RAJ ISRANI IS AN ENTREPRENEUR AHEAD OF TIME

After working abroad as a touring salesman, entrepreneur Raj Israni got involved with pirated video cassettes, especially after he became curious on its legal aspects. Raj produced the video cassettes of his own film Ek Daku Shaher Mein and released it with the help of Magnum, Bombino and Time Video. Though there were around 4000 video cassette libraries all over Mumbai at that time, they could legally sell only 300 and naturally ended up in loss. Says Raj, “The regular dealer had to suffer in business a lot because he was busy in hundreds every week but we were very new in the market.”

Raj decided to have a meeting with Hanif of Magnum, Dhirubhai of Time and Nanubhai of Bombino and suggested to them that they could convert the business legally by buying the video rights from the filmmakers and launched their own shop called United 3 in Santa Cruz, which was inaugurated with great fanfare by Mithun Chakraborty since their first video cassette was his film Dance Dance. Gradually the business started dying when the cable TV started and Nari Hira started selling small budget films in the video format. However, later the scenario changed drastically in 1992 when Zee TV came to India followed by Sony TV and Star TV. Says Raj, “Today we have 900 TV channels. The transition came when consumption increased manifolds with the advent of YouTube as well as OTT.

Raj Israni had another brainwave and started India’s first ever casting agency to scout talent called Israni Communication and proclaimed that he can make heroes out of zeroes. Taking a cue from his father, who dabbled in production with B.S. Narayan of Bangalore as his partner. His father’s Kannada film Namma Ooru proved to be a super duper hit and their lifestyle changed.  “My father was a very disciplined person and a migrant from Pakistan who ran a 2000 sq feet café called Colaba Café in Colaba but lost his money in their next venture Namma Daari and even had to sell his flourishing restaurant and the family was back to Square One.

Raj produced feature films- one in Bhojpuri in 2007 with Dinesh Lal Nirahua and Chingi in Marathi with Girija Oak and Milind Gawli. Both flopped, though it was Dinesh Lal Nirahua’s second after his super-duper hit Rickshawala.

Raj’s tryst with production did not end there. His son produced Raunak in Punjabi, a reality show shot in Vietnam for the TV Channel Atrangi called King with Suman Pandey as the celebrity anchor. The next thing that Raj did was to launch a portal called The Indian Film Industry which has archiving data of around ten lakhs of pages of films from 1913 to 2025. Raj started his own publication Filmi Beat which ran for six months successfully but had no option but to fold it up after he was down with jaundice for a long time.

Raj Israni, who has toured 54 countries all over the world as a salesman for 14 years and says that his commitment was inbuilt then, unlike India and China, has yet not given up. After the Filmy Short Fest, he started Filmi Mike to support stand-up comedians and other new talents. Raj Israni, winds up, “At 70, I am the backbone of Israni Industries and young enough to start three more projects in the pipeline and am raring to go. My daughter Megha, though married and settled in Bangalore, looks after the content to be delivered to the clients as well as the budgets.”