Shanghai is a metaphor

Shanghai is a city, a metropolis, a financial capital, a global economic hub. Shanghai is in China but the word Shanghai is a signifier for India.

Shanghai is an attempt by the political class to divert our attention from the immediate problems to a promised future, a transformation. We are sold the dream of a swanky Shanghai like city where prosperity envelops all. And it is all planned for the future. A future, which when it comes will not hold them accountable. A future near enough, but far enough so that people forget as well. Rome was not built in a day they say. But it was also not build by the using the famed Indian jugaad.

Shanghai is a dangling visual smokescreen. Take a look (at the image below) at what happened between 1993 and 2010 in Shanghai. It is this transformation to a gleaming economic hub that rivals the first world that so seduces the transforming third world. Shanghai is a metaphor.

It is the Promised Land that the politicians like to promise in a safely distant future .This future is rounded up into nice sounding numbers – 2016, 2020, 2025. And when time inches towards these years they push it back to another nice sounding year – Twenty Thirty, Twenty Forty what say? Because somehow,we never think of future being imperfect and dystopian. We always hope the future to be better. We have done so from the past. We continue to do so now. Where is the progress, is this the progress we hoped for and were promised in back in 1995. Wasn’t 2012 supposed be the year when every village in India was electrified?  And now, in 2012, we are still debating nuclear power when we are so many megawatts short of electrifying even our cities that it is embarrassing. Who do we hold accountable?

Any social commentator would agree that India of today, of 2012, throws more bewildering contradictions than say it did in 2000. We are young and aspirational, but then we are also sceptical. We have tastelessly designed flyovers and an underbelly right beneath and around it. The malls are swanky and the earth just outside it is murky, the road leading to it potholed. We have grandiose and leaky socialist schemes in a capitalistic economy. Cross subsidy that skews the supply-demand and market dynamics. And then there’s an audacious proposal of regulating a democratic medium like the internet. The models and actors in ads get paler and whiter even as thankfully, it is a sultry Freida Pinto and swarthy Irfan Khan who have a foothold in Hollywood.

As a nation we have regressed in the last 10 years – the traffic, the civic amenities, our open values, what we can see on television, what can be said on it and what is beamed on it. We can all bring out the largest democracy cloak, but hey we are not a mature one. We can’t laugh at ourselves; we are offended by things which we should bother too much with. The people with sense of humour are on Twitter and those numbers don’t total to many a number.

The irony is inescapable when we are promised maglev trains when people are crushing themselves in Bandra-Churchgate local trains. It makes us smirk at the politicians who do not know the ground realities that the middle class go through, we are sceptical when we are promised a Shanghai in India.

If you can’t save a Kolkata, if you continue to see Bangalore crumble, if you go on as usual as Mumbai bursts to seams, what are you promising to convert to Shanghai ? Cities cannot be transformed easily and briskly.5 years is not enough, 10 years should see considerable progress but 20 is enough if you have the will, even in a democracy. Maybe we should emulate Hong Kong or Istanbul for a change. We should let our states compete and build up their cities. Competition wakes us up. If we have 3 Singapores, city based economies, it is progress. Singapore has no natural resources; it is a power because of the commerce and talent it draws.

We do not need just one Shanghai. We want our Pune, Mangalore, Jaipur and the likes to grow up and shed that non-metro feel. Take advantage of the fact that they are not as messed up as the metros are and realise that therein lies an opportunity. Become the new-age metros. That would do two things. We will have better up-and -coming cities and it will stop the migration to metros and stretch their infrastructure.

Shanghai is in another country, another time zone and another 2 decades ahead of us. Shanghai is a pipedream not worth chasing. 

When cable came to India

Cable has been in India for more than 2 decades now. What many have forgotten is the arrival of it. When AsiaSat1 was launched in 1990, it was the first privately owned satellite communication network covering all of Asia. Its owners were a consortium led by three firms: the Hong Kong based Hutchinson Whampoa, Britain’s Cable & Wireless and China’s CITIC Technology Corporation. In 1991 Rupert Murdoch backed STAR TV launched a joint venture between Hutchinson Whampoa and its Chairman Li Ka –Shing.

What a lot of people don’t know is that cable was present in India a few years before the 90s too, albeit in a more crude and rudimentary form. Even before the arrival of STAR TV and the other satellite and cable networks, an informal, illegal, and unregulated form of cable network was already operating in India.

Cable had unofficially begun in India in 1984, spreading from tourist hotels to apartment blocks and finally to individual households. Videocassettes players, linked centrally to a cable network, fed the networks based on subscription. The numbers slowly crept upto 3450 such cable networks by mid 1990 .In four major Indian cities Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata- over 330,000 households had been formed ,totalling an audience of 1.6 million. A potentially massive market that hungry salivating capitalists would have dreams about.

In 1991, STAR’s package of four channels initially offered news, sports, MTV and general entertainment ;the target audience being the educated urban , middle-class viewer. Around the same time, the economy was liberalised by then Finance Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, when he presented the union budget in Feb 1991.This made India a very lucrative, emerging market which resulted in a scramble from leading global media companies like SONY,TNT,ESPN and CNBC to enter the Indian market. Subsequently there was a wave of Western programming that was lapped up by the average Indian viewer, who was starved of content for years because of the sole state broadcaster -Doordarshan.

Quite naturally, with the mention of cable comes to mind the cablewallah. Unlike the west, the satellite television didn’t spread with set boxes but through cable. It was delivered via cables and the local cable guys dealt with the households .Although dish reception is legal with licenses, cable redistribution is technically against the law. By an archaic Indian Telegraph Act of 1885, it is against the law to dig roads and lay cables without permission by the Telecom commission.

To circumvent this, the cable operators simply ran their lines over the streets and through the branches of trees and lampposts. The satellite and cable revolution was realised on the basis of this by-passing of law and the lack of the policing to tackle this flouting helped the setting up of an unorganised band of cable operators ,who simply set up satellite dishes at one end and with a few rudimentary wired network over the locality would beam programs and made easy money.

Add to those cables lines the overhead electricity wires and telephone wires. And now you know why we have such messy network of wires hanging all over the cities in India!

After a few years, the consolidation effect kicked in and the local operators with more financial clout acquired others or made them sub- contractors and expanded their business. This also resulted in investment in better networks and amplifiers for better signals. These cable operators are known as multi system operators (MSO) who started acting as middlemen who took signals from the broadcasters and passed them on to local cable operators. The cable operators interacted with the viewers, collecting payment and installing connections.

What is interesting is that nobody can keep track of the number of subscribers and the MSO’s deliberately underreported the numbers so that the cost can be kept down to the viewers as well as getting them more channels from the broadcasters who sold their channel for a particular fee a month. There was massive under –reporting and one person who saw its potential was Lalit Modi .He however could not rake in much moolah during India’s cable revolution.

In 1993, Modi established Modi Entertainment Networks (MEN), and entered into a joint-venture agreement to broadcast Disney content in India; the next year, MEN agreed to distribute ESPN across the country as part of a 10-year contract worth $975 million. These were the early days of cable television in India, and ESPN, like other foreign channels, needed local partners to collect revenues from the cable operators scattered across the country and he too would under-report massively.

The entire business was very shaky and the stranglehold of the cable guys and MSO’ like INCABLE NET of Hinduja Brothers continued for well over a decade. Remember the CAS system that was supposed to come in 2003/4? It was government’s way of regulating cable. They couldn't .But now, with the advent of individual satellite dishes for each subscriber, the industry is undergoing change again. Corporate players like Airtel digital, Tata Sky and Dish TV, offer the viewer more control of his choices, money and remote.

Note: most of the information was obtained by reading a very good book –New patterns in global television by J. Sinclair and Elizabeth Jacka ; Third picture from top by Vatsala Goel (Mumbai), a rooftop in Mumbai .