As an independent film-maker, Nair sees herself as an entrepreneur in her own right, one who originates and develops one's own ideas before raising investor capital ``to essentially preserve my creative control over my ideas''.

Introduced at the TiE convention as ``an alternative to the dot.com presentations'', Nair attempted to give TiE members ``some understanding of what my work is like as a creative person'' and, of course, the business side of it.

A graduate of Harvard and a former actress, Nair began her film career making documentaries in India. After a period of seven years, she soon found herself ``getting very tired of the much greater struggle to find an audience''.

When she decided to make Salaam Bombay, her first feature film, she set her budget at $960,000 because ``I didn't want to make a film with any apologies. I wanted to make themovie under the best possible circumstances technically.''

She was eventually able to raise the money, she admitted, ``through a lot of scams''.

Channel Four in England was willing to match whatever she could raise and whenever she met a potential investor, she pitched one of three budgets, depending on how wealthy the person appeared. ``The trouble was how do you convince people to invest in a story about the survival of street children, with very little glamour or sex appeal,'' Nair recounted.

After raising $150,000 from the government of India in return for 25 per cent ownership in the film, ``I went to Channel Four and I lied and said I had $300,000, and they gave me $300,000. So with $450,000, I made the film, literally shooting in the morning and raising money at night,'' she said.French investors came up with the rest of the budget. ``We finished the film on exactly the budget I had wanted to start with and then we were invited to the Cannes Film Festival,'' Nair said.

``In 24 hours, it was asort of fairy tale what happened then. There was a 30 minute ovation, we won every award, including the award that came with money, by which I could pay my off debts. More importantly, I learned the art of distribution and in 24 hours, we sold the film all around the world.''The film went on to make a lot of money for those who had invested in it.

But from that moment on, ``I was hooked with the pleasure and the pain and the obsession, really, of making feature films,'' Nair confided, describing herself ``as someone from India who has a vision of the world... with an attitude that's beyond America''.

She was able to get her next film, Mississippi Masala, financed by a Hollywood studio on the proviso that she have the final cut. Her third film, The Perez Family, was ``a real exercise in how people make films on the West Coast, which is, they try to make it through committee film-making,'' she maintained.

``The tussle and the politics, which is really the essence of the studio world, led me to put thatbehind me and go back to my own independence.''Her next film, Kama Sutra, which she calls ``an epic on a peanut, since we made a film that looked like $40 million for about $7 million'', was financed through pre-sales to distributors in foreign markets. Bottom line, ``I preserve my independence by selling to four or five countries that would match the budget of the movie, than have the rest of the world to exploit and to share the equity of the rest of the world with the partners who have taken the risk of investing in it from inception.''

Yet Nair has come to the crossroads in her career. She is currently pitching projects to the Hollywood studios ``and I know it's sort of like sleeping with the devil in a certain sense because I know there is no such thing as creative independence here'', she freely admitted. ``So I'm doing the Hollywood dance and go down that road,'' she said.

-- IANS