D Satish Poduval on which John Reith built the British Broadcasting Corporation: a kind of domestic diplomatic service, representing India to the Indians. The Indian culture which it represented—comparable perhaps to the BBC's "standard English"—was composed out of the standards and values upheld by the urban-professional, secular-Hindu middle class. Like the parliament of the new nation, it was a state apparatus occupied and operated by those who stood to profit most from 109 ^the nation's progress. Its agenda, succinct and purposive: development. In its heyday, developmental television sought to approximate Grierson's mandate for the documentary genre: its mission to associate "private effort with a sense of public purpose," to give the individual "a living conception of the community which he has the privilege to serve," to promote "a sense of active citizenship," and to give "a leadership of the imagina-tion/^^ikram Sarabhai, widely known as the father of India's space technology (and satellite TV), believed that television had a unique persuasiveness and credibility—which made it the apt tool not just for national integration but for economic and social development in isolated rural communities.12 This was also the stated rationale behind the gigantic Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) of 1975-76. However, even in its most "developmentalist" phase, it is possible to recognize that television was being readied for its market-integrating mandate. Public service television, the world over, has basically evolved along a double helix: on the one hand, out of Reithean philanthropic/paternalist notions of "serving" as a moral and educational medium;13 and on the other, from processes that invented "the masses" through the "commercial colonization of leisure."14 Television has thus been a key locus in governmentality, taking this Foucauldian term to mean complex tactics which target populations by deploying the axes of political economy and the apparatuses of social security. In other words, it is a medium that has regulated the modes of "knowledge" (savoir) in order to create a liberal political and economic space, which might also be termed a striated space :15 a space directed in ways which enable power to "act upon the actions" of populations.16 In a field of objects which it actively delimits, television insinuates itself as the normal (normed) perspective for the "informed citizen." Today, television derives its valorization from the claim that, like the state, (or even contra the state,) it acts for—or on behalf of—the "public." And it is certainly more than just linguistic irony when the argument proceeds that the medium will work best in the public interest when it is controlled byprivate hands. The story of SITE is well-known and well-documented.17 While the satellite itself was lent free-of-cost by NASA, the entire infrastructure for ground technology and software was financed by the Indian government, i.e. through "public funds". SITE was estimated to cost India Rs. 9 crores (or 10 million dollars). While NASA was keen to demonstrate the potential value of satellite technology in developing countries, India wanted to stimulate "national development," beginning with its villages. Developmental messages—programmes for rural students, farmers, women; programmes on science and hygiene, national integration, family planning— Numbers 32-33