Once upon a time, when Dad’s mobile phone was just an inch shorter than a baseball bat and television didn’t know who/what Rakhi Sawant was, IT professionals were made out to be divine creatures. The best sons/boyfriends/neighbours you could possibly ask for. “India has become the IT hub of the world but the guys who are lower in the pyramid — the programmers, the sales executives, all have miserable jobs. They ‘stretch’ their working hours, are insufficiently paid and lack motivation,” says 21-year-old Pratik Arora, who modeled Quotech on the It companies mushrooming all over India. Quotech is a ficitional IT company, part of Arora’s web series Company Bahadur. “We wanted to mock the way the top management regularly uses buzzwords, the way corporate houses fool their customers and ill-treat the employees,” says Arora, a self-confessed fan of Scott Adam’s Dilbert.

The series, which will be up on the site www.companybahadur.com, brings a popular mode of entertainment in the West, to India. The series is loosely based on the format of a sitcom. But one would still be able to follow an episode without having seen the preceding ones. “Apart from the references to previous episodes, you will be able to follow mostly everything,” says the Delhi University graduate in business economics. Also, the 22-minute run-time of a sitcom has been shrunk to 10-12 minutes on the web. “A 22 minute long webisode is impractical because on the internet the attention span of a surfer is quite short. The other thing is that it would take a lot of time to buffer such large content on current internet speeds in India,” explains Arora.

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