Executive Dossier

“Acting is all about being able to think on your feet, improvise, and follow instructions”

Published

25 years ago

May 22, 2001

She tries to keep a low profile but don’t be fooled into thinking she is some pushover. She is a strong person who knows what she wants and has quietly made a mark for herself with her performance as the central character in the hit serial Heena on Sony Entertainment Television. Even her marriage to noted director and producer Farhad Samar was a quiet affair – in her home town of Chandigarh – in the company of near and dear ones.

After securing a degree in arts, Singh took up her first job in a TV production House in Delhi and worked there for two months. Later she came to Mumbai to be here with her childhood friend and figure out her next move. And boy did she make the right ones. Just as a matter of a chance, she dropped her portfolio at production company Plus Channel. And she got selected to star in the long English soap “A Mouthful of Sky”. Then came “Heena” and she has not looked back since. Working quietly but with grit and determination. Working the way she wants, and not joining the rat race like several other actresses of this day have. She is choosy and selective about her roles.

Indiantelevision.com’s Harsha Khot got a glimpse of what Simone Singh is like in a tete a tete with her on the sets of “Tum Pukar Lo” directed by Sanjay Upadhaya at Madh Island, Mumbai. Excerpts:

Of the roles that you’ve been playing so far, which is your favourite role and why?

I don’t have any favourite role. I have enjoyed doing all of them, though I am quite fond of Rupal, the character in “Sea Hawks”, and mainly because its nice to work with interesting people. When you have an interesting actor, a good actor, and a director who can get something new… get something creative out of you … it motivates you.

I enjoyed playing Madhulika in “A Mouthful of Sky”, even though that was my first show ever.

You’re quite selective about roles.

Yes, very selective. In fact, after I signed “Heena”, for a year-and-a-half I did not take up anything. People thought I was mad! When you get the biggest show on air, everyone goes home happy signing left, right and centre, is what they told me.

Were you waiting for a good role?

I wasn’t waiting for the right role; there were good roles which came my way. It’s just that I wanted to be focused on one show at a time. See, before “Heena” I did not do any lead role because I didn’t want to get into it frivolously. I wanted to be sure that I was ready to take on this commitment because it is a commitment for at least a year. When I took a lead role in Heena, I wanted to do that a bit and see what I want to do next… beside also have time to myself; enjoy the first lead role and all that.

Is it that you were trying to gauge yourself?

No. I wasn’t trying to gauge myself. For as a performer you only grow with the every extra bit of work you do. I was trying to be sure. Was this what I wanted to do for a very long time is what I asked myself.

Was it acting or the role? Were you giving it a second thought?

Not that I jumped into it. It came my way, but I wasn’t sure how long I would enjoy doing it, especially on television.

Did you do theatre before?

No. Just amateur stuff when I was in school.

Is it easy being an actress, was it easy for you to be one?

It was easy for me. But you still have to be attentive, be careful and have to be interested. And keep learning. It is not that ‘oh…I have a little bit of talent and think that I can get through it’. You have to keep working at it.

How do you work on it?

How do I work on it… the same like everybody else does. I just imagine. You think about the character, how you want to play it and lot of other things which come within the parameters of your craft. The script is generally not written in advance. We really don’t have all the time to go deeply into it. You decide as to how you would want play it within the scene – to try and make it more interesting, you try and work along with your co-actor, director and that is how you work on it.

When you play the character what goes on in your mind. I mean do you forget you are Simone while playing the character?

In deliberation? Do I lose myself as a character? It’s not a short-term thing that you become a character and lose yourself in it. Television is one week out of every month. You would be extremely schizophrenic if one week out of every month you became the character. So, no I don’t think so. I never want to be pompous and say that. It would be extremely pretentious to say that. I am not going to say that.

What are you thinking while facing the camera?

Ghosh! I hope I am saying the lines right. Hope I am in the right place taking the light and being able to play the character as real as I can make it.

With the light, camera… dialogues and all that in your mind how do you compose yourself?

See that’s what an actress’s job is all about. If you are going to get thrown around and become nervous after all these years, then that would be very silly. It’s your job, you’ve got to do it to the best of your abilities like any other job and be able to think on your feet, improvise, and follow instructions.

How do you improve your acting skills?

I really learnt on the job. Many people have come up to me asking if I was looking for training. They say they would like to help me and that it would enhance my performance. But, really speaking I learnt on the job.

How was it when you just stepped into acting and what’s it like now after five years?

I’ve definitely come a long way. Like I said, I learnt while working. If in any way you think about what you’re doing and don’t do it by rote then you do improve. Your work becomes more detailed.

What kind of role do you like?

One that is well written. There is nothing you can do with a badly written character.

I mean is there any particular kind of role you like?

It doesn’t have to be any particular kind. Why should you want to limit yourself!

How do you prepare for tough scenes?

Like I said. I try I remember all my lines.

Is your shooting schedule back to back?

I shoot for ‘Heena‘ the first week of every month and in the third week I do ‘Tum Pukar Lo‘. In between I do one off things, an ad film or any one day shoot.

What is it that you like? Ads or acting?

I prefer acting. Ads. They are always fun. They make you look good. Money is good. It’s a short 30 seconds thing. It takes 20 to 25 takes of the same line because they want it in a certain way. I enjoy doing ads but I enjoy acting better because it is more interesting.

How do you select a script. What do you go for?

A powerful story, a well written character and the people who are making it should be good people. That is more important to me because I would be working with them for at least a year.

How long does it take you to learn a script?

Well in TV you should be grateful if the script is there when you reach work in the morning. Sometimes, you will have just finished one scene when the script for another scene arrives. You cannot afford to be a prima donna. It is very silly when people say they take hours and hours to learn the script. Maybe for the first schedule you have to think about certain mannerisms. After a while, you fall into the character easily. TV is unfortunately really constrained by tight budgets. One has to live within these parameters and make sure everybody goes home with enough money to be happy. So everything has to be quick.

How do you expand your repertoire?

I try and work on subtle variations, understand what the situation is like, and then accordingly try to act it out as close to real as possible.

How do you expand the spectrum of your acting abilities.

I try to understand the character, their mannerisms. The protagonist in ‘Heena’ is subtle, subdued, while that in ‘Tum Pukar Lo‘ is perky. She is a lively, bubbly sort.

How often do you feel you could have done this shot in a better way?

Very often.

Do you work on your voice?

As in voice training? No I don’t.

Which actor, actress do you like? What about them do you like?

I like a few from old movies. Robert De Neiro, Dustin Hoffman and the list goes on. I like different things about different people.

How are you as a person?

I am very polite. Very reserved. It is so embarrassing to describe yourself. You should ask this to my sister, my husband.

What do you like doing most?

Travelling. When I was younger I used to go trekking, canoeing and things like that. I would like to do it again but have not been able to. I was supposed to go to the mountains in the North before I came to Mumbai, but then this job happened and every since it been continuously postponed.

Which is your favourite place?

Every new place that I go to is my favourite for a while. My latest new favourites are New York and Goa.

What is it about them that you like?

About Goa, it’s great energy, beaches. You feel free and a sense of relief. Besides, I love Goan food, walks on the beach, swimming in the sea. About New York, I like Manhattan. It has a buzz….

You love reading, what is that you like to read?

I read everything, fiction, non-fiction… about people, how they live… the age that they lived in. Books are for me a great escape. It’s a way of being in another place at another time.

What matters to you the most? What makes you happy?

Being able to be by myself, not surrounded by people all the time. Being with family, my husband, pottering about in the kitchen. Pottering about in the house late at night, being at the computer…

Executive Dossier

Game on, fame on as Good Game hunts India’s first global gaming star

New reality show puts Rs 1 crore prize and global spotlight on India’s gaming talent.

Published

5 months ago

January 27, 2026

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Game faces on, pressure high India’s gaming ambitions are levelling up. Good Game, billed as the world’s first as-live global gaming reality show, has officially launched in India with a bold mission: to crown the country’s first Global Gaming Superstar.

Blending esports with mainstream entertainment, the show brings together competitive gaming, creativity and on-camera performance in a format that tests more than just joystick skills. Contestants will be judged on gameplay, screen presence and their ability to perform under pressure, reflecting how gaming has evolved from pastime to profession and pop culture currency.

Fronting the show are three high-profile ambassadors: actor and entrepreneur Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Indian cricket star Rishabh Pant, and gaming creator Ujjwal Chaurasia. The winner will take home Rs 1 crore ($100,000) among the largest prize pools for any Indian reality show along with the chance to represent India on a global stage.

Backed by a planned annual investment of up to Rs 100 crore, Good Game is also courting brand partners, promising a minimum reach of 500 million among India’s core youth audience. The creators position the show as a bridge between entertainment and interactive culture, offering long-format content, community engagement and commercial scale.

Auditions are now open to Indian citizens aged 18 and above, inviting amateur and professional gamers, creators and performers alike. Shortlisted candidates will be called for in-person auditions in Mumbai on 14 and 15 February, and in Delhi on 28 February and 1 March 2026.

With big money, big names and even bigger ambition, Good Game signals a shift in how India views gaming not just as play, but as performance, profession and prime-time spectacle.

Digital

SpotDraft hires new CMO and CFO to fuel global push for its AI contract platform

Alon Waks and Amit Sharma join as SpotDraft accelerates growth across key markets

Published

6 months ago

December 3, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

INDIA: SpotDraft has strengthened its senior ranks as it gears up for faster global expansion, naming Alon Waks as chief marketing officer and Amit Sharma as chief financial officer. The appointments follow the firm’s $54 million Series B round earlier this year and mark a push to scale across the Americas, EMEA and India.

The AI-powered contract-lifecycle-management platform has posted 100 per cent year-on-year growth in customer acquisition, counting Apollo.io, IPSY, Mixpanel, Oyster and Panasonic among its global clients. The firm processes more than one million contracts annually, with volumes up 173 per cent and nearly 50,000 monthly active users.

Waks, a veteran of Kustomer, Bizzabo, CreatorIQ, LivePerson and ZoomInfo, will steer global marketing and category positioning as legal teams adopt AI-driven tools. Sharma, who has led finance across scaling tech firms since 2016, will guide financial strategy, investor relations and market expansion.

Both hires aim to sharpen SpotDraft’s bid for a larger slice of the fast-growing legal-tech market, expected to exceed $63 billion by 2032. Co-founder and chief executive Shashank Bijapur said the company is focused on scaling go-to-market operations in the Americas, deepening leadership in EMEA, and accelerating AI capabilities for general counsels and legal-operations leaders.

Clients report shorter deal cycles and better alignment between legal and business teams. “What used to take weeks now happens in days,” said Abnormal Security senior legal operations manager Susan Koenig. DeepL head of legal operations André Barrow, said SpotDraft has helped reframe legal “from a cost centre to a generator of revenue”.

Executive Dossier

Outdoor Ads Get Smarter as LOC8 Shifts OOH from Visibility to Attention

AI, dwell time and real-world vision are rewriting the rules of what outdoor ads can do.

Published

7 months ago

November 28, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Out-of-home ads were once the wallflowers of marketing seen by everyone, noticed by few. But in an age where attention has become the world’s most fought-over currency, even billboards are getting a brain upgrade. Enter LOC8, OSMO’s AI-powered attention engine, quietly reshaping the old OOH playbook by measuring not just who could have looked at an ad, but who actually did. The shift is subtle but seismic: impressions are out, impact is in and data, not gut instinct, is calling the shots.

In a landscape where marketers question every rupee spent outdoors, LOC8 is turning lampposts, flyovers and traffic islands into precision-mapped attention laboratories. By crunching dwell time, visibility zones, perceptual size and real-world obstructions, the platform is dragging OOH into a future where creativity meets computer vision and where the best ideas aren’t just eye-catching, but eye-measured. From automotive facelifts to FMCG novelty and real estate trust-building, the message is clear, outdoor has stopped shouting and started listening. Indian Television Dot Com explores more about it in an Interview interview with OSMO co-founder Nipun Arora.

On how OSMO is shifting outdoor advertising from a visibility-led medium to an attention-led one through LOC8.

Traditional OOH has long been measured by visibility and impressions i.e how many people could see an ad. OSMO, through its proprietary AI platform LOC8, is shifting that narrative more towards likelihood of being noticed. Using computer vision and machine learning, LOC8 analyzes real-world video data to measure visibility zones, obstructions, dwell time and perceptual size; bringing precision to how attention is quantified outdoors. It moves the focus from mere impressions to quality of impressions, making OOH a data-verified, attention-led medium comparable to digital in accountability.

On how marketers can use LOC8’s dwell-time, visibility and perception insights to craft more effective, emotionally resonant OOH campaigns.

LOC8 helps brands understand how people truly experience outdoor media how long they look, from what distance, and under what conditions. By quantifying dwell time, visibility duration, and perceptual size; marketers can plan campaigns that align with real human viewing behavior. This empowers creative and strategy teams to design emotionally resonant storytelling where messaging, visual hierarchy and placement are optimized for how people actually notice and process OOH creatives.

About what LOC8 has revealed through campaigns like Renault Triber and Namaste India on how categories such as auto, FMCG and real estate use attention metrics to drive outcomes.

Each category uses attention data differently but all share one common goal: to convert outdoor visibility into measurable engagement.

• Automotive | Renault Triber

For the new Renault Triber facelift, bold creative met data-led planning through LOC8. By analyzing on-ground video data, LOC8 measured real audience attention across placements factoring in visibility zones, obstructions, traffic speed and perceptual size. This enabled Renault to identify corridors that delivered maximum reach, saliency and engagement, optimizing media efficiency and ROI.

• FMCG | Namaste India

In OOH, innovation is the hook and assets are the bait. But bait often hides the hook. With Loc8’s attention metrics, we ensured the bait wasn’t a hurdle, rather it became the perfect stage for innovation to deliver its full impact! The insight proved that creative novelty, when validated by attention data, drives deeper engagement and measurable brand lift.

• Real Estate

For luxury and real estate campaigns targeting HNI/UHNI audiences, attention patterns differ especially between front and rear passengers, who are often the core audience segment for premium sites. LOC8’s ability to distinguish rear vs. front visibility plays a critical role here. It helps identify sites that offer longer viewing windows and stronger perceptual dominance from the rear seat where decision-makers are most likely seated making it a key differentiator for premium and trust-led categories. Together, these insights prove that auto optimizes for impact, FMCG for recall, and real estate for trust visibility showing how attention metrics adapt to category goals while ensuring measurable outcomes.

On how attention analytics will shape the future of brand storytelling and media planning as OOH becomes more digitised and data-driven.

As outdoor digitizes, attention analytics will inform not just where to advertise but how stories are told in public spaces. This evolution transforms OOH from a static broadcast channel into a dynamic attention ecosystem, where creativity is optimized through evidence-based insight.

On how LOC8’s data-led framework helps marketers quantify OOH impact and make outdoor a more accountable, ROI-driven medium.

LOC8 bridges the gap between intuition and evidence. By quantifying metrics like visibility duration, attention opportunity index, and visual saliency rank, it allows brands to benchmark site performance and justify investment. This data-led approach brings transparency, comparability and ROI measurement to a medium historically driven by perception.

On how OSMO ensures AI and computer vision enhance creativity rather than reduce it to numbers.

OSMO believes that technology should enhance creativity, not overshadow it. LOC8’s attention models reveal what naturally draws the human eye helping creative teams refine design cues, contrast, and visual hierarchy for greater impact. By merging art and science, LOC8 empowers creativity with intelligence.

About the creative best practices and design cues LOC8 has uncovered regarding what truly captures consumer attention outdoors.

LOC8’s visual cognition analysis has surfaced clear patterns across campaigns:

• High contrast and minimal messaging outperform cluttered designs.

• Motion cues draw significantly longer dwell times.

• The first two seconds are critical, creatives must establish focus instantly.

• Contextual alignment between the creative and its environment increases attention by over 30%.

These learnings offer a scientific foundation for creative effectiveness helping brands design OOH that’s visually magnetic and emotionally memorable.

On how attention metrics will integrate into omnichannel planning where OOH, digital and social work together for unified brand impact.

Attention can become the unifying KPI across OOH, digital and social to creates seamless storytelling continuity, where outdoor triggers digital engagement. The future of omnichannel planning lies in attention-led integration ensuring that campaigns don’t just reach audiences everywhere but truly capture and hold their focus.