Hours after the Northern Alliance liberated Kabul, a bemused world watched Afghans splurge on Hindi film cassettes as the first act of their new-found freedom; books by Arundhati Roy, V.S. Naipaul and other tellers of Indian tales stare out of bookstore windows all over America.

Are Indian media talent and Indian media companies ready for prime time on the world stage? It is a tantalising prospect. Worldwide, demand for media is skyrocketing. This demand is accompanied by seismic changes in the media industry. If Indian media companies and talent can negotiate these changes they could be major world players.

The first of these changes is the mega-merger trend that is creating behemoths like AOL-Time Warner. ''A best-selling book begets a movie,'' said Time magazine commenting on the CBS/Viacom merger, ''which begets recordings, which beget an internet website-all of which are promoted on television and radio outlets until the film is endlessly re-run on cable systems and flogged in neighbourhood video shops around the world.''

Technological change is forcing consolidation at the distribution end. The single cable that provides television and internet services is already a reality in many homes in India and the world and bitter battles are being fought for its ownership. The winners hope to charge all others a toll, or, in countries where legislation is weak, even shut all others out.

Great changes are going on in the content and programming side, as well. CNN's move to put a TV actress, best known for her role in the serial NYPD Blues, as one of their Headline News Network anchors has inaugurated a phase where news is pushing itself into being entertainment. On the other side, entertainment is pushing its way towards reality with shows like 'Survivor'.

Some of these shifts are reflected in the public policy debates going on in India. Attempts to make Doordarshan independent of politicians have not succeeded. Meanwhile, its share of audience is dwindling and may soon come to a point where the privatisation debate is no longer relevant.

The other strand is the on-going battle in which (some) established Indian media groups try to fend off new entrants (who typically enlist international media companies as their joint venture partners) by influencing government policy on foreign ownership in Indian media companies.

This is a truly problematic issue-Indian-owned media companies need capital to grow, but opening the sector to international financial investors, they fear, could be like the proverbial camel in the Arab's tent. Some way has to be found to reconcile these two goals. What lies ahead for Indian media?

• Prannoy Roy and his team must surely rank among the best TV news producers in the world; so should Tehelka for their passionate investigative journalism and (at the risk of making this sound like a plug), Rediff.com for breaking news coverage that won the Online News Association/Columbia University Award. There is little doubt that this quality and independence will grow and flourish.

• The news-breaking and information-dispensing role of media (stock quotes, etc.) will increasingly be taken over by wireless internet with newspapers and magazines providing the analytical, perspective-providing role

• The number of TV channels will multiply and we will see much more diversity than today.

• TV will borrow from the web's interactivity probably by incorporating hyper-linking within video streams.

• Napster-style music services will be the dominant mode as soon as the music industry finds a security/charging system that is reassuring enough for them.

• Does all this mean 2010 will see 'Indiana' (India inspired media) as a world force? The experience of Taiwan Director Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, may be instructive.

Starting with the martial arts metaphor that young US audiences were already familiar with, Lee's treatment of this film took the Chinese cinema in one fell swoop out of Chinatown and art house cinemas into mainstream US multiplexes, won four Oscars, and grossed over $120 million at the US box office last year. There may be a lesson here for Indian media.