Insourcing Bollywood!

All last week long NPR had been running a series on the potential in India's entertainment industry.

First of course there's the fledgling animation industries and the traditional outsourcing role they have taken to playing for Hollywood's media moguls - cheap animator labor reducing costs for the inexhaustible American marketplace (did you see any drop in your ticket prices for Spiderman 3? No? perhaps the labor cost savings went into the pockets of the studio owners who are right now fighting on another front trying to protect their bulging pockets from those thieving starving writers - see http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1674063,00.html ).

But then there's the reverse trend:

• Sony tries to muscle its way into the lucrative Bollywood market with Saawariya - what's to lose? the cinema market in India is lush and cultivated - the holy trinity of 1 billion film addicts, the ever more magnificent movie theater multi-plexes that are strewn across big metropolises and small suburban areas, and the robust bollywood industry of actors, cameramen, directors and musicians, consumers, distributors and producers all ready and waiting for Sony to come and skim its share of the proceeds -WHY? Because it can! (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17148807)
• Virgin Comics - Richard Branson in another alliance with Deepak Chopra's son turns India's folklore into gold for the Englishman's coffers - http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17187840. (First they patented the garlic and turmeric into private intellectual property, now the stories that our grandparents told us.)

India is no longer merely a cheap source of labor, but maybe a cheap source of ideas and cheap source of big, fat, juicy sales revenue!

We've seen this film before, haven't we? - it was called "East India Company"!!