Where tech talks showbiz

Is there a future for techie-showbiz alliances that girdle the globe?

Once upon a time, office boxes stored data, and box offices sold movie tickets, and database men and showbiz men displayed about as much mutual understanding as a hard place and a rock.

That is to say, not an awful lot. But with all boxes and boundaries getting blurred into the handy little cellphone, we have stock analysis on hilltops, choirs on beaches and an even more unfamiliar sight: Indian techies talking to global showmen.

It's the latest logic of crossborder alliances. And Amit Okhandiar, president, mLogica, a Californian software start-up that has set up an office in Pune, has done what this logic dictated: strike partnerships with Wake Music Group, run by music producer Ric Wake, and R-Dog, run by another producer Rick Dobbis.

A veteran of the database wars while at Sybase, via IBM and HP, Okhandiar is an IIT engineer "� IIT Chicago, that is, the Illinois Institute of Technology. And mLogica, set up with his wife Vazi Okhandiar from EDS, provides embedded database solutions for things as diverse as mobile phones, medicine vending machines and automobiles: so that your phone tracks your investment portfolio, you get just the right pills to pop and your wheels don't burn too much rubber as you vroom. It's high-sensitivity work. To guarantee response in real time, he's even got a former NASA man on board ("a real rocket scientist!" he jokes, who knows how data mishaps can be a "life and death" issue).

But the real fun starts now, as mLogica starts work in Pune on an entirely new sort of sensitivity, as his team gets cracking on the alliance with Wake, producer of the Chicago , Bride & Prejudice and Down To Earth soundtracks; and R-Dog, concert manager of the Stones.

And if this gives the team in Pune blue-sky visions, all the better. "They'll do the music," says Okhandiar, "we'll do the animation." Sets, characters, small-screen renditions for cellphone clips... whatever involves digital work.

Sounds quite like good old software outsourcing. Ah, but it's not. "Sure it's low cost," avers Okhandiar, "but it's not a cost play. It's creative content." India is to evolve into an active source of entertainment ideas that can be globally commercialised.

It's a search for India's own Pokemon, the Japanese character series that's selling an estimated $30 billion worth of products around the world every year: more than ten times the size of India's entire film industry.

That's precisely what Richard Branson's Virgin Group has in mind too: "Reinvent Indian character entertainment by creating a new wave of Indian animation characters" in the words of Sharad Devarajan, CEO, Virgin Comics, a three-way venture between Virgin, Gotham Entertainment Group and the Shekhar Kapur-Deepak Chopra combine. "We're going to make other comics look stone age," declares Devarajan, particularly gung-ho on "the potential of Indian mythic content" powered by Virgin as a brand devoted to reinvention of old concepts for new markets.

Comics, here, doesn't just mean those flip booklets printed on paper. "The visual storyboard is just the springboard," says Devarajan. And India will not just be a source of ideas, but of "cutting edge technical work" of the sort that would be appreciated by John Woo, who made Face-Off , and has been roped in by Virgin for the project. The aim is to get talent in "seamless interaction" across the world to generate multibillion dollar properties.

Sounds ambitious. So what's first up? "A futuristic Ramayan, Ramayan Reborn, set in the post-apocalyptic future," discloses Devarajan. And then there are mystics with supernatural abilities and much else.

Okhandiar's mLogica, meanwhile, is looking closely at India for something else. "Not mythologicals, but folk tales."

That, in itself, may not be difficult. India's wealth of stories is legendary. Perhaps the challenge will lie in getting a company of techies to breathe, live and dream showbiz "� without losing the "logic" in mLogica.

Regular database software is best done in a structured environment, subject to discipline detailed down to almost algorithmic exactitude. Showbiz ideation is best done in a free environment, subject to nothing that boxes brains in.

Can it be done? Once two-way crossborder ideation gets into full flow, yes. And Okhandiar is not quite the techie who oozes digital bits and bytes. He draws inspiration from Amerindian tales gaining popularity globally, for example, as also the cross-continental musical sounds emanating from South America.

This is a niche that is in ferment nowadays (why, 2004's chartbuster Dhoom took Spanish song-n-dance to the mass Indian market), and India has plenty to contribute to the world's new audio-visual kaleidoscope, he reckons. "We look forward to the opportunity to use our imagination," he says, cheerfully, "we can show them some doors they haven't thought about."