HISTORY OF GENESIS
Genesis was started between 3 assistants of Shyam Benegal, Prahlad Kakkar, Mandeep Kakar (Not related)
and Ravi Upoor. When discussing the name between us , Smita Patil the actress who was a good friend
and well wisher had just seen a student film at the FTII (Film and television institue, India) called Genesis.
So we all decided being inspired by the film to call it Genesis, The beginning of the beginning.
Mubi Ismail, who was the films chief of Lintas was a great supporter and believer and gave us our second
set of films for Britannia. Then Genesis worked for Britannia continuously from 1978 till 2003.
Our first film was actually given to us by Air India where the deal was that we had to make a film based
on their posters. Their track was a bioscope poem "Dekho dekho duniya dekho"
We needed an interesting voice for the Bioscope master.
We hit on Mr Harindramath Chathupadhya, other then being a interesting character.
He had a unique voice as we had heard him recite a poem that he had written called 'The curd seller'.
When we found Harindranath, he was standing on carter road with a platoon of street urchins making them
march upon the promenade with him being the Sergeant major.
We asked him to come with us to the film center, tardeo to record the Bioscope audio and he
was even more pleased because we told him we'll pay him. As his Hindi was not up to scratch, we had to
write the entire commentary in Roman, and he had to record it like a Bioscope person in one breath.
The rest is history , Genesis started its career with the film winning every award that Adlabs would o"er,
and there was no looking back after that.
What was unique about Genesis was that other than film production we also interacted with the agency and dealt with the creatives directly.
We also took full responsibility of the end product as much as could to the extent of reshooting the whole commercial on our own budget if the need be.