It starts with a Mercedes careening wildly. Left, right. The radio switches between stations. There’s a struggle inside. It goes off road, hurtles off a cliff, and tanks in a lake. Saif Ali Khan, caught underwater between drowning and escaping, looks out and then to the camera. He explains, in all earnestness, how he got here. Pause for thought. This movie is the latest evidence of the thinking over at Yashraj. In their magnificent marketing minds, this new audience is done with unnecessary things like feeling, empathy, and common sense. It has no use for suspense. This is the new India. What it wants is style, Tashan. And what that means is bronzed bodies, and Kareena Kapoor happily drenched at every opportunity.

Tashan oozes everywhere, even in physical assault. “I’m going to rape you,” says Jimmy Cliff (Saif) to Pooja (a paper-thin Kareena) in one hair-raising encounter. She can only smile in admiration. “Oh Jimmy!” a female voiceover swoons, taking us back to the golden days of India’s finest screen rapist, Prem Chopra. It all means nothing, of course. But it’s done stylishly, and that’s what truly matters.

But here’s the thing. Tashan’s a pretty good story if it wasn’t for the varnish. It’s a revenge tale with riveting flashbacks and little asides that could have been beautiful sub-plots. There’s the magic of actual drama and comedy alive here. But really, who cares for these things, so why take them further? Loosely, here’s the plot. Anil Kapoor’s Bhaiyyaji, a stylish English-loving don who uses sports equipment to kill and maim, is betrayed by Pooja, his assistant, and Jimmy, his English tutor. Bachchan Pandey (Akshay Kumar) is summoned to find the girl. After they mess around a bit with Jimmy, Bachchan and Pooja flutter eyelashes. They turn against the don big time. All this is done pretty stylishly, with foreign dancers, and a useless firefight or two thrown in.

The details are irrelevant. A particular music video sensibility – quick cuts, booty-shaking – infiltrates the entire movie, with none of the continuity you’d expect. What else could explain Bachchan suffering the inconvenience of a bullet in the arm (the focus of that particular scene), and the wound vanishing thereafter? And what of Pooja, on her way to Haridwar to perform her father’s last rites, stopping by in Europe to work it in hot pants and a bikini? There’s also the supremely unfortunate cut where Pooja appears to have grabbed Bachchan’s crotch during a dance routine.

Only Akshay emerges shining from this nonsensical wreckage. His body slinks and melts when he’s sheepish, and stands erect and tightens when he’s angry. It is implicit that style can only take you so far - a fact that escaped Vijay Acharya (director) and the producer Aditya Chopra, who drop-kicked substance out the window when they conspired to make the Dhoom series.

After a quick incursion into Shimla, your dashing, jetsetting, and hopelessly inconsistent blogger was called to Dubai at a moment’s notice. So here we are then, looking progress in the face.

In the six months since I last visited, the pace of progress seems to have slowed. The papers are full of news about changes that aren’t cosmetic. Routine stuff like the price of cars and registration going through the roof, the push to get a very status-conscious people to use public transport. There’s news about a rice deal with India because of the shortage here. The price of vegetables has just about doubled (Which still does not explain how these guys can possibly pay Dh7.5 (roughly Rs85) for a packet of button mushrooms! You get the same weight for Rs25 in India), and other rising costs have forced schools to outsource bus services (It costs parents more). It’s somewhat alarming to see an entire class of workers squeezed out. I don’t know what the thinking is, but ’squeezed out’ isn’t an exaggeration. It has happened in the past once before in the 90s, when a rule was passed to cancel the visas of workers who earned less than Dh4000 a month (or something like it). A little later those silly comparisons with Monaco started happening.

Anyway, so this is what’s happening: road rage, murders, outrage at costs. I’ll bet the planners didn’t take that into account. They did the cosmetic stuff, and that’s more or less ready. The real stuff, the real change, that you can’t see but can only feel, is currently underway. I’m being opaque at the moment, but the next few posts will illustrate what I mean.

If you catch this in the next five-ten minutes, mosey on down to www.iplt20.com to catch an unedited feed of what’s happening on the ground. Two minutes ago Arun Lal gave two vastly different takes of his ground impressions. Since he hasn’t given a third, they’re probably editing the second take to show on tv later today. Good fun.

Not that it matters much, but blogging will be nonexistant for the next week. Out for a break.

Bummer. Resident Evil 5 will only be out in 2009. If you haven’t played RE4, do so right now. I mean right now. Drop everything else.

There’s a pretty good profile of George Clooney up at the New Yorker website. Here’s one delightful passage:

…he has taken the trouble to think his way into the mind of the person inching up to his restaurant table for an autograph, or the friend of a friend who has become a little dizzy in his presence. (“Your job is to find the best way for those people to hold on to their dignity,” he explained to me. “For a second, they have thrown it out. They got what they came for”—the autograph, the handshake—“but then they’re standing there feeling, God, that horrible taste in their mouth: ‘What now, how do I walk away?’ ” As Clooney described it, they have to be shown a path back to their normal selves.)

I mean, you really, really should read it. THe piece has an oddly poetic headline: ‘Somebody has to be in control’.

This follows Prem’s post on the issue.

If I were Sony, I’d be very scared of this information and broadcasting ministry. The IPL is due to start on April 18, which is just over three weeks from today. In this time, the ministry could decide that the IPL is a matter of national importance. Perhaps (heh) the second half of the tournament - the bit where Sony execs see advertising rates hitting over 5 lakhs for ten seconds - could be of national importance. And there won’t be any warning. Just like last time, when on October 19, exactly two weeks before Pakistan played in India, the Test series was deemed to be of national importance. So I’d wrap up my advertising deals pretty quickly, and make sure they were darn watertight. 

Anyway, I had heard from an official at Doordarshan that it makes no money on cricket. In fact, it loses money. She wished the 75-25% deal with Nimbus didn’t exist (for those who don’t know, while Nimbus gets to keep its own advertising revenue, DD has to give 75% of the ad revenue it earns to Nimbus in return for taking the feed).

Now here’s an interview from 2005 (by Anjan Mitra of Indiantelevision.com) with KS Sarma, who was then CEO of Prasar Bharati:

Revenue generation seems to be the latest mantra in Prasar Bharati. Is that why the organization lobbied hard with the government to have laws favouring it where sports content, especially cricket, is concerned?
Why not ? Prasar Bharati’s reach amongst the masses, which is the target for the government, is maximum amongst all broadcasters present in India. And, what’s the big issue with cricket? That cricket is a big revenue earner for us is a big misconception. Moreover, the laws that you are referring to have been enacted by the government so that a huge chunk of the population that does not have access to cable and satellite TV gets to see quality sports, which may include cricket.

He goes on to say:

However, cricket helps DD in retaining viewership for other programmes. The chances of a viewer sticking around after a cricket match to check out the programme following it, is high. Feedback from TAM has indicated this and we are trying to capitalize on this.

Perhaps it hasn’t struck him and his colleagues that cricket isn’t just a loss leader for Doordarshan. When Sony promises hundreds of millions, it expects to barely break even. What it knows is that the “chances of a viewer sticking around after a cricket match to check out the programme following it, is high”. You make money on the edges.

But here’s another thing to think about. However you do the math, you can’t really make money off Indian cricket. It’s not a new trend. While it speaks about another country, here’s a bit from a 2003 edit, titled “Sports broadcast rights may head back to earth”:

The old economic model for TV sports is dated. The strategy among execs used to be that if they couldn’t recoup their investment in broadcast contracts, they could always use the games’ huge audiences as a one-of-a-kind opportunity to promote their prime-time lineups and other network programming. But today, the people watching sports are mostly men, and the people watching prime-time shows are mostly women. “Begrudgingly, executives are beginning to realize that sports is not a loss leader anymore, either,” says Richard A. Bilotti, a media analyst at Morgan Stanley. He estimates that sports losses wipe out about 40% of all profits from prime-time programs.

This is why you find fewer companies bidding for cricket rights. 

And here’s something handy for you to throw at government when it next talks about other countries making it mandatory for sporting events to be shown on terrestrial television. The other countries it is likely referring to have more than one terrestrial network, and they bid for rights.

Besides this, Nimbus’s grouse is perfectly valid. It’s been a year, and the signals have still not been encrypted. What this means is that this signal goes out to Pakistan, Sri Lanka, perhaps even the middle east and south east asia - all markets where Nimbus has sold broadcast rights. It also means, in a way, that DD’s DTH platform (subscriber base of over four million), regardless of where its subscribers live - city or countryside - will receive the broadcast. So this goes against the I&B ministry’s line that this is for people who don’t have access. Secondly, because it’s available on DTH as a free-to-air, why would anyone want to carry Nimbus’s Neo? If you’re Neo, you buggered. The DTH guys don’t want you, the cable guys sure as hell aren’t going to pay you. You’re so buggered.

Anyway, good luck to Sony. This is one messed up ministry.

Hate it. Hate it. Hate it. Aargh.

From the Rajya Sabha debate archives: 

SHRI DINESH TRIVEDI: I support this Bill. I was always opposed to politicians being in sports unless they themselves are sports people. But I have to change my views by seeing the contribution of so many people here. I think, only the people’s  representatives will take care and support whatever is good for the people and this particular Bill. I would like to compliment Hon’ble Minister but I would like to take this opportunity also to mention that this is a wake up call for the Government. I am not against the private sector but they can blackmail at the last minute the way the Hon’ble Minister mentioned about the West Indies game.

The debate was over a bill making it mandatory for private broadcasters to share certain sporting events with Prasar Bharati (that’s Doordarshan and All India Radio). It took place in March last year, when Nimbus refused to share its live feed of the India-West Indies games. This was the blackmail the minister spoke about - that a private broadcaster refused to toe the official line. Because of the bill, Nimbus was in serious trouble. Of course it didn’t help that Nimbus bid $612 million for the cricket rights, especially when they knew what the second-highest bid was. Now they’re up for sale, apparently.