I have been involved in television production for over fourteen years. Each passing year I have experienced & learned many things from business life and business organizations I have worked with.
I started my career with TV-18 – one of the leading production houses in India – as trainee where I was given the opportunity to learn the basis of filmmaking like scripting, shooting, editing and graphics. After my first year with TV-18 I become passionate about editing. I found editing very interesting mainly because of story telling, the flow of the film, the kind of music you use. To put it into a nutshell: I liked the challenge to create a perfect 2-5 minute film out of two hours of footage. I continued editing for the next seven years. I have covered all genres – fiction, game and music shows, features, promos, documentary, on-line switching, etc.
In 2003 I joined Reliance Infocomm as the technical head for the value added services like audio, video, ring tones & wallpapers. I was very fascinated by this industry – mobile phone business was booming at that time – there were mobile phones with different specifications from grey scale to 24 bit color phones, some with live streaming & some with downloads. My primary task was to set up a testing system for value added services on mobile phones. I setup the entire news feed live on mobile phones. I can proudly say that I was (most probably) one of the first persons in India who has done this. Furthermore, I was also part of the broadband television venture of Reliance called Big TV now. I was given the responsibility for formatting feature films into various codec’s like Mpeg's, AVI's, etc.
After Reliance I was teaching the basis of film making at the prestigious Indian Institute of Journalism & New Media (IIJNM) in Bangalore. Teaching has always been one of my passions. At this point of time, it was a welcome break to brush up on my skills as well. I enjoyed being surrounded by young ambitious students. After a while I realized that it was too early for me to “retire” and I returned to mainstream television.
I continued my professional career as Creative and Programming Head with the niche channel Fashion TV. I was not only responsible for the creative part in Fashion TV, the position was determined by business development and marketing tasks as well. The position was more demanding. I had to understand the business module and adopt accordingly all my actions and moves in order to be successful. Besides the channel work I was involved in various on-ground activities, for instance, opening F Bars, F Cafes, F Salons and organizing Fashion-TV parties accompanying various fashion week seasons. During my Fashion-TV days, I was able to experience all business aspects of running a television channel – creative, dealing with clients, business development and PR work.