A Crowd In Hand

The last time I experienced Delhi winter I thought it was overrated and the 16 of Bangalore was colder than the 4 of Delhi. I accounted this to the wind speed and altitude difference. This time however the winter already seems cold. Maybe because I’ve been living in Delhi for a little over 4 months and pretty much accustomed to the windless oven. Now I see people leaving for home earlier, shops shutting down earlier, the sun shying away faster and a dead silence descending over the night.

  It was the silence of the cold Friday night. I heard a railway horn blow at a distance. The line was about 1200 – 1500 meters away and would’ve been inaudible if it were not winter. It was in this silence that kept me awake. I finally decided to watch the movie Lucia.

 

I think it was August 2013, when I suddenly started seeing all these posts from on FB about how awesome Lucia is and surprisingly, I BMS-ed  it and what do you know! A PVR in one of the malls of Gurgoan was actually showing Lucia. I didn’t have a lot of company to go watch it, I had found zero Kannadigas and my friends of Delhi weren’t really interested. This wouldn’t have happened if you’re in Bangalore. I’ve been dragged and I’ve dragged my friends to movies of the languages we didn’t follow, but it was fun and it happens often in Bangalore.  

Anyway this post isn’t about language. It’s about the concept of crowd funding. The introduction credits of Lucia movie said that it’s the first CrowdFunded Kannada movie. I googled a little later and found a news result dated Nov 12, 2013. It said the first Crowd Funded Malayalam movie with a Tamil/Malayalam cast and a Bengali Director would release soon, cool so Kannada is ahead (yay :P) More googling lead to a Reuterspost about the movie. It says the story writer had made a blog post where he said that he had tried to source the movie but had failed for 3 years. Suddenly out of the blue he got 200,000 rupees into his bank account from a lady in UK. More funding from random strangers followed and that’s when they decided to make a movie out of funds from the crowd. 

This idea is ingenious! Kannada film industry of the ‘Sandalwood’ is known for its low budget or its Tamil/Telugu adaptations; Lucia was so big and radical that people said it brought a paradigm shift. Though it was still a low budget movie, it was very well received. The plot of the movie itself is so delicate and complex. The actors did good and the songs were pretty good too. The movie all in all was good, it was also released in Pakistan; the Tribune even put a review of Lucia. Sadly I still don’t think I would find people who would want to try the movie. (it was released with subtitles ofcourse)

Last year I had authored a white paper dealing crowdsourcing for software testing and since then I had started to appreciate the benefits of using a crowd. I read a bit more about crowd funding and the more I read the more I was interested, this idea is already catching up, crowd funded movies were already famous in the west. The next result said Crowd Funded travelling; a site called Trevolta said it would sponsor trips! The idea is simple; travelers post their travel plans and the company tries to sponsor it, the sponsors may be from simply inspired and passionate travelers or marketers sponsoring for marketing use. Whatever the case, you get to go on a trip free of cost! Why wouldn’t it work?? The idea is relatively new and the site has very less right now, but you can check out their FB page just in case (I know free publicity right? They better fund one of my trips :P :D )

I was thinking hard about how to make use of this idea, maybe I could use CrowdFunding to raise capital for my entrepreneurial ideas too… and that’s when it hit me that this is what we do in India! A Ganesh mela or a Durga Puja pandal or holika dahan all happen with crowdfunding! We call it chanda and now we’re giving it a fancy name, come to think of it, it doesn’t seem so radical or big or new idea at all! And today, we have so much money; Banks, Investors and VC’s and ready to give you all the money if you have an idea, and if not these guys then you can just get money from the crowd! What we need is planning, transparency and proper IT integration and we could use CrowdFunding for anything! So... Go!