Size Matters

Abstract

When "industry status" for the Indian film trade was announced at Bombay's Leela Kempinski Hotel in 1998, Dilip Kumar joked about the aspiration toward a new corporate ethos. "We in the film industry are prone to be fictional in our approach to life," said the old movie hero, "we are very bad at accessing the mathematics that are involved in industrial jurisprudence .... I have a mortal fear of mathematics. Whenever any figure work is involved, I get frightened" (Kumar, 1998). Given the irony that hindsight often brings, Kumar's cheeky temerity now sounds like a prologue to the decade that followed, as big numbers came to dominate film industry discourse. As the twenty-first century opened for business, Indian media statistics circulated through the press, industry, and academy, enabled by the proliferation of reports produced by Indian business lobbies in collaboration with international management consultancies, like the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI), the US-India Business Council (USIBC), Arthur Andersen (AA), Klynveld Peat Marwick Goerdeler (KPMG), Ernst and Young (EY), and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC). A decade known colloquially as "the noughties" and "the Ohs" was presided over by a trail of zeroes criss-crossing the pages of glossy industry co-productions.The procession of statistics, marching together with industry acronyms in a dazzling parade of letters and numbers, was orchestrated for globally interconnected investment communities hoping that the fortunes of the film industry might rally along with the SENSEX. Integral to this new speculative economy, numbers composed a future-oriented discourse. By mid-decade, the subtitles of entertainment industry brochures provided dreamy, tumescent figurations of possible futures: a 2005 report was subtitled An Unfolding Opportunity; a 2006 report, Unraveling the Potential; A Growth Story Unfolds for 2007; and by 2008, Sustaining Growth. A 2009 report, finding that the Indian media industries would not grow as projected, offered instead the more sober and succinctly titled Outlook. Nevertheless, by the end of the decade, these reports, despite having different points of origin, were all committed to the specificity of estimates. FICCI/KPMG's 2009 Industry Report predicted a rise in the number of Indian multiplexes from 850 in 2009 to 1,254 in 2012, while the total Indian box-office of US$ 1.6 billion in 2008 was projected to rise to US$ 2.5 billion by 2013. The 2009 PWC report claimed that the Indian film industry would grow by 11.5 percent over the next five years, swelling from Rs 107 billion in 2008 to Rs 184.3 billion in 2013, while domestic box-office receipts would increase by 10.2 percent cumulatively over the next five years, from the present size of Rs 81 billion to Rs 132 billion in 2013. In a remarkable conceit of precision, the USIBC/EY 2008 brochure reported that piracy cost the film industry US$ 959 million and 571,896 jobs in 2008.

Taste, Taboo, Trash: The Story of the Ramsay Brothers

“…Trade wisdom suggests the Ramsays did 60 per cent of their business in rural territories, where returns are slower, smaller, and clouded with administrative haziness (Nahta, 2009). As Nitin Govil points out, box-office figures in Bombay have historically been delivered with a "casual" attitude, the "lack of seriousness and organization," the "occult significance of black money" guaranteeing the industry's chronic "improvisational nature" (Govil, 2010). Figures in Film Information represent only the tip of the box-office iceberg, since the journal does not record revenues from B-, C-, and D-centers, each with their own (tax) evasive histories (Nahta, 2009).…”