Urban studies scholarship has marked liberalization as the turning point in the lifeworld of cities in India.1 Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore associate it with government policies that enable the free flow of capital and with cities being modified to attract international financial capital. Globally, liberalization is marked by competition between cities for investments. However, contrary to this understanding, we see a race between cities to establish the film industry in India pre-dating the liberalization in the 1990s. As shown in Chapter 3, as early as the 1940s and 1950s Bombay and Madras were competing to become the most important production centre for film. After the formation of linguistic states, with the emergence of new film production centres such as Hyderabad, there was competition between Madras and Hyderabad. The competition between cities is thus not just a post-liberalization phenomenon but is a continuum in different phases of capitalism. The difference, however, was in the nature of global capitalism at these different points. In the 1940s, Madras and Bombay were operating in the colonial world. Starting from the 1960s, Hyderabad and Madras were competing for regional capital within the nation. All these distinct capital relations produced distinct cities. In the post-liberalization phase, the film industry forms a nexus with the tourism and real estate sectors and participates in producing the city as a constant spectacle to attract international capital.