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The journeys of individuals are the journeys of nations

A few days ago, I was sitting in a plush seven star hotel, with the top bosses of an International media company, narrating the story of my first truly global film, ''The Suicide Bomber'' to him. As I looked at my potential future partners, who seemed to be riveted by the tale I was sharing with them, I was suddenly reminded of a similar situation, thirty six years ago. The difference was just that instead of these sophisticated westerners, a bizarre, flesh eating Mystic had sat in front of me, chanting Sanskrit shloks, while the sound of a thousand bells resonated in the Benaras evening air. Nothing had changed; I mused, and yet, so much had! These well informed men and the tantric were both means to the same end, as both of them were gateways to funds for my passionate heart to make movies. However, while the venture capitalist was asking me questions relating to my vision for the film and how he could help me; the mystic was giving me voodoo charms in the form of scraps of dead human flesh to be fed to the potential financier that I was engaged in wooing. I was a young lad of twenty one then, scouting around with a friend of mine for finance, so that I could tell the stories that coursed through my heart; and my potential financier was a gun-wielding landlord, who made money out of the oppression of the poor farmers, and who lived in Gaya, the town where the Buddha received ''enlightenment.'' What a journey it has been for me alone in these last thirty odd years, and similarly, what a journey for India! I have literally moved thousands of years, from the dark ages into the global arena in less than half a lifetime!

The early years

When I began my journey thirty six years ago, the entertainment scene in India was drastically different. The honeymoon phase of freedom had faded and India had woken up to the innumerable problems that it was facing. Poverty and illiteracy weighed down the spirit of the nation. As a result, two schools were born. One was the neo-realistic school, which engaged in films rooted in social reality, and whose tallest icon was Satyajit Ray, who put Indian cinema on the world map but was restricted to ''art house'' cinema circuits. The other was completely escapist fare, which was committed to making products according to the needs of the current trends in the box office, symbolized by makers like Raj Kapoor. The average Indian used a Bollywood film as a drug to escape from his heartbreaking reality. Historians say that this was the period in which Indian cinema went ''pulp'' and lost its earlier links with literature. In the metros a sizeable section of the English speaking population regularly watched Hollywood films. The impact of Hollywood on Bollywood is tremendous. Infact there is no denying that the mainstream cinema has been shaped by Hollywood.

In the 70''s and the 80''s the Indian cinema slowly it began to lose its inherent coherence and grace, as well as its intellectual and creative sharpness. During this period the government did all it could to fund and support what was called the parallel cinema but it just failed to take off. This in a way marked the end of the cinema of commitment, and which peaked with the arrival of MTV and the satellite age.

Then as audio- visual images from all over the world began to flood our homes, not only in Metros but all over the country, as a result of the open policy of the Govt; globalization suddenly became a reality for us, and not just something that we read about in the newspapers.

The implications of this were devastating. The Indian film industry, in its efforts to go global and come on par with Hollywood, thematically as well as commercially, began to woo the non-resident Indian.

This was the era when our Indian films surrendered their ''Indian ness''. Despite of our leaders'' having indulged in long, tiresome debates on the new international information order, where developing nations for years had expressed their anxieties regarding the terrifying imbalances in the international flow of information and media products, the fact is that India couldn''t fight the hegemony of the overpowering influence of western culture and the technological revolution.

The Bollywood landscape began to be ruled by Film makers who produced films for the Non Resident Indian audiences, which portrayed an Indian lifestyle completely removed from anything that existed in reality, right from the mega opulent mansions, to the attempts to uphold the so called ''traditional Indian values'', of family togetherness, kinship, and ritualistic reverence to religious beliefs and the scriptures. These were the times when the real Indian from small town India simply faded away from the screen. He just ceased to exist. Indian cinema just turned its face away from the real social issues, and instead focused on the problems of people with too much wealth.

These were the times when film production costs went out of control, block busters of ever diminishing merit began to be worshipped and manufactured, and a mania for sequels at the expense of innovation, took root. Films became progressively good - looking, but inside were hollow and dead, with no inner core. Cinema as a mass entertainer lost its clout to television. Soon, the whole production, distribution and exhibition system began to focus on the so called elite, which consumed films in multiplexes, where tickets are sold at exorbitant cost. With this, the ''first day, first show'' audience, which constitutes the mass audience, faded into history, because it did not have the money or the desire to see movies that did not reflect its world. This was soon followed by the addition of a ''discerning'' middle - class audience, which trickled into the cinema halls, after reading reviews and consulting their peer groups. And that brings us to the current scenario…. Today marketing skills and gigantic publicity budgets confuse appearances with reality, and films have become ''events'' which now form part of an entertainment weekend, where the only target of filmmakers is to get bums on seats and not to create an enduring shelf space in the hearts and minds of the audience. You could say that in some was we have hit rock bottom.

And today…

Today in India, cinema is serving the short - lived entertainment thrills for the anglicized urban elite, whose numbers are only increasing by the day. The Indian exhibition sector is undergoing dramatic changes; in fact it is being re-structured. It seems that in times to come, while the affluent will have a vast network of cinema multiplexes, offering an integrated package of shopping, entertainment and leisure, which will offer several Indian and foreign films within the same complex; the ordinary Indian will become socially and economically ineligible to avail of such expensive up market facilities.

But what is bizarre is that while, just a few years ago, when one mentioned the word ''Bollywood'' to the average westerner, he perhaps would have thought you had mispronounced the name of the global cinematic capital, Hollywood! However, that is no longer the case. Today it is the average westerner who is in fact looking at Bollywood as a lucrative investment opportunity. The Indian film producer today is being wooed by mighty nations from the west from Switzerland and Australia, to small dots in the ocean such as the Reunion Islands.

Why has this change taken place so suddenly? One of the reasons is because the vast NRI and indigenous Asian population abroad have made Indian cinema a lucrative business there. And its growing popularity has not escaped the investors in U K and USA.
The other reason is more complex. The Yorkshire Film Development Council is aggressively promoting the idea of making joint Indo- British productions. The IFFA Film Awards for this year was staged in Leeds. The British Government wishes to promote Bollywood in the U K because it is through these films that it hopes to soften the British Asian youth, who are gravitating towards militant Islam. They feel that stories and cultural modules will work when lectures don''t. Stories are perhaps the most effective communication tool ever used. All the world''s great religions use tales and parables to preserve and transmit beliefs and values. At least the U K Film Council feels that in the 21 st century, Bollywood is perhaps playing that role rather well. Giorgio Armani dressed up Bollywood Diva Aishwariya Rai for the London premiere of BRIDE AND PREJUDICE, and Judi Dench wore an outfit for the latest Oscar ceremony designed by famous Indian designers Abu and Sandeep. In the suburbs of Mumbai, the commercial and entertainment capital of India, dozens of young Indian men and women have been contracted to do sophisticated special effects work for Hollywood, a domain hitherto only monopolized by Los Angeles. Therefore it''s hardly surprising that the Americans are worried about losing jobs even in the high tech service sectors to skilled workers in India and China.

But globalization does not only mean Westernization. Production houses from Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Singapore are working out ways and means to initiate joint film productions with Bollywood. Our company recently created ''history'' by releasing Awarapan simultaneously in India and Pakistan.

India is on the verge of becoming the largest theatre country in the world, an opportunity waiting to be tapped by potential investors. For a country as large as India, film exhibition and distribution are quite diverse from one another. Today around 12,000 theatres in the country are being serviced by around 250-300 celluloid prints released for a mainstream commercial film. As these prints are insufficient, they are first released in ''A'' class cities and thereafter re-circulated to ''B'' and ''C'' class cities in the country. After having run for a couple of weeks in ''A'' class cities, the quality of such prints deteriorates considerably. This impacts the occupancy rates in the already run down theatres and also the ticket prices. Further, during the period when the new releases are running in the class ''A'' cities, pirated copies from these celluloid prints are developed to cater to such audiences in the ''B'' and ''C'' class cities. But all this has been changing with great speed in recent times. Theatres across the country are now going digital. Run down theatres in ''B'' and ''C'' class cities are upgrading themselves and transforming themselves into digital theatres.

Experts say that the world entertainment and media industries will grow faster in the second half of this decade than the one gone by. The study by Price Waterhouse Coopers forecast that the United States would remain the largest media market at 390 billion pounds but growing at the slowest average annual rate of 5.6 per cent. The Asia-Pacific region, driven by gains in China and India, was seen expanding fastest, at nearly 12 percent per year, to reach 244 billion pounds.

There are times in the life of nations when they feel confident that they can take on the world, that they are capable of meeting any challenge, achieving any dream. But development can not occur without the re-assertion of ones'' identity. This means saying to the world and to ourselves that this is who we are, this is what we are proud of and this is what we want to be.

The Indian film industry had been one of the oldest segments of the Indian entertainment industry. Motion pictures were brought to India in 1896 by Lumiere Brothers, and since then there has been no looking back. Today, India has the world''s biggest movie industry that churns out around 1000 movies each year. The Indian film industry is witnessing mark improvements in all spheres - from the technology used in making films, to the themes of movies, exhibition, finance, marketing and even in its business environment. There is no doubt that the Indian film industry is finally getting corporatized. In that sense, 2005 was a watershed year for the industry. The Indian film industry stands today at an estimated INR 68 Billion. Having grown 20 percent from the previous year, experts project the industry to maintain similar growth rates over the next 5 years on an overall basis, though different segments of the industry will grow at different rates. The film industry is projected to reach around INR 153 billion by 2010.

India, by the end of the next decade will become the world''s largest nation in terms of its population alone. We already are the world''s largest multi cultural, multi religious, multi ethnic, and multi linguistic democracy. The journey of the Indian experiment in nation building in the social and economic empowerment of a billion people is vital for the future of mankind in the twenty first century. And in this process, movies and entertainment have a very important role to play, particularly when the winds of globalization are de-linking the cinema of every nation from its indigenous cultural roots, and superimposing on it a fanciful globalized culture.

Fortunately in India, having hit the rock bottom there are welcome signs of a few film makers re-connecting with the Nations creative and cultural roots. The efforts towards the resurrection of Indian cinema from its impending downfall will require a virtual re-birthing beyond the alluring shadows of a global culture. Indian cinema will need to re-invent itself by reviving its links with its past traditions, thereby lending its own unique perspective to its problems which are really not so different to problems shared by others all over the world. We will have to lose our emotional and intellectual timidity and assert our creative take on world issues. Only when we begin to do that will we truly come into our own and make a difference.

But for this, we and we alone can help ourselves. However shaky they are, they have to be our feet and ours alone that take the first steps towards true self reliance. Slavery comes in very attractive packages, and we have a tendency in our country to follow rather than lead. Recently, an actress friend of mine from Pakistan asked me a simple question. ''Why is it in South Asia in particular, Bollywood has prospered while Pakistan, Bangla Desh and Sri Lanka have not?'' ''One of the reasons'' I responded, ''is perhaps because India is an open society.'' ''What is an open society?'' she innocently asked. ''One that is free of any kind of repression. The Indian society in spirit is committed to democracy and is pluralistic. It has a fee press and it allows dissent. Only in such an environment can creativity take its root. If Indian cinema is flying today, it''s because our founder fathers sowed the seeds of a free society which is now in full bloom and bearing fruits. As long as the people of any society retain its free spirit, its cinema will flourish… or else, it will come crashing down and make empty sterile images which only titillate but fail to satiate.