Man on a mission

For the last 14 years, MM Satish, founder, Global IPR foundation has been leading a crusade against piracy. Chesta Shah Sengupta and Piroj Wadia meet the man and find out more about his plans to set up an anti-piracy ministry at the centre

A name synonymous with raids at Lamington Road and Heera Panna (Mumbai), MM Satish comes across as being a fearless man. His escapades against piracy and dealing with it at a grass root level has made him daring and some of the experiences he narrates seem like scenes out of a action packed Hindi pot boiler.

“I was knifed during one of my early raids at Lamington road. One of my boys came and informed me that I was marked. In Hindi he said: ‘Aapka fielding laga hai.’ When I went outside there was this guy with an open shirt and several gold chains around his neck. I have trained in the martial arts for over a decade. He pulled a knife, and in the fight that ensued, he knifed me in the arm and ran away like a coward,” recounts Satish.

No one knows the turf better than Satish. As director operations, Indian Music Industry (IMI) Satish had the onerous task of leading from the front. He left the boardroom to conduct raids, the first of which resulted in a haul worth Rs7 crore. At the forefront of fighting against audio-video piracy, today Satish is on the verge of a nationwide war against spurious goods. He optimistically believes society can be purged of the ills of piracy but with political and public support.

“I was doing a policeman’s job. I always planned my raids very carefully. In fact I often did mock raids to understand how the information flowed. Invariably, if I revealed I was going to conduct a raid, and went to the police station, I found that the news had leaked out and all the pirates had disappeared,” says Satish.

Satish conducted his raids scientifically and used the media to his advantage to report about the raids, thereby creating a sense of pressure and fear in the minds of the pirates. He was accompanied by TV crews, reporters and photographers who ensured coverage and made the raid news worthy. In fact after his raids, the pirate markets were closed more than a week on one instance!

Delving into his past, Satish has had a chequered career. He was a protocol officer in 1982, for the Asian Games, and then later for the Non Aligned Movement Summit (1983) and the CHOGUM Summit (1984).

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A shift to head the advertising and public relations of Afternoon Dispatch and Courier in Mumbai threw open new challenges for Satish. Soon he moved to the Indian Express Group to be the no2 as sr. manager advertising and public relations. “I was the youngest member in the IENS (Indian Eastern Newspaper Society) to be heading a newspaper such as the Indian Express. The experience was exhilarating.”

In 1988, he was nominated to the Bombay Pradesh Youth Congress as chairman for Press Publicity and Public Relations. In association with the Leela Penta Group, Satish organised the Air Fair ‘88 which brought together 20 airlines, for a seminar related to the problems in the aviation industry.

In the mid 1990s Satish joined the IPI (Indian Phonographic Industry) as director-Operations.

Shortly thereafter IPI was renamed Indian Music Industry or IMI, as its best known. This was perhaps the start of Satish’s tryst with piracy. He was responsible for revolutionising the levying of performance fees and there has been no looking back since. In 2004, he took over as the President of T-Series (Super Cassettes Industries Ltd). Here he launched the T-series Public Performance License (TPPL), which too was a success.

At IMI, Satish launched another path breaking concept –that of the mobile music station (MMS) – an attempt to deliver non-pirated music to the masses, at their doorstep. A fleet of specially altered vans with display racks and music systems were parked strategically outside colleges, discos and so on, playing and selling audio cassettes of the latest music releases.

In 1997, Satish was invited on an exchange programme by the government of America to Washington DC, but as this clashed with the launch of the MMS, he had to decline.

“14 years back, before I joined IMI, nobody even knew the name of IPI. There were no raids, no publicity of raids, nothing at all. Nobody had the guts to do anything of that sort,” says Satish.

“The constant fear is something I created. I still survived after I got shot on my shoulder. Anybody would have chickened out...especially when you get a call from the underworld,” he says.

Satish has been appreciated for his anti-piracy activities by several public associations. He had received several awards such as the Sahara Sangeet Award in 2005, FICCI’s Antipiracy Campaigner Award, and other awards from service organisations like the Lions Club of India Gold Awards for his excellence in antipiracy in 2007.

An old hand in the community, Satish has more detractors than supporters from within the music industry. Allegations abound – “He is known to be corrupt and conducts raids on only those outfits that don’t oblige him with kickbacks,” says a source on conditions of anonymity.