Come the middle of may, and moviegoers across the country will likely be on the edge of their theatre seats, fearfully savouring Naina, a suspense-horror flick starring Urmila Matondkar. Or so hopes Shripal Morakhia, 48, Chairman of the Mumbai-based brokerage firm, SSKI. No, Morakhia isn't punting on the stock of the company that produced it. Instead, he's the man who's directed the movie. Fulfilling his old promise to make a movie as soon as his firm could do without him, Morakhia has spent a year making Naina. He even hired dummy actors to hone his directorial skills before calling in the real stars. Why movies, and a horror film at that? "They have greater acceptability with the high-spending audience," says Morakhia, whose four-year-old iDream Productions has made five other films. "It's an honest attempt, let's see if it works," says he. Indeed.

CTO Czar

He holds more patents (305) than any other IBM employee, was Big Blue's youngest Fellow (an exclusive club of top inventors), and now Ravi Arimilli, 41, IBM's CTO for servers, has also been recognised as the most influential IT manager in the US. Arimilli, who was six when he moved to the US, is understandably thrilled, but thinks IT's transforming capabilities are just getting unleashed. "Not many people are aware or prepared for this transformation of mankind," says the "disruptive" inventor. He, clearly, isn't one of them.

End Of Innings

Fifteen years ago when UB's Vijay Mallya bought an ailing Mangalore Chemicals & Fertilizers (MCF), he turned to a group veteran to effect a turnaround. Since then, Daraius P. Mehta, 54, has more than quadrupled MCF's topline and turned losses into profits. Now, he's moving on, fuelling speculation that Mallya may have decided to sell the company. Mehta denies the rumours, and as for his decision to quit, he says that's because he is "looking to a global play in the products space" as his next big challenge. Again, while Mehta denies it, a little bird tells BT that his next stop could be the Nagarjuna Group. Meanwhile, don't be surprised if MCF actually changes hands. After all, Mallya's got big plans of his own to pull off at UB.

Smoking It Out

Padmini Somani likes to chew tobacco-figuratively, that is. Daughter of Gujarat Ambuja's Narottam Seksaria, Somani has been crusading against the harmful leaves for eight years now, which resulted in her setting up the Salaam Bombay Foundation in 2002. An NGO, it is committed to saving young children from the scourge of tobacco, especially the chewable gutkha. "The amount of gutkha consumption at a lower age has gone up," fumes the LSE grad. Somani, 29, has already taken her interactive awareness programmes to more than 250 schools in Mumbai, and is now targeting colleges and vocational institutes. Somani knows how devastating the gutkha addiction can be. Her own father had a traumatising encounter with it.

Perfect Plan?

In a country where millions of children go without primary education, it may be too ambitious to talk about higher education. But as Azim Premji, Chairman of Wipro, likes to say, it's not an either-or situation. Ergo, he's gone ahead and figured out a way to make higher, if not primary, education more affordable. Dubbed the Premji Formula, the plan calls for lending to students at half-a-percentage point above the risk-free rate. Experts are already calling the plan a win-win. Not only does it tie in with UPA's common minimum programme, it also makes lending viable for banks by recommending an interest subsidy on such loans. Now, let's just hope it gets implemented.

Done Deal

When a us-based infotech magazine, information Week, profiled vMoksha's Pawan Kumar as part of its listing of innovators and influencers in 2003, it put the former head of IBM India among the 11 "most likely to leave a mark on 2004". Kumar, 57, hasn't disappointed the magazine. Although three months late, he's made a mark by selling his it services company to Chennai-based Helios & Matheson for $17 million (Rs 74.8 crore), of which his share works out to $8.5 million (Rs 37.4 crore). So, is Kumar planning to hang up his boots? Hardly. "With this partnership, our goal is to ensure that one plus one is greater than two," says Kumar.

-Contributed by Priya Srinivasan, R. Sridharan, Rahul Sachitanand,
Priyanka Sangani and Venkatesha Babu