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Indian cyber czars tell the tale of their success-induced stupor

On the sets: No lotus-eaters, this quartet

If you thought Silicon Valley was the proverbial El Dorado for Indian software professionals still riding the '80s boom, those who ostensibly have it all-dream careers, luxury cars, suburban homes, stock options-you have another think coming. In the shape of a poignant, humorous, wild and wacky 16-mm film, Bugaboo, that captures the ennui that has set in in the utopian lives of the Indian software whizkids. 

A trendsetter of sorts, the film is the maiden effort of Indian software engineers to tell their own story. Conceived by Sujit Saraf and Sanjay Rajgopalan, two Stanford PhD students-the former is the director and also plays the main character, Bapu-Bugaboo is the story of the ordinariness and predictability of successful life. Says Mahesh Umashankar, who plays Bapu's friend in the film: "The central concept is about people playing by the rules and learning about breaking them". Adds Lalitha Rajgopalan, who was in charge of production: "Doing things becomes such a habit that we don't question the premise on which we're living our lives. So maybe, sometime we should question that and break free."

The film crew, in their 20s and 30s, were unfazed by their inexperience. "Ignorance is bliss," says Lalitha. "We didn't know what we were getting into." Adds Mahesh: "Being engineers, at least the technology didn't intimidate us." While Tony Sehgal, the cinematographer, has some formal training in film-making, the rest are engineers working with Netscape, Cisco, Intel, H-P and nasa. None of them has any real background in film-making or drama except for staging a few odd plays in the San Francisco Bay Area under the banner of their drama group Naatak.

The team rented the equipment from San Francisco-based Film Arts Foundation and shot the entire film over six weekends-since all of them had full-time jobs-on a shoestring budget of $21,000. "The real crunch came in post-production," says Srikar Srinath who was in charge of sound recording along with Tony. Using an untested software programme, they converted the film directly into a video. It took nearly three months to edit. For Rajiv Nema who plays Jeevan Ulhas, the biggest difficulty was not knowing how the shot has come out. Says he: "In a play, we could make out what we have rehearsed. But in a movie you don't know how it's going to come out unless you see it." Adds Mahesh: "As a film isn't shot sequentially, it was a task to remember the details-to ensure that you are wearing the same T-shirt, holding the same coffee mug, etc." Yet, the shooting ratio was 1:2, which says a lot about their dedication.

The film is the story of three engineers from India who find themselves doing almost too well. Bapu, the protagonist, reflects on his life and decides to seek out a professional life randomiser, Jeevan Ulhas PhD, who injects random disturbances in his routine life. Ulhas has a recipe for each day of the week-jump a red light, introduce a bug into the code you are writing, etc. 

Bapu has two friends with problems typical of Indian bachelors living in the US. One has a live-in relationship with an American girlfriend and his mother is visiting from India. The other can't consummate his marriage. The film tracks the deviations from their placid normal routines until it leads to a "grand deviance" unthinkable for sober law-abiding engineers from India. It is only then that they discover simple solutions to their seemingly complex problems.

The film has no substantial role for women, no song and dance numbers, or romantic angles. But there is a strong humorous line. In the opening scene, a young man is engrossed in his pooja when his pager goes off. He promptly lifts his dhoti to reveal a pager and a cell phone strapped to his body. In another scene, the expectant parents while planning their child's website, register one set of domain names for a girl and another for a boy.

Bugaboo premiered on August 12 in Palo Alto and has already created quite a buzz in Silicon Valley. But the film-makers have "no illusions about its appeal". "It will definitely appeal to Indians in Silicon Valley," says Srikar. Director Sujit, however, has since returned to teach at iit, Delhi.

The biggest challenge now of course, is to sell Bugaboo. The team is scouting for distributors and also trying to pitch the movie on the film festival circuit. Says Srikar: "The most enjoyable part was the prospect of making money and the biggest stumbling block is actually making it." As the film team knows only too well, there isn't always a pot of gold at the end of every rainbow!

Shalini Bhatnagar in Cupertino, USA