Beaming Messages to the Nation recently made in two highly publicized court petitions, Indira Jaisingh's petition on the grounds of freedom of expression, and Anand Patwardhan's petition on the grounds of public accountability), or second, that they have turned properly fascistic. I present this problematic by way of an introduction to this paper. With television, we have a technology that functions in this manner — television, as you have experienced, seems to grow in a sort of cellular mode, never yielding substance at any stage of its many stages of transmission. As Kumar said earlier, it is 34 at best a system of broadcasting, not an art form. The signifying chain includes the camera on the one side, the studio or the Outside Broadcast facility, the station, the satellite, the transmission towers, the receiving antennae, the television set, the viewer — a viewer placed in what Armand Mattelart describes as 'a series of amorphous concepts such as consumer society, mass society, affluent society, public opinion etc. in all of which supports of social domination are concealed. In other words, this language acts as a screen, an alibi, for the apparatus of domination, as a formula permitting its dissolution in a euphoric world of consumption, modernity and advertising'. In a way this problem of an authorless system seems to further, in inverse form, what Marx speaks of I think in The German Ideology, when he emphasizes the class-identity of the individual rather than the overdetermined individuating tendencies of, let's say, the 'sympathetic landowner'. Today the crisis is actually one of individuating, and it is inherent to the struggle, and the pain, of seeking a voice in the din around us. To contend with this vicious, sometimes circular and sometimes spiral trap, I shall be introducing several different areas into my discourse, some concerning television, some film, some art practice, some plain economics — as I understand it — each involving the problem of the author, in various ways. Television was introduced in India in 1956, when UNESCO gave us a grant of $ 20,000 to set up a pilot project to study the use of television as a medium of education, rural uplift and community development. The United States government donated some equipment and Philips sold us a transmitter at a nominal price, and by 1959 a weekly half-hour service was regularly beamed from Delhi with a 40-km radius. Only in 1965 did this become a daily service, and then it remained in Delhi alone for seven years until, in 1972, Bombay introduced a centre, followed in 1973 by Srinagar, and then by Calcutta and Madras, so that we now have 44 centres with telecasting facilities. In 1975 the now-famous Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) was instituted and became the basis of much that has followed since then, as the satellite programme has moved into its third generation of operational effectiveness. India, we know, was one of the very few countries in the Third World' to have actually emphasized satellite technology to the extent it did, since the 1950s, with the establishment of the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in Bangalore and Ahmedabad. What were the assumptions that went behind India's move? We are of course familiar with Nehru's many pronouncements on the general subject, but the actual ideologue behind the plan to use satellite technology for television was the father of India's space research programme, Dr Vikram Sarabhai. It is he who, in a speech in 1969 — which I have here with me — outlined the specific promise that Journal of Arts 6* Ideas