Deepak Chopra & Shekur Kapur Collaborate
By Gotham Chopra

Intent is the new paradigm.
Intent is potential becoming actual.
Intent is power.
Intent is everything.
Intent is.

With these words, film director Shekhar Kapur announced his alliance with holistic mogul Deepak Chopra in launching a multimedia company, INTENT, aimed at spearheading the entertainment industry explosion in Asia and India. Strong believers in the growing economic strength of the middle class in the East, Kapur and Chopra feel the Asian consumer will soon have enormous cultural muscle and influence in the media industry and that Asia will generate 70% of the revenue from the media and entertainment business in the next ten years. Kapur muses, “It is likely that by the end of this decade, a film like Spider Man 5 will open to a billion dollar first weekend. Expect $700 million of that to be generated from Asia. Expect then, that when Spider Man takes his mask off, he may be Chinese or Indian.”

Most well known for his direction of the eight-time Oscar nominated 1998 biopic film Elizabeth, Kapur is intimately familiar with the media world. Recently, he served as co-creator of Bombay Dreams, the musical love story that played to packed houses in London’s West End before debuting on Broadway in New York. His upcoming projects include Pani (Water) a multi-million dollar film set in Mumbai 20 years from now where water becomes a weapon of economic and political exploitation. “It will be Hindi cinema's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” predicts Kapur. Popular for mentoring young dynamic filmmakers and taking risks while remaining loyal to the Hindi film industry, Kapur is sure that “creating the enterprise we envision in the next few years will take courage, conviction, vision, and a lot of hard work. But I know it can be done.”

His partner, Chopra, has been heralded by Time magazine as one of the 100 heroes and icons of the century and credited as the “poet-prophet of alternative medicine.” Chopra has achieved a huge following in the United States, especially Hollywood, for what he calls "bridging the technological miracles of the West with the wisdom of the East." He explains, “The mass media culture of the world has long been colonized by the West. However, the world now is searching for a deeper meaning and fuller experience of living. This is the perfect time for Asia, and in particular India, to export its knowledge, wisdom, entertainment, spirituality, and sensuality. The formation of this partnership is the natural extension of my life’s work.”

INTENT will collaborate with strategic investors to form a venture capital fund to outsource to and invest in media related projects in Asia including post-production, music, technology, and even screenwriting. As a first project, Kapur and Chopra have set out to create Siddhartha – Your Life, “a saga of life, death, ego, and awakening in the rock opera meets Bollywood extravaganza.” One description of the show reads, “Throbbing to the beat of a thousand instruments, and a hundred dancers and acrobats, amazing theatrical and visual effects, the show promises to transport you to a universe that will leave you gasping.”

“Popular culture is on the threshold of radical change. People are bored of recycled melodrama and superficial art form. The images are stale, the clichés repetitive and the romance with the war hero all but over. The world demands a change- a new mythology, new music, new images, faces of another color and voices free of a predictable accent,” says Chopra.

"It’s all about what the market demands are,” declares Kapur. “In the entertainment industry, we are fast realizing that the biggest markets are in China and India. Tomorrow's Tom Cruise might well be Shah Rukh Khan.”

Chopra adds, “We feel that the peoples of Asia and India, the diaspora included, are poised to emerge as the new leaders who will inspire, educate, and entertain humanity. We feel privileged to participate in this global mind change and invite others who share our vision of transforming ‘intent’ into reality.”