Here’s one law of economic activity that they don’t always tell about at school: if public tastes are changing, the black market will discover this long before legitimate industry does. We’ve seen this happen again and again over the last two decades. In the ’80s, we borrowed movies from the video library long before the Hollywood studios had the bright idea of releasing legal videos in India. Before that, in the ’70s, when such Indian music companies as Polydor and HMV were still churning out LP records, the likes of Gulshan Kumar and the pirates of the Eastern world had worked out that the audio cassette was the preferred medium of choice for Indians.
Globally pirates, bootleggers, and black marketers have always been ahead of the curve. These days the music business is in its death throes, failing to make the usual big bucks from over-priced CDs. Pirate music sites (such as Napster) made it possible for young people to download music for free from the Internet so that they did not have to pay the huge mark-ups that music majors charged for CDs.
Now, the music business — having first tried to close down Napster and fight the Internet — is scrambling to become net-friendly and to make its money from downloads. My thesis, this week, is that something of an epochal
nature is happening in India and that legitimate industry has still to cotton on. But the black marketers, pirates and bootleggers have moved in. And they are rolling in money.
Ask anybody in organised media about public tastes and you will get the same comments. You will be told how audiences are going resolutely down-market. Marketers will tell newspaper editors to keep the articles short and to include more Bollywood coverage because that is what the readers want.
People who run TV channels will tell you that real news is dead. People just want to be entertained. Nobody has any desire to be
engaged any longer. Attention spans are down to a few minutes. And so on. And yet, if you travel by car in any of the metros, think about what happens when you stop at a traffic light — your car will be surrounded by small children. Some will just beg or offer to clean your windscreen. But others will try and sell you pirated editions of books.
Now, pirated books are not new to the Indian market. In the early ’80s or so, foreign publishers started producing India-only paperback editions of bestsellers by the likes of Jeffrey Archer, Sidney Sheldon and Judith Krantz. They knew that the moment the hardback came out in the West, some enterprising
Indian would run off a pirate paperback edition. So, they decided to beat the pirates with their own paperbacks.
Fair enough. But the next time you are stuck at a traffic light, just look at the books you will be offered. You may find the odd Jeffrey Archer. But the vast majority of the books on offer will be relatively serious in nature. You are almost certain to find Amartya Sen’s The Argumentative Indian . There will probably be something by Malcolm Gladwell ( Blink or The Outliers usually). In Mumbai, you’ll get the unauthorised biography of Dhirubhai Ambani ( The Polyester Prince ). And you’ll see a few management books on display.
A few years ago a global headhunter who tried to recruit me to edit a foreign newspaper said to me that India had been a revelation for him. I never tire of repeating what he said: “In other countries, even China, they sell you porn or trash. In India, they sell management books at traffic signals”. The headhunter took this as a sign that in the long run, India would beat China because our people demonstrated a thirst for knowledge. And I think he was right. Never before in the history of India have so many people wanted to buy so many serious non-fiction books.
Until recently, the pirates made all the money. But now the big houses have finally got the message. Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India has sold over 60,000 copies in India alone, making it the biggest hardback bestseller in the history of Indian publishing. (Until a decade ago, a sale of 5,000 copies was considered terrific.) If you’ve seen his book, you’ll know that it is not light reading. It is serious, thoughtful and demands a constant engagement from the reader. And yet, more people are willing to spend a relatively hefty sum of money on his book than they are on some cheap, easy-to-read work of fiction. Soon, his book will be out in paperback and I imagine that it will sell
between one or two lakh in that format. Plus, there will be the pirated copies.
So, are the official marketers wrong when they tell us that the secret of success in India is go down-market and to dumb down? I think so. I do not dispute that there is money to be made from appealing to the lowest common denominator (the formula that made India TV rich). But equally, there are other markets
developing. These are smaller in size but are hardly niche. They consist of urban, English speakers who want to read, who want to think and who are willing to pay for their reading.
I’ll give you examples from my own career. I just moderated a discussion at the launch of Rajni Bakshi’s new book about the bazaar. (Nandan was on the panel). Rajni’s is a serious book, not too different from the sort of stuff she has been doing for a while. But this time, there’s a buzz around the book that was absent when her other books were launched. People want to discuss the failings and the future of the market. They want to engage with each other at the level of ideas.
I’ll give you another example. I’ve been writing in print since 1976. And though I achieved a certain measure of success, my profile did not really change till 1994 or so when I began to appear on Doordarshan. By the time I was on Star (1996-1997), I began to get used to being recognised or being stopped in the street.
To me, that demonstrated the difference between the two media. People might enjoy reading you in print but it was only TV that had the power to make you a star. These days, I do more TV than ever before. ( Custom Made on NDTV Good Times , Tycoons on CNBC, the upcoming Asian Diary on Discovery Travel and Living which is being endlessly promo-ed and guest shots on such channels as NDTV 24/7).
You would think, therefore, that if strangers did stop me, it would be to discuss my TV work. And certainly, I do get asked about my shows. But here’s the interesting thing: something like two-thirds of the strangers who recognise me or come up to me want to talk about my articles, not about the TV stuff.
It isn’t that my writing has improved dramatically. Nor have I acquired a massive reach (most of the comments are about my HT stuff which has been appearing there for nearly a decade.) So what makes the difference? I know it isn’t me. It isn’t anything I am doing.
I think the nature of the audience is changing. People are eager to engage at the level of argument. They want to read. They want to discuss what they’ve read. (The web and twitter help them do this.) And they know that there is life beyond the auto-cue. So whenever marketing people say things to me like “You’ve got to keep it short and light” or “make it colourful and sensational” or “nobody has the patience to read,” I smile to myself.
To paraphrase and adapt Bob Dylan: Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Juneja? It’s not something they taught you at business school. It’s the wisdom of the street. Just ask the pirates…
