Ramu's English patience

CINEMA: Experimental filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma is making his first-ever English film for Percept.

Ramu is working on his first English film." With these words, Shailendra M Singh of Percept Holdings knows he has grabbed the attention he wants. And by the time you read this, he may have announced as much "" with David Dhawan beside him "" in Mumbai too.

Singh is quite at ease in Delhi too. In a beige Hugo Boss T-shirt with a jacket casually thrown over, he has to look skyward to count off all the businesses he's now in. Once part of the ad fraternity, Singh now runs 25 companies in as many as eight verticals "" many of them with the glitz of celebrity at the pivot.

What's hot at the moment is a creative partnership of sorts between Dhawan and Singh's company that will look after his overseas portfolio. A three-film deal has already been struck with Ram Gopal Varma who was in Manhattan with Singh recently, and will soon be working on his first English film.

"We have fantastic scripts," says Singh, "and our idea is to take our Indian entertainment industry to the international level." This would entail Indian directors using Indian ideas and international actors to create cinema for a global market.

Besides Varma and Dhawan, Percept will also look after the overseas portfolio of Madhur Bhandarkar "" whose film Corporate has been produced by Percept "" and Nagesh Kukunoor, maker of Iqbal.

It's a high-risk business, but risk is what Singh claims to thrive on. He claims that Percept is producing as many as 35 Hindi films in 2006; not all would obvious be hits, but even a single mega-success would make it all worth it.

In celebrity management, two of Percept's most famous clients, Viveik Oberoi and Sourav Ganguly are going through bad patches, but he's confident in their future. And also looking for new celebrities who are still far from their zenith "" such as Sunidhi Chauhan. "Sunidhi is not Britney Spears of India because no one has ever marketed her like that ever... I'd love to do that," he says.

The Varma English film, though, could be a risk much bigger than that. Making Westernised cinema for Indian audiences is one thing. Making Westernised cinema for Western audiences is another.