The saga of Screwvala

What is the point of tracking the life of another being if not to learn from it and marvel at the wonder of life and the human sprit?

I found myself thinking these thoughts as I sat witnessing a show at the Lakmé Fashion week recently.

The occasion was to showcase the work and people behind entertainment mogul Ronnie Screwvala's newest passion, the NGO Swades - a Rs 700-crore initiative for rural upliftment across 220 villages in Maharashtra.

But the fact that walking the ramp along with a village headman, school principals, outstanding students, healthcare and education activists from far-flung Maharashtrian villages were the likes of Abhishek Kapoor, Kiran Rao, Ekta Kapoor, Sanjay and Zarine Khan, Farah Khan, Rohit Bal, Juhi Chawla, Chetan Bhagat and Ayushmann Khurrana made it a surreal moment.

Here were the stalwarts of Bollywood gathered to honour the vision of one man: a producer who not only brought in some of the decade's biggest and most critically acclaimed movies but also someone who had changed the face of movie-making in the span of less than a decade - corporatised it, internationalised it and rid it somewhat of its dodgy antecedents.

To understand why the Screwvala saga defies stereotypes, one must know a little about his background. Belonging to a well-heeled professional South Mumbai Parsi family, he went to Cathedral School, a bastion of chichi privilege. He was the last person in the world one would associate with the rough and tumble, and often anarchic, world of Bollywood! His mother taught Beethoven and Mozart to South Mumbai's high-born daughters and he acted in the highbrow theatre of Pinter and Shakespeare!

Graduating from the prestigious Sydenham College of Commerce, it was assumed that Screwvala would get into advertising and soon start his own agency, or head one of the larger ones like most of his peers did.

But Screwvala outdid all expectations and broke most assumptions. Realising the great vacuum in TV entertainment, he set up the city's first cable TV business network as far back as 1981. In a modest room crammed with projectors, VCRs and other equipment, he began to provide clean and family-oriented programming to a swathe of Mumbai households. Not resting on this success, he established United Studios, South Asia's premier studio and animation complex.

After pioneering many ventures such as Home Shopping , Screwvala ventured into the big league by incorporating all these into the UTV group (movie production and distribution, gaming and new media, television content production and TV broadcasting). Soon, UTV became one of the most respected and successful production houses in the country bringing Screwvala much recognition (he made it to Esquire's list of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century and Time's list of 100 most influential people in the world).

But the Screwvala saga didn't end there. In 2008 he began a fruitful association with Walt Disney. Starting with the Hollywood giant picking up a 15 per cent stake in UTV Global Broadcasting and ending in the company investing Rs 924.03 crore in the company and appointing Screwvala as the managing director.

But while most men would be content with this, Screwvala once again has broken the mould and set his sights on the far from glamorous field of rural upliftment working in areas of healthcare, water harvesting and education.

And there's more to the Screwvala phenomenon - we haven't even come to the fact that apart from all this, he owns one of India's largest toothbrush manufacturing companies!

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com