People want music and dance because it feeds their soul. Everybody here in the US who sees Inside Man is electrified by the rap remix of Chaiyya Chaiyya. I played it for my students in an American high school and they went crazy for it. It turned out two Hispanic chemistry students already had it on their ipods, but with the title misspelled so they couldn’t figure out what it was. Best way to market it: see it for what it is. Honor your artists. Invest in them, I guess. They’ve gotta eat. (God, did any dancers fall off that train?!)

In my opinion, the impact of cultural export cannot be overemphasized. The world watches Hollywood movies and it wants to drink Coca Cola, eat at McDonald’s, wear Levi’s jeans and Nike shoes, and showoff new iPods. The Indian movie industry (let’s start calling it “Mayapur” shall we), although rivaling Hollywood in terms of sheer eyeballs does not translate into international consumer interest in Indian products (people in the Philippines or the U.A.E. don’t watch a Mayapur film and go “where can I buy a kurta?”). I think the reasons for this difference are multifold.

Hollywood has the advantage of catering to a world that is already widely anglicized due to British colonial rule in the past. American products like Levi’s jeans and Nike shoes, Coca Cola etc. are marketed worldwide so they are there to instantly exploit the desire to “look American” created by Hollywood. In other words, Hollywood, Levi’s, Nike, Coca Cola etc. are all in sync. How many Indian kurta or chappal (or for that matter any other) brands can you name that are savvy enough to even realize that they may be able to create an overseas market inspired by Mayapur? But wait, before we start thinking about Indian products, we realize we have a bigger problem at hand. Mayapur itself widely patronizes American culture (I remember almost falling off my chair once when I came across a Shah-Rukh Khan song in which he dances in front of a huge American flag for no apparent reason!). Mayapur has so far been able to hook only international audiences that like to watch fine young men and women perform inspired pelvic thrusts to incomprehensible songs (not that there’s anything wrong with it, just that it’s a low-paying audience). This audience exists mainly in the middle-east or far-east whereas the greatest payoff in the movie business is in America (high ticket prices, low piracy, sophisticated video rental systems, merchandise sales, digital delivery systems…the list goes on).

But before we go into any detail, let’s start at the beginning of the process of film making. The quality of screenwriting itself is questionable in India (you’ll be surprised at how ignorant even some of the big names in Mayapur are). In contrast, it’s almost impossible to find a struggling Hollywood screenwriter typing away on a laptop at a Los Angeles cafe who has not seriously studied the art of screenwriting. Almost every screenwriter, beginner or professional, is dialed into the latest technological tools for the job - and there are many extremely sophisticated ones that are really very effective. The numerous excellent film schools in the United States create a solid base of creative minds that have honed their skills systematically, and those who cannot afford film school still have great inexpensive internet based resources available to them. And we haven’t even gone into production and marketing aspects. A discussion about Film Production Project Management Methodologies is not even necessary to make the point.

In conclusion, Mayapur will have arrived only when white men and women somewhere in Kansas or Oklahoma throw on kurtas and have masala dosa brunches without even thinking about it. Until then, Mayapur will continue to be called Bollywood - a bad copy of Hollywood, albeit with the occasional twist. It has a long way to go before it can even begin to see the real Hollywood market on the horizon.

Timely to point to my recent post on soft power:

That India is considering soft power as an instrument of foreign policy is a good sign. And given India’s obvious strengths and potential for soft power it is easy, especially for the popular Indian media, to get carried away by its prospects. It is important to remember that putting that soft power to use will be rather hard. [The Acorn]

However, suspect that Bollywood has been bandied about so frequently that we may have no choice. Only possibility is if the Indian film industry creates a new moniker, and launches a huge brand awareness campaign — but that would take many millions of dollars, with no immediate ROI.