Anagha Fowler
She was visible everywhere
— on the ramps, magazine covers and advertisements. Now one can catch
her on the net also. Banker-turned-model Anagha Fowler has launched her
personal website
www.anagha.com. This news may give some respite to her fans, as the almond-eyed
model plans to shift
her base from India to Australia in the coming months. So even if she says
good-bye to Delhi, there is a
link available.
In a world where casting couches and leery advertising executives are the
norm, model Anagha Fowler,
26, has trod a different route to success. Perhaps the first Indian model
to use technology to her
advantage - certainly the first to use it so spectacularly Anagha
has, within the space of a year, turned
from a little-known Delhi wannabe to a much-in-demand international model.
A unique success story sans compare, almost, Anagha woke up one morning,
like it happens in books,
and decided she needed to do something to kickstart her career. And while
she was doing it, she
thought, why restrict herself to India? At a time when anything Indian
was sweeping the globe, or like she
says, India is the spice of the new millennium, the world was her oyster,
quite literally.
Born into a traditional Hindu Brahmin family, Anagha always wanted to be
a model, but actually ended up
taking to banking after her graduation in Economics (Honours!) from St.
Stephen's College, where she
found another passion basketball! She actually only set foot on the
modelling road, however, when a
local photographer insisted on taking pictures to show a few people
but it wasn't happening fast enough.
Along with photographer husband David Fowler, then, Anagha, whose name
means pure or without sin in
Sanskrit, set up her own web site, www.anagha.com.
"There are no real risks involved in promoting yourself through the Web.
And there's a whole world out
there; you can decide how you want to appear to them. You have complete
control of the images and
content that appear on your site," she says. The initial investment cost,
she adds, with high graphic
content, was a one-off bill of Rs 1,50,000, with hosting charges logging
in at approximately Rs 25,000 per
annum. Indeed, her networking of the search engines was so good, that for
months, whenever you typed
in the keywords of Indian and fashion, anagha.com would almost always be
on top of the search results.
That wasn't all. Since she was working with the web, it was easy to incorporate
as modus operandi the
connectivity afforded by the medium. "Marketing your web site requires
a little more initiative and
investment," she continues. "I produced a post card of my home page and
sent it to modeling agencies
and senior executives within advertising agencies around the world. The
investment here was close to Rs
40,000. And the returns were excellent; I immediately started getting,
first, feelers and then offers and
contracts from around the world," she gushes. One decent assignment, she
points out, covers most of
your costs and assignments abroad are extremely lucrative.
Today, she's more successful than the big names you read about, and with
a three-year contract with a
New York based agency, has made it faster internationally than the ones
who go and spend six months
in London and come back saying they missed their parathas. Among her assignments
since, are location
shoots all over the world Prague is her favourite place, followed
by Australia.
And naturally, like anything else that is accepted internationally, the
Indians have clasped her to their
heart. Among her local campaigns are commercials like Ravissant, The Canterbury
Tales, DeBeers,
Ogaan, Suneet Varma and others, with photographers like Prabuddha Das Gupta,
Atul Kasbekar, Tarun
Khiwal and Bharat Sikka.
But what about the dangers of the web? What about crank emails, hacking
and so on? "So far, I haven't
faced any of those except for four nasty emails out of approximately
25000," says the 5-foot-9½ inch tall
model.