Last month, Prakash Durrani bought a few miles of cable and a giant dish antenna, which he aimed at a satellite showering non-stop music, sports and news on India.
A few days later he was in business, joining a growing band of entrepreneurs distributing satellite broadcasts from a Hong Kong-based company to millions of Indians via cable TV.Most viewers are ecstatic. For the first time they have an alternative to the censored news, stodgy old movies and boring discussions on the state-run monopoly television network, Doordarshan.
"We have never seen anything like this before," said Durrani. "The youngsters are going crazy at the flashy music videos. They may not know who Madonna is, but they like the rhythm."
Experts believe satellite and cable distributors in major cities are changing the way Indians see the world - even if what they watch is rock 'n' roll music, Western situation comedies, movies and occasional news.
"Kapil is always glued to the musicals," said Kanta Juneja, a New Delhi mother glancing at her teen-age son as he intently watched a video featuring a gyrating Madonna.
Lalit Mehta conducted a viewer study in this nation of 844 million people and 25 million TV sets. "The imagination of the viewers has been fired," he said. "There is no stopping satellite television."
Mehta, who works for India's top marketing research company, Operations Research Group, says an estimated 2.5 million people now watch satellite television.
When it first started this summer, satellite television raised concern among Indian officials because of its Western entertainment and news programs. Some Indians have a deep-rooted belief that the liberal Western way of life undermines native traditions.
Doordarshan - which means "seeing from afar" in Hindi - rarely shows Western movies, news, entertainment or music programs. It has no foreign news bureaus, and video clippings obtained from other networks are carefully edited to avoid offending friendly countries.