His raison d'etre is computers. Forty-six-year-old V Chandrasekaran is a BE in Electrical Engineering, a MTech in Computer Science and has been in the IT industry for the last 24 years. He is also the chairman and managing director of Pentafour Software and Exports, the second largest software exporter in India.Chandrasekaran began his career in 1973, writing programmes for BHEL. Nine years later, he went to the US to design software for radio and TV stations and multimedia applications. He came back in the mid-'80s and plunged into the world of software by starting Pentafour with an initial investment of Rs 5 crore. "Software is a mind product. Either it should be a one-man show or a big show," he says. For a few years, however, his show was constrained and strained by the hefty 300 per cent custom duty on computer imports. Once that was reduced, the company was the first software house - in 1992 - to go public and import the latest IBM mainframes, Sun Sparcs, Silicon Graphics workstations, DECAlphas, MACs. an inventory befitting a comprehensive catalogue on computer products.Today, Pentafour is worth Rs 164 crore and employs 1,300 professionals, 80 per cent of them trained in-house. It has also set up a CD-ROM plant which manufactures 12 million CD-ROMs and 1.5 million CD-Rs every year. The company has 12 overseas offices and 11 in the country, including the newly opened office at Andheri. It has spread its tentacles into banking, financial services, insurance, training, multimedia and films. In fact, Pentafour has done the special effects for the Tamil and Hindi versions of Kamal Hassan's Chachi 420. Currently, 105 animators are working on the 30 million dollar real-time animation movie Sindbad the Sailor for the US company, Improvisation. The other projects are King and I, Gulliver Travels, Genes, starring Aishwarya Rai in a double role, and a film on the Narmada Andolan with Madhuri Dixit.For animation projects, Pentafour uses 3-D motion rendering, whereby realmovements are captured onto the Toons. "Sindbad is a virtual human being he will walk and talk exactly the way the model posing for him did," explains Chandrasekaran. Though the output is stunningly real, it's also expensive. A 20-minute animation film costs anywhere between $150,000 to $300,000. Movies like Lion King and Alladin worked out to over $20 million, even though they used the computer merely as a "glorified typewriter". So, despite its titanic appeal, special effects figure extensively only in 20 per cent of movies made in Hollywood.But no matter how expensive hi-tech's may be, Chandrasekaran believes the bottomline remains user-friendliness - a fact Pentafour dare not forget. He gives the example of Silicon Graphics, which is hailed as the King of Graphics despite an abundance of cheaper alternatives. "SG built the chip around the industry, whereas others wanted the industry to be built around their chips," he says.Also, the cost factor hasn't deterred Chandrasekaran'screativity from working overtime. For instance, three years ago, he suggested modernising the electoral process. Election cards would be imprinted with a digital image of the voter and a copy routed to a central database, which would also double up as a info-bank for the police and other agencies. During elections, voters would log their verdict directly into the database - giving a computerised paperless result immediately after the voting has ended! One fringe benefit would be of making booth capturing obsolete. "All progress comes from crazy ideas," insists Chandrasekaran.And he feels that special effects are like magic tricks - successful only if no one notices them! Also, the moment technology supports his crazy vision, he will use the "computer as the camera" and show Filmwalla & Co the way to the soup kitchen! Virtually with his virtual movies. The idea will make your head reel. Listen: Chandrasekaran envisions movies created completely with computer-generated actors, movements and backgrounds so`real' that they will be indistinct from really real movies. Further, such movies would be truly international. Depending on the country, not only the audio will change but the heads of actors will roll as well. "The films will be released with local heads," says Chandrasekaran. What that means is that heads will be "replaceable" - so what looked like Madhuri Dixit in Mumbai will be transmogrified into Demi Moore for New York!The only point on which Chandrasekaran's imagination falters is the cost of such films. But then, making movies has always been expensive. So what if they are only virtual!
