decisions, and we permit money to give our creations away. There is no sense of belonging that can ever come to be established between we, the creators, and them, our creations. That, in my opinion, is the essence of materialism. The reason we think god cannot exist is money. Furthermore, money itself being the creation of a materialistic individual, is it true then that materialism is an absolute truth? Perhaps, for it is very hard to disagree. By the very definition of god, a supreme force that created us and everything around us, divinity and materialism are mutually exclusive. According to me, those are the two absolute factions that dominate every conceived principle on this planet. I’m not talking about science, and how philosophy guards its boundaries, and nor am i talking about godliness itself, and how philosophy prevents its wrath from engulfing science. I am talking about art for the sake of art, and how a simple and seemingly trivial clash between our materialistic tendencies and our creatively driven actions results in a question of cosmic proportions. Can art for the sake of art exist? In my opinion, we will never know. All that we know is the product of money, and since money has come to define what we believe in and what we deny, money itself is our god. The capitalist economy is the temple, and the capitalist is the priest. Take, for example, our history. Everything we know about the past is a product of money. How? The historians we believe are paid for by money, the tools they employ are purchased by money, the books they write are a product of money, the TV shows they appear in are a product of money, the reason they are willing to work day after day after day is money. The sorrow in all of this lies in the fact that the dreams they harbor are the only representatives of their innate humanity. The purposes that get us started in our journeys, the spirit that keeps us from breaking, the resilience that denies us the way back, the aspirations that keep our destination in sight no matter how far they are – these are the only elements that are left of humans, and but everything else is money. To have allowed such meaningful and pure emotions to be dominated by money is itself a sin, for i believe that if there does exist a god who created us, then he created us not for this willful surrender we have brought upon ourselves and our children. At the same time, he created us naught for the intentions, for they are our own, and thus, the refusal to believe in this god (an intention, is it not?) is a self-denial we choose to impose upon ourselves just so we remain, for the days to come, secluded, quarantined, away from the sins of our past. This remnant, this covenant between who we were and who we are, is the one thing that is moving mankind as a whole in the forward direction; it is the one indication that we despise this money and love that dream. It is the one wave that we believe will yet reach the shore, bearing along the message in a bottle, for our children and grandchildren to read and believe and hope.

The Slumdog Shantytown

Poster

Nestled in the vast slums of Dharavi, Mumbai, Rafiq Ali knew not much of the world that functioned around him until one fine evening, luck, instead of knocking on his door, crashed through the roof. His daughter, Rubina Ali, had been spotted by director Danny Boyle while playing in the streets outside her house. Boyle was there along with his casting director, Loveleen Tandan, to look for little kids to cast in their upcoming movie, ‘Slumdog Millionaire’. Although the cast wasn’t all that glittering, ‘Slumdog’ went on to become something of a revolution in India cinema. It didn’t matter to us that it was a Hollywood production, nor did it matter that Anil Kapoor faked a fake Indian-English accent in his dialogues. All that mattered was that ‘Slumdog’ was filmed in Mumbai, and it won an Oscar.

Rubina near her home

 

Many people who saw the movie before it became so acclaimed had a lot of nice things to say about it. Having been seasoned year after year with colorful and noisy movies with masala and entertainment on the house, the similarities they could have drawn between OSO and ‘Slumdog’ went unnoticed. All that seemed to matter was the two words: Mumbai, and Oscar. However, once the movie showed signs of garnering Oscar nominations by the bulk, the sliver of the local population that was actually interested in the art of the talkies drove to the theatre, paid for a ticket, and watched the movie. Up until now, Slumdog’s success was all about the fame and popularity and glam that the middle-class of India thinks their country deserves but, unfortunately, doesn’t get. Once people actually began to think and opine, they realized the movie was not so special after all. In fact, it didn’t take them long to deduce that the one thing Danny Boyle had effectively done was to show India in a poor light – as though the whole country was one large slum.

According to me, the movie has two aspects to it. These are not going to be the visual aspects and the optical aspects and all that, but those which defined the complete impact of the movie on the general populace. The first one has to do with what the movie did to Boyle and his team. By gracefully walking the fine line between order and entropy, the movie has immersed the message it intended to carry in a sea of noise, dirt and the inevitable thrill we derive from watching a rags-to-riches story unfold in front of our eyes. In accomplishing this, Boyle was rewarded suitably. But that’s only as far as direction and its after-effects go. Just because a movie has been shot to perfection doesn’t mean it is perfect. One cannot simply handle a camera well enough to be awarded an Oscar and then claim he shot the scenes to perfection. I concede that there are many ways to shooting a scene, but when it comes to filming a nation and its people together, such unboundedness is luxury. One must keep in mind what it is that one is filming. Looking at the total earnings of Slumdog, I can make the educated guess that Western cinema-goers have never been availed the opportunity to witness ‘on-the-house entertainment’ before, or at least frequently enough. In presenting an aberrant spectacle to the less privileged, Boyle has marketed the movie as one of a kind whereas you and I know now that it is, in fact, not. In all this celebration and the consequent hoopla, the one thing we’ve taken for granted is the talent of the children hired to play in the movie, the children handpicked from the slums of Mumbai. To us, the ‘general public’, the children in the movie were as much a part of it as were the crew working behind the cameras. To the crew, the children were as much a part of the cast as was Freida. But to the children, this sudden transition from the melancholic dirt and grit of their past to a present that promised a future full of colors was one unfathomable leap. To some, it was as if they had inadvertently traipsed into a dream of sorts. For their fathers and mothers, the amount of money involved was unspeakable. If they walked over to their neighbor in the slum and showed them a wad of $100 bills, the first conclusion would be a successful heist. These people, the downtrodden and the forgotten, are the spine of the Indian economy. They are the ones who bother to vote year after year. They are the ones who think money is earned only by breaking one’s back and shedding one’s sweat and blood. Computer and cameras mean nothing to them. To entice them with money and glory and then to blame them for having fallen for it is just plain wrong.

 

 

Rubina with her father

For Rafiq Ali, the spotlight was a wonder. Maybe he craved to step into it, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he wanted to give up his daughter for adoption, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he knew no other way, maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was all for the money, maybe it wasn’t. Even if Rafiq Ali did all these things, don’t thrust the cameras to inside his humble house. Yes, I know one’s love for his or her children must surpass everything else, but poverty and inexplicable attention can do a lot of things to break an honest man’s mind. I’m not saying Ali is honest, but nor do I want to say that he’s guilty. People like him will expect something in return from a world that just decides to acknowledge their presence through the beauty of one lucky man’s daughter. They are also one among us.

The Salary Theorem

Why engineers can never hope to earn as much as business executives and other non-engineers.

Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power. 
Postulate 2: Time is Money. 
As every engineer knows: Power = Work / Time.

Since: Knowledge = Power, 
then Knowledge = Work / Time, 
and Time = Money, 
then Knowledge = Work / Money.

Solving for Money, we get: Money = Work / Knowledge.

Thus, as Knowledge approaches zero, money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of work done. 

Survival of the tweep!

I just realised why some people in college here don’t give that much of a damn as to whether they miss classes or not – they just wanna clear it year after year: it’s because they’ve discovered the internet and what it can do. In fact, I myself was inititaed into the world when I suddenly realised I had to open a website of my own. Don’t ask me why, I just wanted to. So, I opened Chrome and began to hunt for hosts. I finally landed on Rediff, and Rediff told me annual hosting would cost me Rs. 500 per annum (that’s about $10). After that, I sat down thinking as to what I would write on. I could just go on writing the same things I write in this silly blog, but I decided that I needed something concrete, and something that would hold my interest for the years to come. And then, I truck gold. It wasn’t that I hit upon a lot of options I could choose from, but that I hit upon just one. Entertainment and media. Surprisingly, this world has more people who are worried about the content than about the design, more people who are worried about the content than the place where it’s finnaly gonna end up, more people who are worried about the content than getting the right people to read it. But I don’t wanna know how that came to be. All I was interested in was the fact that I had struck gold.

To survive in a world inhabited by people who live longer online lives than offline, you don’t need a master’s degree in anything. You just need an internet connection, loads of free time and an imagination that isn’t held back by the laws of physics. You need to be able to think like no one else does. Furthermore, with that internet connection of yours, you need to be only at a few places to start with. You need to be in Facebook, which should serve as a useful intro to Twitter (which should lead you to Twistori if you’re bored). After that, you could have a blog or a site of your own that told the uninitiated the world the same things I’m telling you now (but I don’t mean you’re uninitiated; of course you are!). The internet, by bringing together millions of people at a place where they can all stand and look at each other without seeing any of the physical differences between themselves, tells you that anything is possible. Money is not an issue. As long as you think, and believe, that whatever you’re thinking or doing (which is everything from cooking to launching rockets) could be useful as information to someone else, you’ll be making money. And don’t worry, you won’t ever get lost, get beaten up, go shame faced or any of the many other things that happen to people who prefer to run their businesses with only brick and mortar. Unfortunately, I have a gut feeling that I’m going to be skipping more classes because of this fortunate revelation.

Sorry dad.

Being The Tata Nano

Ratan Tata’s new calling card, the Tata Nano, has been unveiled in India. The car is purported to be the world’s cheapest, and also promises to be one of the most fuel efficient in its category (if the category does exist). Here are what I think some advantages and disadvantages of being the Nano.

Advantages

1. Small size: Thanks to the compact design and exquisute space ergonomics, the car could very well be the first truly possible solution to India’s traffic congestion problems in its tens of cities.
2. Fuel economics: By cutting down on everything from aluminium sheet metal for the shell to the size of the engine, the Nano is a light piece of marvellous atomotive engineering with a fuel consumption to rival any other vehicle that promises the same things.
3. For the family: India’s burgeoning middle class can now afford to own their own car. Considering that Tata had gone into a compromisation spree while developing the car, Ratan Tata had a full-scale crash test performed to prove that none of the 500 engineers working on the car had cut down on safety measures. The Nano is a family car!

Disadvantages

1. Affordability: Just as much as being a solution to the traffic problems is an advantage, the overwhelming affordability that the image of the car projects could very well defeat it by the sheer number of Nanos on the road. Maybe Tata will come up with a smaller car.
2. The Green Scene: As with the affordability, environmentalists are concerned about the comparison made between the Nano’s fuel consumption and the number of Nanos on the streets. Again, sheer numbers.

 

Tata Nano (measuring a little less than 5m long)

 

Who ever thought the manufacturer of cutting edge four-wheeled monstrosities in India could come up with such a smug solution for the passenger? I don’t think anyone did. Well, now, with Tata more than dominating the Indian automobile scenario (as well as the global markets with its bids for Jaguar and Land Rover), what happens to the others? And with so much hype being generated for single car, the time is not far when someone is bound to find something wrong with the it. Only time will tell.

When it sounded stupid…

The usual for people like me today consists of waking up at 6 in the morning, freshening up with a hot bath, grabbing a quick breakfast and heading for college – which is either a 2-minute walk from the hostel or a 1-hour bus ride from where ever you are. Our classrooms are kept neat and cool with the integrated air conditioners, and we’re provided for with fine and groovy clothing to match our tastes by our parents. Through all this, whenever my dad sits me down and speaks of his college days, I would feel unable to connect with whatever he had to say: no proper footwear, a multi-mile walk to his school or college, and meagre pocket money to keep yourself entertained. It sounded stupid to me that such a time existed where civilisation and the society could together provide for a fine education but none of the other things that went with being like someone else of your own age. The money I think I had to spend as I liked clouded my opinions about things like this. My parents’ advice stemmed from experiences like the ones they had, their advice about how to spend money, how to befriend the right people and how to spend time in general. In the beginning, when I was in my first semester in college, I used to feel bad that my parents couldn’t trust me to do such things like save up money and have a time-table for my studies. I felt I deserved much more. Whatever they had to say sounded stupid.

And then, recession happened.

My world went upside down. The one thing that lay at the root of the lifestyle I had began to dwindle in quantity: money. No longer could I spend on the clothes that I liked, no longer could I afford to have food in the middle of the night, no longer could I do things on a whim. From being an optional bonus to have a time-table, it now became mandatory. We all know we detest as well as desire change, as though it were a necessary evil. We become accustomed to things as they stand. We need to be able to wake up in the morning and do the same things we did the day before at the same time. We believe that we can survive on the same things that we learnt yesterday. But when we think those things, we forget that the world belongs to the people of tomorrow. Although this sounds like too big an idea to fit your wallet when you drop in at Costa’s for a costly cup of coffee, you can’t deny that it’s true. Those things we thought were stupid – taking the bus to where ever you had to go and borrowing anything that deserved to be borrowed – are now taking shape in our very own lives. And now, with first-hand experience, we find out why such things meant so much to our parents. Now, we know the real value of money. Now, we know the real value of all the things that didn’t deserve to be cherished as much as we cherished them, and the real value of things that deserved to be cherished more than how much we already did. By bringing down most of the indsutries and companies on the planet, the recession has shown the people of the world the importance of spending wisely. It has given those spendthrifts another chance to tread lightly, and those business moguls another chance to belong to a more perfect world.

Silver Screen Sorrows

The film industry is one of the world’s most dominant audio-visual media, and spearheads the information and awareness hegemony against ignorance of common social issues as well as important political ones. It is no wonder that some of the fastest growing nations on earth derive a considerable fraction of their GDP from them. Ever since the advent of the television, and its encroachment into the spaces of print and audio media, the movies have been able to spawn greater audiences as well as critics. Messages that they come to convey are easy to understand and comprehend, and their availability in various languages defies the probability of information localisation amongst major groups of the population. More over, owing to their inherent style of dramatics and character play, it is entertainment on the house if only you can pay up for the theatre tickets. They seem to breed even a fashion conscious worldly wise generation as the years progress!

India, as one of those fastest growing nations, has a dominant film industry thriving in mainly two regions of the nation: the central region, the home of Bollywood, and the southern region, home to the Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada and Telugu industries. Together, they form the largest filmdom in the world in terms of number of movies produced and ticket sales. The Central Board of Film Certification has stated that “every three months an audience as large as India’s billion-strong population visits cinema halls”. There were a record number of movies, 877, produced in the year 2003 alone. Considering the magnanimity of the bosses behind this movies, it is only common that we face such statistics. However, amongst these regional industries, Bollywood, the Hindi film industry, is the largest branch, with an approximated annual collection of USD 1 – 1.5 billion through tickets. Funding for these movies comes from a few large studios as well as private contributors. Earlier, Indian banks and financial institutions were forbidden from lending money to these production houses; this ban has now been lifted. Owing to the inadequate regulation of monetary influx, some of the movies are also partly, or sometimes wholly, funded by the Mumbai underworld (for ex. Chori Chori Chupke Chupke).

The industry seemed to have been firmly established in the Indian soil by 1931, when Ardeshir Irani’s Alam Ara, India’s first sound film, was released. Earlier, in 1913, Raja Harishchandra by Dadasaheb Phalke was the first Indian film. Over the next 20-30 years, most of the regional film industries shifted over to sound filming, and by the 1940s, around 200 films were being produced annually. Colour crept into Bollywood in the early 1950s, but were a commonality only in the late 1960s. Around this period, the genre of the films tended noticeably towards romantic musicals and melodramas. As the 1990s dawned, the films swung back to family centric romances, making stars out of a new generation of actors such as Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir Khan, Kajol and Madhuri Dixit. Comedies were also widespread, spearheaded by actors like Govinda, Akshay Kumar, Karishma Kapoor and Raveena Tandon. Incidentally, this decade also marked the successful creation of art and independent movies, which were hailed by fans and critics alike.

At the start of the 21st century, Bollywood saw a new and immense surge in the popularity of its films with the utilisation of better equipment, improved cinematography and innovative story lines. With the construction of multiplexes around the globe, and also a growingly predominant Indian community overseas, Indian cinema expanded its reaches to greater audiences spanning a plethora of cultures and backgrounds. As the returns grew, so did the investments, luring in foreign businessmen to spend their money on this lucrative trade. And around this time of sconomic boom was planted the sapling that is today known as the concept of globalisation.

Box office bosses looked to maximise their profits, and the most convinient solution happened to be the targeting of mass audiences. This move resulted in Bollywood resisting investment in movies that targeted narrower audiences, thereby no longer representing the face of Indian entertainment and Indian education per se. The doors were shut to small-time investors and prospective producers and actors. The band wagon had to continue to roll, and it seemed that if you couldn’t beat them, you eventually joined them. Further, the increasing investments saw the clout of those at the top also rise. Now, with the localisation of power, the delocalisation of interests was neglected: movies were made if only they were appealing to these bosses. Smaller industries were confined to their parent regions and were unable to move out of their cocoons as the markets grew more and more dominant. This era spearheaded a hegemony of sorts with Hindi cinema stealing the limelight away from movies that had greater potential if only they had people watching them. The new techniques available for movie making, coupled with the paraphernalia that went with it, drew on a large number of talented movie-makers, only to put them down in favour of those who seemed capable of drawing in the bills. It is as if you pinch a sleeping baby to wake up, and then rock the cradle to send the baby back to sleep again.

Bollywood is a portmanteau of Bombay, now Mumbai and the capital of the Hindi state of Maharashtra, and Hollywood, its American cousin. Owing to the development of each state in a different manner, and also due to their classification on a lingual basis back in 1950, the northern regions of India now reflect a greater cosmopolitanism than the south, which is more conservative and abiding with its root cultures. Owing to insufficient segmentation at the box office and the drive for a greater output-to-input monetary value, Bollywood, in its move to target broader audiences by the year, has increasingly integrated the values of the Western cultures. India being dominated by a large middle-class community, a loss of identity streaming from entertainment with which you find hard to establish a connection becomes gradually unavoidable. The need to stay in line with your cultures and traditions is not mandatory, I agree, but to retain them in at least a few aspects of the movies you are producing is necessary. Women bearing all on the big screen is sensationalistic enough, but is this who we are?

Furthermore, owing to the large (monetary) volume of this market, the impeding recession in global economies spelled the sudden shrinking of it. The reliability that Bollywood had generated in its founding years now seemed overbearing, consequently giving birth to investment concerns. Due to the variational dependencies of India’s economic growth with this industry, the lack of safeguarding measures against such mishaps was reflected in an increased inflation rate (up to 14% as opposed to the critical 12%) within the country. This tempted the Mumbai underworld to get involved, who began to provide funding for some of the productions – the result? Black money disappearing into the maze of the market, worsening the economic recession.

Now, the allowable infrastructure, freedom and flexible for the regional industries is dependent on the local government to a great extent. The volume of money floating in the market, being sufficiently regulated, is pinched at the top before it can cascade to the bottom, leading to a monetary localisation. The markets up north may not have realised this, but since it does happen, there is an indirect regulation of money in the southern circles also. Finally, Bollywood has continued to be the most lucrative of industries in India, but only a representative de facto. The post of representative de jure has been regained by those businesses that equiprioritatively dealt with money as well as the needs of the people who made use of them.