Chapter 417 Indian Idol
"Boss, how did you do it?" Ashish was amazed.
"If you take care of New Delhi, you take care of everything."
"New Delhi?"
“Do you know who the current Minister of Transportation is?”
“Uh, I haven’t paid much attention recently. I think it’s from Uttar Pradesh?”
"Yes, last name is Sue." Ron nodded.
"Oh!" Ashish understood.
"This is just the first step. First, we need to get Sur Mobile into the public channel, and then we will get Garuda Communications Equipment Company."
Many of the Ministry of Telecommunications’ contract phones are provided to officials or public sectors, similar to the unit purchases by the University of Tokyo.
As long as the first batch is approved, there will be no worries about sales later on, as the government channels are very stable.
Not only can it make money, but it can also rapidly expand the popularity of Sur mobile phones among the upper class.
When Aditya put the Sur phone into the system, he had a lot of reasons. As the first mobile phone produced in India, shouldn't the government support it first?
Great! Now I really feel unpatriotic if I don’t buy this.
Ron is sure to reap the benefits of Barat's success.
The Sur phone was indeed India’s first domestically produced phone, while several other TV brands were still struggling to figure it out.
The title of "the pride of domestic products" has always been the marketing killer of Suer Electric Appliances.
Tsk, I still need to keep in touch with Dong Duoduo.
Although he spent a lot of money on shopping in the past, Ron's family business was also supported by these things.
Without the cash cow of Sur Electric, how could the mining, energy, real estate and ports flourish?
India Mobile's future investment in base stations will probably still require the support of Sur Electric.
Speaking of India Mobile, Ron remembered something else.
“How many pagers have we sold now?”
"There are already more than three million copies."
"So many?" Ron was a little surprised.
"It's very popular now and it's the most desired gift among young people."
"Yes, these people are also customers of India Mobile." Ron nodded with satisfaction.
"We are already developing the next generation of pagers, this time with two-way communication capabilities."
The popularity of code messages prompted Sur Electric to keep up with the times.
Where there is demand, there is a product.
"Two-way paging, meaning the pagers can send messages to each other?"
"Yes, this technology has been around for a few years. It's just too expensive, so it hasn't become popular."
"Can we handle this part of the technology ourselves?"
"It's not a big deal. Boss, don't forget that we developed the pager entirely ourselves, and we have accumulated a lot of technology in-house."
“How much does it cost?”
"The expensive part is still the chip. The whole device costs 3,000 rupees."
"That's almost three times the price of a one-way pager," Ron exclaimed.
"There's nothing we can do. This is the international market situation." Ashish was also quite helpless.
"Both models are retained, and two-way pagers can only exist as high-end products."
The cost is 3,000, so it has to be sold for more than 5,000 to make a considerable profit.
This price is not much cheaper than the Sur mobile phone, so it is difficult to popularize it.
Unless the chip problem can be solved, the price will never come down.
Why don't we look for Huazi? The chip in a pager is much simpler than a cell phone, so let them fix it while we're at it.
After all, I have prepared 100 million US dollars. For the sake of the financial sponsor, I should do something to help.
After explaining the matter to Ashish, Ron reviewed Sur Electric's quarterly financial report.
With more and more new products launched in the past two years, overall sales are on an upward trend.
Air conditioners, refrigerators, VCDs, radios, stereos... all these things added up have brought Sur Electric's monthly profit back to the level of 10 billion rupees.
If it weren't for the impact of the financial crisis, we might have set a new record.
These numbers still look comfortable. The more money the better.
Ron estimated that it would take another three to four billion US dollars to cover all the funds needed to build the several major business districts that Sur Real Estate was building.
The power plants and signal base stations will continue to expand, and Gujarat will also purchase another port, which all requires money.
Most of Sur Electric's profits for the next year will have to be invested, and bank loans alone are not enough.
Ron had made plans long ago. He invested money before the millennium and just collected money after the millennium.
As a cash cow, Sur Electric Appliances must not be taken lightly, so he listened carefully to Ashish's report.
VCD is about to launch a new generation of products, which will have a karaoke function and even the microphone and speakers have been significantly upgraded.
When it comes to VCDs, Ron thinks of Bollywood.
I don’t know what happened to Sun Media’s investment in Chopra’s film.
Well, Chopra is definitely having a hard time right now.
He was initially confident in his carefully polished script, but suddenly found that some people could not understand the script.
That was Bahadur, the Nepalese chef he hired. During a break in tea one day, Chopra told him about his masterpiece, and Bahadur was very confused.
It was then that Chopra realized that her script might be too artistic, which was not a good sign.
Although Chopra is a director, he does not think highly of art films.
In India, talking about art films with ordinary people is like speaking Greek or Latin to them. This is a cultural gap that has existed since the colonial period.
Art films are for Westerners to watch, and only people from that region would invest in and produce such films.
Chopra is a director, not a screenwriter, and he hates being fed cliched plots by audiences he calls "idiots."
The difficulty he often faces is that our audience is film-illiterate, which is like talking about Shakespeare with Bahadur (the cook).
He was worried that in order to make Shakespeare understandable to most people, he had to simplify the plot again and again. By the time he finally met an audience that could appreciate Shakespeare, he had already lost the ability to present Shakespeare.
So in order to make Indian audiences understand the movie, he has to force himself to lower his IQ all the time.
Even the movie poster at the end can't be in English, so the audience can't understand it at all. No one will care about this movie, and he might really go bankrupt.
Chopra has also made art films and received Oscar nominations.
He sometimes wondered what his life would have been like if his art films had been successful in the beginning, or if he had stayed in the United States after being nominated for an Oscar.
Will he sigh and lament whether he made the wrong choice at the crossroads of life, and whether he failed to live the wonderful life he could have lived?
Ultimately, he is conflicted. He wants to contribute to the world film scene, but he also wants to make films that go international and keep growing.
But reality trapped him in Mumbai, where could he go? He could also hide in his study all day, surrounded by solid wood furniture and a jacuzzi, and his life would stagnate.
So in order to be more down-to-earth, he had no choice but to have people constantly revise the script, and it was not completed until the end of last year.
At the beginning of the year, I was busy recruiting actors, and everything else was settled one after another, except Amit Bachchan, who has not responded yet.
At this time, Chopra thought of Ron again. He hoped to move this great man and get the last big shot.
Since he had nothing to do, Ron brought Urmila to visit.
Amit Bachchan's villa is also in Bandra, which has almost become a gathering place for Bollywood celebrities.
Ron was shaking hands with this star, a household name throughout India, whose films he had watched as a child.
To be more precise, it was Bachchan's image on the screen that accompanied the growth of Ron and his generation.
Looking back at his distant memories, Ron really admired this star when he was in school.
I remember when Bachchan was injured while filming a stunt scene, people all over the country prayed for his recovery, and thousands of people lined up outside Chongshan Hospital, waiting to donate blood for him.
At that time, Ron almost made an appointment with his friends to ride on a train to Mumbai to donate blood for Bachchan.
Later, it was his second uncle Aditya who dragged him back from the Varanasi railway station.
Tsk, he actually did such a stupid thing in the past.
Now, Amit Bachchan welcomed him with both hands and was very polite.
It must be said that he is taller in person than he looks on screen, wearing a loose white silk Pathan suit.
He would suddenly smile when shaking hands, and Ron had never seen anyone show so many teeth in an instant.
It wasn't a smile of pleasure or politeness; it was more like a switch had been flipped, and Ron's white teeth seemed to gleam in front of him.
After a moment, the switch was turned off again, and Bachchan's expression returned to calm, even showing a slight trance.
Outside his villa, there were people waiting 24 hours a day, hoping to see him and seek his "darshan".
This is a kind of religious custom. Darshan means to gaze. Indians believe that seeing the face of a saint or a deity will help with their practice.
Ron had experienced this kind of treatment many times in Uttar Pradesh: people would come and shout his name, hoping that he would see them.
In the villa, Bachchan sat in the study, where the khaki leather sofa chair and ebony furniture added a touch of luxury to the room.
On one wall of the study hangs a large portrait of a group of children huddled around a movie projector.
On Bachchan's desk lies a stack of videotapes and two books, one a collection of his father's poems and the other Paul Lesser's "The Way of Husband and Wife."
They started chatting about Mission: Kashmir and Bachchan said he was shooting in Mauritius when he got the call from Chopra.
“This is going to be a fucking amazing movie, just wait and see! I couldn’t help but blurt out, I was so excited!”
“So you think it’s a wonderful movie, too?” Capra asked.
“Of course,” Bachchan nodded, “but I heard you changed the script again?”
“I felt it wasn’t perfect yet, so I made some minor adjustments,” Chopra explained.
Unlike other Mumbai film directors, Chopra usually shoots strictly according to the finalized script, but a finalized script alone is not enough to sign big-name actors for the crew.
Chopra had to explain the contents of the script himself, which was why he visited Bachchan this time. He wanted to tell him what the story of "Mission Kashmir" was.
During Chopra's explanation, Bachchan nodded frequently, while Ron occasionally interjected and slowly sipped his tea.
However, compared to movies, Bachchan is more concerned about another thing.
"Mr. Sur, are there any vacancies at the Bombay International School?"
"Huh?" Ron was a little confused.
(End of this chapter)
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