By Nikhat Kazmi

NEW DELHI: Good morning in Silicon Valley. Good Indian get up early, have glass of good, nutritious milk and then get set to perform pooja - good beginning to busy day in big Bay Area, now bustling with Indian computer professionals. Midway, the mantras are interrupted by beep-beep. Bapu lifts Rin-white dhoti to reveal his turn-of-the-century treasures: a mobile and a pager strapped to his waist.

 Geez! Order, discipline, technology and the dhoti: Bugaboo (irritant) is the name of the new virus that seems to have infected the expat technocrats teeming in the US of A. And Bugaboo is the name of the first-of-its-kind 16 mm English film which premiered on Thursday at Palo Alto, the hub of Silicon Valley.

 The 82-minute film, made by a group of Indian computer professionals working in Netscape, Cisco, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and NASA, seems to be cinema verite at its innovative best. It captures the life and times of a group of prosperous young Indians who ostensibly have it all: money, access to the world's best technology, a high-flying lifestyle and security. Yet, they end up wondering: is this Utopia?

 For the proverbial outsider status never does leave this amorphous group that continues to live inside cocooned communities which are completely divorced from the American mainstream. Hence, the confusion and sense of displacement of three friends who are torn between progress and a sense of belonging, the American razzle-dazzle and the Indian desire for rootedness. Bugaboo then refers to ``the bugs in the minds of successful expat Indians'' which make even a life full of achievements seem worthless.

 According to Sujit Saraf, the 30-year-old NASA researcher who co-scripted, acted in and directed the film, the idea was to make a film about ``real people and real problems'' rather than ``a commercial Hindi film about good-looking people falling in love, despite social and economic pressures''. In his publicity note, Saraf confesses the motley group wanted to ``tell a story that captures the essence of our lives but with a twist. A funny intelligent film aimed primarily at funny intelligent people.''

 The producers of Bugaboo - shot over eight weekends on a budget of $22,000 - are already scouting for Indian distributors since they feel the film has an appeal for both ``expatriate Indians and Indians in urban centres of India''. In short, for people who have been swept off their feet in this technological tidal wave and are left with little time to just stand and stare.