“I would never miss it. Every Wednesday, I would make sure I was near a radio set,” I remember my father saying. He would often tell me about his favorite radio show, Binaca Geet Mala, broadcast on shortwave by Radio Ceylon, a Colombo-based broadcasting company, during the 1950s. “His voice, it was like he was speaking to me,” he would say of Ameen Sayani, the renowned host of Binaca Geet Mala and other shows on Radio Ceylon and later, on All India Radio. I like to think that the stories about radio and Hindi cinema’s playback singers, music directors, and stars that I heard from my father and others in his generation have something to do with my interest in mapping Bombay cinema’s relationships with other media – radio, state-owned television (Doordarshan), cable and satellite television, and now, the Internet and the mobile phone. Imagine my excitement, then, when I got to meet Ameen Sayani in downtown Bombay last year, in the same office where he produced, each week, a show that captured the attention of millions across the Indian subcontinent. It is this story of my encounter with one of the most important figures in broadcasting and Indian film culture that I wish to narrate in this column as a way of raising from broader questions about broadcasting and film history.

Apart from brief mentions of radio as an important site for audiences’ engagement with film music, there is no sustained historical analysis of how broadcasting shaped the workings of film industry in Bombay. The story of film songs and broadcasting has been narrated mainly from the perspective of All India Radio and nationalist elites’ interventions in the realm of cultural policy.

As the story goes, B. V. Keskar, minister of information and broadcasting from 1950-1962, deemed film songs ‘cheap and vulgar’ and effected a nearly complete ban on film songs1. While Keskar attempted to create ‘light music’ – with lyrics of ‘high literary and moral quality’2 and music that would steer away from the ‘tendency to combine western and eastern music as was done in Hindi films’3 listeners across India began tuning in to Radio Ceylon for film songs. As one oft-quoted survey of listener preferences noted, ‘out of ten households with licensed radio sets, nine were tuned to Radio Ceylon and the tenth set was broken’4. Recognizing the enduring popularity of film songs and acknowledging the difficulties involved in forging a new taste public, Keskar relented and on October 28, 1957, announced the launch of a new variety programme called Vividh Bharati that would ‘consist of popular music and other light items’5. The press release also pointed out that of five hours’ programming on weekdays, nearly four hours were dedicated to film songs.

This was, without doubt, a struggle over defining “national culture” and as Lelyveld points out, government controlled All India Radio was expected to play ‘a leading role in integrating Indian culture and raising standards’6. However, this narrative, in which Radio Ceylon makes a brief appearance, does not shed light on any other aspect of the film industry’s relationship with radio. How did producers, music directors, and playback singers react to All India Radio’s policies? How exactly did the overseas programming division of a commercially operated broadcasting station from Colombo establish ties with the Bombay film industry? What role did advertisers play? What was the production process for a hit-parade program like Binaca Geet Mala? In what follows, I draw on my conversation with Ameen Sayani to provide a brief account of Binaca Geet Mala and highlight Radio Ceylon’s role in forging a “national audience” around the songs and stars of Bombay cinema.

In 1951, Radio Ceylon established an agency in Bombay – Radio Advertising Services – in order to attract advertising revenue and recruit professional broadcasters who could record both commercials and programs. It was through this agency, headed by Dan Molina, an American entrepreneur who had lived and traveled across the subcontinent, that Ameen Sayani and a small group of producers and writers created a number of film-based radio programs including Binaca Geet Mala. Sponsored by a Swiss company named CIBA and broadcast using three powerful short-wave transmitters, Geet Mala was initially produced as a half-hour competition program in which seven random film songs were broadcast each week with audiences invited to re-arrange the songs chronologically. With a hundred rupees as the jackpot each week, the show attracted attention immediately and according to Ameen Sayani, ‘the very first program, broadcast on December 3, 1952, brought in a mail of 9000 letters and within a year, the mail shot up to 65,000 a week.’ Recognizing the difficulties of the competition format, Sayani and other producers decided to transform Geet Mala into a one-hour hit parade in December 1954.

While continuing to encourage audiences to write in with song requests, CIBA, after consultations with their sales personnel, identified 40 record stores across India that would send weekly sales reports to be used as the basis for the countdown show. However, when it became clear that some film producers and music directors were involved in rigging record sales, Geet Mala producers decided to set up radio fan clubs across the country as a “popular” counterweight. As Sayani explained,

We used to get letters from avid listeners, and some of them used to say, we are listening to your show along with our friends. And our letter went back saying if you are listening with your friends, why don’t you form a club? Give your club a nice name and if you have the funds, type up a letterhead or at least have a rubber stamp. Get people together at one place to listen, if you can, otherwise figure out two or three places where people can congregate and listen. Then send us, every week, your top songs so that we can play the songs you have chosen. And they responded. At the peak, we had 400 radio clubs all over India.

Each week, representatives from CIBA would collect sales figures and fan letters and develop a countdown that Ameen Sayani would use to produce a show. Each week’s show, recorded in Bombay, would be flown to Colombo and broadcast from 8:00-9:00 pm on Wednesday and as Sayani reminisced, “the streets would be empty on Wednesday nights…in fact, Wednesdays came to be known as Geet Mala day.” While the relationship between radio programs, the routines of daily life in independent India, and ongoing struggles to define “national culture” certainly merits in-depth analysis, I wish to draw attention here to the ways in which the film industry became involved with Geet Mala.

The overwhelming popularity of Geet Mala led to complaints from music directors when their songs did not feature in the weekly countdown, and as Sayani explained, “some came to CIBA to say that something fishy was going on and they were losing business.” In response, CIBA’s representatives invited film producers and music directors to go through the sales figures and registers, and Ameen Sayani suggested appointing an ombudsman from the film industry who would check the countdown list. With established figures like G. P. Sippy and B. R. Chopra assuming this role, producers and music directors seemed satisfied with the process and according to Sayani, information regarding record sales and popularity among audiences in different parts of the country began circulating in the film industry. By the mid-1950s, directors and stars from the film industry were participating in weekly sponsored shows on Radio Ceylon and film publicity quickly became a central aspect of Radio Ceylon’s programs. As Sayani recalled, “no film was ever released without a huge publicity campaign over Radio Ceylon and later, Vividh Bharati.” Radio, in other words, provided film stars, directors, music directors, and playback singers with the opportunity to both listen, speak to, and imagine a “national audience.”

I do not wish to suggest that the picture of the “audience” that radio shows provided the film industry carried greater weight than box-office considerations and the information that producers, directors, and stars in Bombay received through distributors. What I am arguing for is a consideration of radio’s role in making the films, songs, and stars of Bombay cinema a part of the daily life of listeners across India, creating a shared space for listeners in locations as diverse as the southern metropolis of Madras and a small mining town like Jhumri Tilaiya in the northern state of Bihar, binding together the nation-as-audience, and enabling the Bombay film industry to imagine a “national audience.” Furthermore, this story of radio and film also encourages us to ponder how other developments in media and communications – for e.g., satellite television and the emergence of powerful media companies such as the London-based Eros International – influenced the circulation of films and film music, reconfiguring the Bombay film industry’s spatial coordinates and engendering new sites and forms of consumption. This does not necessarily mean that we think only about continuities from the 1950s to the present. Rather, this story opens up a space for more grounded explorations of the inter-woven histories of different media technologies and institutions in Bombay.

Image Credits:

1. The Hindu, September 29, 1953
2. The Hindu, October 3, 1957
3. The Hindu, September 29, 1957

1. Lelyveld, D. (1995) ‘Upon the Subdominant: Administering Music on All India Radio,’ pp. 49-65 in
   Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai (eds) Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
2. Awasthy, G C. (1965) Broadcasting in India. Bombay: Allied Publishers, 51.
3. The Hindu (1957) ‘Compulsory Study of Music,’ September 29.
4. Lelyveld, D. (1995) ‘Upon the Subdominant: Administering Music on All India Radio,’ pp. 49-65 in Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai (eds) Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 59-60.
5. The Hindu (1957) ‘Vividh Bharati: New Programme Over All India Radio,’ September 29.
6. Lelyveld, D. (1995) ‘Upon the Subdominant: Administering Music on All India Radio,’ pp. 49-65 in Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai (eds) Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 57.

In this column, I focus on events surrounding the third season of Indian Idol in order to reflect on the changing relationships between television, daily life, and public political discourse in contemporary India.1 In the summer of 2007, media coverage of Indian Idol-3 focused attention on how people in the northeast Indian state of Meghalaya cast aside decades-old separatist identities to mobilize support for Amit Paul, a finalist from the region. While some fans set up websites and blogs to generate interest and support from the rest of the country and abroad, others formed a fan club and facilitated efforts by a range of groups and organizations to sponsor and manage PCOs (public call offices) in different parts of Meghalaya, distribute pre-paid mobile phone cards, and set up landline voting booths. Recognizing the ways in which these activities were beginning to transcend long-standing ethnic, religious, linguistic, and spatial boundaries, state legislators and other politicians soon joined the effort to garner votes for Amit Paul, with the chief minister D. D. Lapang declaring Amit Paul to be Meghalaya’s “brand Ambassador for peace, communal harmony and excellence.”2 It seemed that this three-month long campaign around a reality television program could set the stage for a remarkable refashioning of the socio-cultural and political terrain in Meghalaya. As one journalist remarked:
When Meghalaya’s history is written, it could well be divided into two distinct phases — one before the third Indian Idol contest and one after it. A deep tribal-non-tribal divide, punctuated by killings, riots, and attempts at ethnic cleansing, would mark the first phase. A return to harmony and to the cosmopolitan ethos of the past would signify the second. The agent of change: Amit Paul, the finalist of the musical talent hunt on a TV channel.3

During this time, residents of Darjeeling and viewers in other cities and towns of West Bengal, Sikkim, and Nepal were rallying behind Prashant Tamang, the other finalist of Indian Idol-3. Tamang’s success soon attracted attention, with political activists beginning to leverage his fan following. As Tamang progressed through the competition, his fan clubs were transformed into political offices and fans were drawn into a campaign for a separate state of Gorkhaland.4 There was little doubt that this reality television phenomenon had drawn the attention of millions across India to the complex socio-cultural and political struggles in a region that continues to be neglected, and often misrepresented, by both state-run and commercial media institutions.5

Under these circumstances, it was striking to note the sheer range of number of organizations and groups involved. In Meghalaya, for instance, the Shillong Arts and Music Lovers Forum, Civil Society Women’s Organization, Society for Performing Arts Development, Bihari Youth Welfare Association, Frontier Chamber of Commerce, Marwari Ekta Manch (Marwari Unity Platform), and several smaller clubs in different localities of Shillong drew in people from different ethnic, caste, linguistic, and religious backgrounds, with the Amit Paul fan club serving as an umbrella organization.

Working closely with local businessmen and organizations like the Meghalaya Chamber of Commerce and Industry, fans ensured that PCOs (public call offices) in residential areas and several prominent locations in Shillong remained open all night for people to come forward and cast their vote. As the contest drew to a close, fan activity intensified and funds were raised to create publicity materials and even distribute pre-paid mobile phone cards for free.6 Over a period of 3 months, it became clear that the mobilization around Amit Paul had created a “neutral” space for a range of people to work together, and the many public activities had dramatically changed the way different groups inhabited the city of Shillong.

While news organizations from New Delhi and Mumbai looked upon these events with incredulity, commentators in Shillong began debating how Amit Paul — a middle-class, Bengali, non-Khasi — had emerged as a catalyst for changing relations in Meghalaya.7 To begin with, the situation in Meghalaya had begun to change over the past 4-5 years, with tentative moves being made on the part of different groups to reach out and work towards peaceful resolutions of long-standing issues. Secondly, Amit Paul’s background — a high-school dropout who had to struggle in a marginalized state and region of the country — resonated deeply with youth across the region, with questions of ethnicity receding into the background. Finally, Amit Paul’s participation in a national contest like Indian Idol was seen as a unique opportunity for Meghalaya and other states in the Northeast to assert their presence in the nation and claim belonging in the “national family.”

Following along online, many of these explanations made sense to me. But one question remained unanswered: given the complexities of ethnic strife, what would happen when all this fan activity around a reality television program came to an end? What are the cultural and political implications of fan mobilization that lasts a few weeks or months at best? And as media scholars, what conceptual and theoretical frameworks might we draw on to understand this phenomenon?

To begin with, I would argue that it is problematic to regard such moments of participatory culture, enabled by mobile media technologies and practices, as nothing more than “free” fan labor harnessed by Sony Entertainment Television and cell phone companies.8 Among other things, an in-depth account of this participatory culture would need to trace and analyze the ways in which fan participation intersected with the interests and motivations of local businessmen, politicians, and varied civil society groups. I would also argue against situating this phenomenon within the domain of a “cultural” public sphere and theorizing it as an interruption or intervention into the domain of ‘the’ (political) public sphere. Furthermore, we also need to consider the role played by mobile media technologies – public telephones, cell phones, and cybercafés – in reshaping the terrain of everyday life and engendering new forms of sociality around television entertainment.

Taking all this into account, I would like to posit the term mobile publics as a way to draw attention to the centrality of mobile media technologies to the formation of publics, highlight the fluid and ephemeral nature of these publics, and suggest that the transient nature of mobile publics allows for the articulation of new cultural and political possibilities that might not be possible in more formal institutional settings. Indian Idol-3 was a crucial media phenomenon precisely because the publics that cohered around Amit Paul created the possibility and the space for the renewal of everyday forms of interaction across ethnic, religious, spatial, and linguistic boundaries that had been subdued and rendered difficult, if not impossible, over the decades. And as numerous news reports suggested, this renewal of everyday engagement between different people — at rallies and other public gatherings, fan club meetings, in queues at public call offices and so on — also evoked the cosmopolitan past of cities like Shillong and sparked discussions of how that cosmopolitanism could be a vital resource in struggles to overcome ethnic divisions.

At one level, the term mobile publics relates to the emergence of a hybrid mediascape and the development of technological and cultural capacities to circulate and share ideas, images and information in ways that were not possible earlier. At another level, it is important to recognize that mobile publics are more than just collectives that are informed and/or networked through new communication technologies. Mobile publics need to be understood more broadly as interventions that evince, if only momentarily, new cultural and political possibilities within the realm of everyday life. Indeed, mobile suggests that these publics are open-ended social formations that can be harnessed for different projects in unexpected ways (consider Prashant Tamang and Gorkha nationalism).

Will such a renewal of interaction and engagement sustain itself over time? Can mobile publics strengthen other efforts to resolve long-standing tensions in Meghalaya? How might we trace and assess the impact of mobile publics? How do mobile publics intersect with and re-shape other spaces of conversation? These and other questions that emerge suggest not only the need for further critical examination, but also that the term mobile publics does not have to be limited to the socio-political context of northeast India or reality television. Perhaps we can look further afield and consider audience responses to the racialized dynamics of U.K.’s Celebrity Big Brother involving the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty or varied uses of mobile media technologies to mobilize political action in Pakistan in 2007-08 as instances in which mobile publics played a key role.

Image Credits:

1. Fans in Meghalaya rally to support Indian Idol 3 finalist Amit Paul
2. Amit Paul Fan Club gathering. Picture courtesy of Arijit Sen.
3. Amit Paul greets his fans

1. This column emerged from a paper I presented at a symposium on reality television held at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania. http://www.asc.upenn.edu/news/Calendar.aspx?id=570
2. “MLAs’ last ditch bid to garner votes for Amit Paul,” Shillong Times, 20 September 2007.
3. Jaideep Mazumdar, “The hills are alive: a local lad on national TV unites a state,” Outlook, 1 October 2007.
4. Simon Denyer, “Gurkha secessionist fire stoked by Indian Idol,” International Herald Tribune, 19 March 2008.
5. See Kallol Bhattacharjee, “Northeastern India: Satellite TV’s Forgotten Spectator,” Flow. http://flowtv.org/?p=581.
6. It is useful to note here that unlike American Idol, where viewers are allowed to vote for a period of two hours after the show’s broadcast, Indian Idol viewers are permitted 11 hours (from 9 PM until 8 AM next day). Viewers could cast their vote by sending an SMS via mobile phone or “televote” through a landline telephone, use an interactive voice service available for mobile phones and landline phones, or online through www.indianidol.sify.com.
7. See Nalin Mehta (Ed.), Television in India: Satellites, politics, and cultural change (New Delhi: Routledge, 2008).
8. Terranova, “Free labor: producing culture for the global economy,” Social Text, 18, no. 2 (2000), 33-57.

In July 2005, MTV Networks announced the launch of MTV-Desi, a niche channel for South Asian-American youth. Desi, which means “from the homeland,” is a term that is increasingly used to refer to people of South Asian origin in North America and is indicative of desi youth emerging as “public consumers and producers of distinctive, widely circulating cultural and linguistic forms.”1

Launched with great fanfare, MTV-Desi featured Bollywood song sequences and Indi-pop music videos, diasporic artists based in North America and the U.K. (DJ Rekha, M.I.A., Jay Sean), shows that revolved around desi culture (Live From), and hit programs like Roadies from MTV-India. Recognizing the transcultural nature of desi youth culture, writers, producers, and VJs worked hard to define MTV-Desi as a unique site of cultural production that neither mainstream American television nor the India-centric programming on Dish and DirecTV could match.

Further, MTV-Desi was part of a larger MTV World initiative that involved channels targeting Korean (MTV-K) and Chinese-American youth (MTV-Chi). As the very first mainstream media initiative that targeted Asian American youth, these channels attracted a great deal of positive attention despite the fact that they were available only through international programming packages on DirecTV’s satellite television service. MTV-Desi, for instance, was part of the “Hindi Direct” package that included five other Indian television channels.

Eighteen months later, MTV Networks pulled the plug on MTV-Desi, MTV-K, and MTV-Chi, stating that the premium distribution model failed to attract audiences and hence, advertising revenues. In press releases and interviews, MTV executives pointed out that the decision was also shaped by a larger process of corporate restructuring that Viacom undertook at the time. On the one hand, the cancellation of the MTV World initiative did not come as a major surprise. As one journalist remarked on the widely read blog of the South Asian Journalists Association,

“we published next to nothing on the channel, because I couldn’t find anyone who watched the satellite channel: no college students, no twenty-somethings with spare change. And it wasn’t just me. All the tastemakers I interviewed – DJs, other music types – said they didn’t know any MTV Desi subscribers either”2.

On the other hand, given the fact that all other attempts to carve out a space for Asian-American programming on television – AZN, American Desi, South Asia World, Pan Desi, and ImaginAsian – had failed or struggled to remain viable, the dismay among desis and other Asian-American groups was understandable.3

Relying on advertising and marketing discourse that has, over the past decade, constructed the “Asian consumer” and the Asian-American community as an increasingly important audience demographic, protest letters and petitions suggested that these failures reflected a lack of commitment on the part of mainstream media corporations to develop and sustain Asian-American programming. Although letters to MTV Networks urging the company to keep MTV World alive and to make these channels more widely available did not have any effect, it is possible that they did influence MTV’s decision to rethink their content production and distribution model. In December 2008, MTV Networks announced the launch of MTV Iggy, a website for Desi, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese youth across the world.

In this column, I want to make a case for approaching MTV-Desi as an important moment in the history of diasporic media production and as a productive failure that signals an important shift in the relationship between television and diasporic cultures.4 Is the MTV-Desi case merely another illustration of the limits of niche programming? In other words, what other factors, besides the ones offered by industry insiders (distribution, lack of advertiser interest), shaped MTV-Desi? Engaging in this exercise is critical, in my opinion, if we are to understand the challenges facing the television industry in imagining Asian American audiences and, more importantly, acknowledge the limits of television where Asian American cultural production is concerned.

To be sure, the narrowcasting logics of American television and industry lore concerning minority audiences do provide one explanation as to why MTV Desi did not succeed. Nusrat Durrani, Senior Vice President of MTV World, and others at MTV understood very well that the relationship between “diaspora” and “home” was much more ambivalent for desi youth compared to their parents’ generation, and that MTV-Desi could not succeed by mimicking MTV-India or other Indian television channels. As a Sepia Mutiny blogger observed: “MTV-Desi was not MTV India. Not something piped in for the Aunties and Babujis, not something that caters to particular regional, ethnic or religious tastes, not something that waxes nostalgic for the mother country. But, instead, reflects the fact that we are creating something new, forging a unique identity from the mélange available to us as Ameri-Brit-Canadian-Kenyan-Punjabi-Hindu-Tamil-
Bengali-Parsi-whatever.”

However, despite Durrani and others’ efforts to position MTV-Desi as a uniquely diasporic space, they were forced to strike a distribution deal with DirecTV and locate MTV-Desi within an India-centric programming package simply because Asian Americans still did not constitute a viable and sustainable consumer demographic that would attract advertisers. As Durrani explained, “if you look at Asian Americans, then get to South Asian Americans, then cut it further to our specific target group of South Asian American youth, and consider all the diversity within that group, you’re not left with much. Of course we all knew that linear TV was not the best option, but when the project was green lit, in that media landscape, it was what we could do”5. Distribution aside, MTV-Desi’s programs also failed to make any significant intersections with desi youth culture. As Amardeep Singh, taking stock of contemporary desi youth culture and pointing out the absence of diaspora-centric programming on MTV-Desi, noted in another Sepia Mutiny post: “at the current moment there isn’t truly a need for a channel like MTV-Desi, especially if you have to pay for something a dedicated blogger/video podcaster could do in her basement for free.”

However, MTV-Desi’s failure cannot be explained by focusing on the logics of American television alone. The growing influence of Indian film and television companies in defining media circulation in the diaspora also shaped the channel’s programming, distribution, and reception. Over the past decade, film and television companies based in Bombay, Hyderabad, and Chennai have been very successful in reaching diasporic audiences across North America, Western Europe, and the Middle East. Taking advantage of mainstream media’s neglect and the dwindling support for public access television in the U.S., channels like ZEE, Sun, and Star have established themselves as attractive alternatives for South Asians. Where cinema is concerned, a number of prominent production companies and studios based in Bombay have also been successful in defining the flow of “South Asian” content around the world. Hindi-language films have come to dominate the desi mediascape to the extent that diasporic filmmaking, as an industrial and aesthetic category, is also being “Bollywoodized” (Mira Nair’s The Namesake, co-produced and marketed by Bombay-based UTV, is a good example). Even a cursory look would confirm that India-centric media, non-subtitled television programming in particular, does not speak to the particular experiences of desi youth.6

We might argue, then, that MTV-Desi is symptomatic of a larger problem confronting desi media production – of being caught between the nationalist logics of two powerful media industries. And the question is, if Indian media companies are defining the flow of “South Asian” content, and American television’s commercial logics do not allow for diaspora-relevant programming, what possibilities remain for desi media production? Can television, in its current form and structure, be expected to serve the needs of a decidedly transnational, hybrid, and increasingly digital youth culture?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Perhaps desi entrepreneurs who have launched digital media companies over the past few years – Jaman, Desihits, and Saavn to name a few – decided that television isn’t worth bothering with anymore. And surely Nusrat Durrani and his team at MTV also pondered the limits of television as they reworked the MTV World initiative into MTV Iggy. Bypassing the distribution bottleneck, making content production and circulation more open and participatory, and creating a space that invites us to look beyond established racial and ethnic categories in the U.S., MTV Iggy signals key transitions in mainstream media corporations’ approach to Asian/Asian American youth culture. Without a doubt, it is disappointing, even if understandable, that American television never had the space for characters like Bhangramuffins telling us to kiss our chuddies.

Now it remains to seen what kinds of stories will be told and circulated and, crucially, who gets to participate in these new digital spaces. But with such terrific narratives like Sita Sings the Blues leading the way, maybe we can be optimistic. You know what? TV can kiss our chuddies!

Image Credits:

1. MTV Desi
2. MTV Desi Available Through DirecTV
3. Desi Fire – Jay Sean
4. Saavn Broadcasts Snoop Dogg’s “Singh is Kinng”

1. Shalini Shankar, Desi Land: Teen culture, class, and success in Silicon Valley, Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, p.4.
2. Venugopal, 2007
3. See Madhavi Mallapragada’s MediaCommons entry on this topic [http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/imr/2008/04/13/show-me-the-money-desi-tv-in-the-us-marketplace]
4. In a recently published anthology on production studies, Vicki Mayer draws attention to the importance of focusing on failures in media production. Examining failures in the production process, Mayer points out, involves listening to stories about failure that media professionals narrate, how they move on to the next project, and often sheds light on what constitutes success in a given media landscape. See Production Studies (Eds.) Vicki Mayer, Miranda Banks, and John Caldwell, New York: Routledge, 2009.
5. personal interview
6. One reason that Bollywood figures prominently in discussions of desi youth culture is because of desi youth appropriating and re-mixing film songs and dance sequences in college events, dance clubs, etc.