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The Black Hole Of Calcutta
Blood Orange
The Chola Chronicles
The Fires of Passion
The Calcutta Chromosome
Selva K Tamilmarai Siddarthan
Founder and CEO
Selva is a producer and entrepreneur working in film, TV and music, and the founder of Simaha Media, a book-to-screen development company. He is a former project manager in the automotive sector in corporate India. Born and raised in Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu, he grew up reading a lot of stories in school. Selva earned his engineering degree from PSG Tech, Coimbatore before moving to Mumbai and then to Chennai for work. He managed projects across manufacturing, supply chain and product management at Ashok Leyland for six years.
But Selva’s real passion was storytelling, more so than engineering, that perhaps stems from reading great Tamil and English literature growing up. In Chennai, as he managed volunteers and projects for the non-profit AID India to promote equality of education, he found an inner calling to make films that inspire and change the world - one step and one story at a time. Just before moving to the US, Selva worked as an EP at Kavithalayaa Productions on a corporate film for IIM-A in Chennai, Mumbai and Ahmedabad.
He enrolled at UCLAx to pursue Entertainment Studies and graduated the program with distinction. Simultaneously, he interned at Hyde Park Entertainment, Myriad Pictures and Mulberry films and also worked on campaigns to promote India's official entries to the Oscars in 2016 and 2017 - VISAARANAI and NEWTON. He produced three short films at UCLAx. After graduation, he joined Mulberry films as a Creative Consultant, before founding Simaha Media.
Selva is an avid reader, a terrible cook and enjoys listening to A.R.Rahman, Beyoncé and The Weeknd. He aims to watch at least ten movies or two seasons of TV every week across languages and genres. LA/Mumbai based talent agency, Tulsea reps several of his projects. Selva lives between LA and Atlanta.
The Black Hole Of Calcutta
In the year 1756, the Seven Years War between France and England was in the early stages. It was the first global conflict, being waged on multiple continents. The East India Company, in the backwaters of Calcutta India, sought to increase the fortification around Fort Holwell. Siraj Ud Dualla, a regional Mogul warlord, used this provocation to invade. The company defenders, consisting primarily of non military traders fought a brave defense. But after days of heavy combat, they lost the battle. What happened after their fall would change the course of history, setting the stage for England’s complete conquest of India. A first person account by provisional commander John Zephania Holwell tells a gruesome tale of survival.
He and nearly 150 others were thrown into a tiny stone dungeon on a sweltering summer night. By morning, all but 23 had died from being crushed, heat stroke, dehydration, or asphyxiation.To add insult to injury, the Indian guardsmen taunted the thirsty prisoners with water, leading to a deady water riot within the confined walls. Although the number of prisoners has been disputed by some historians, there is no denying the long term impact of Holwell’s account. Going viral in its time, the incident of The Black Hole of Calcutta became well known in London by the following year. The story was used to propagate an unfair and racist view against Indian people. And unfortunately, it worked. Public sentiment turned against the savages. An enraged Parliament sent troops to retake the colony later that year. The British East India Company was now a state sponsored business venture. The age of the British Empire had begun.
Blood Orange
Nineteenth Century, an isolated family is tending to their daily duties of running an orange grove. Mason, a seventeen year old sheltered teenager and his younger brother Miles serendipitously dig up a foreign object from under the muck, a gas pipe. In the midst of this discovery they are called away by their tyrant of a Father to finish their work for the day. But later that night, the pipe explodes causing a massive fire on the outskirts of the grove. Mason, not knowing anything but the four corners of his farm, takes a close look through the flames and sees a group of goons dressed in attire clearly not from his time period... This catastrophe causes both confusion and curiosity leaving Mason with no choice but to question the lie he’s been living and seek what else is truly out there.
The next day someone from the fire, a girl, Max, comes back to the farm for her own reasons. Max and Mason find themselves sharing a unique connection. He befriends Max who introduces him to the Gang at a battered down one story studio in the middle of the woods. They take Mason on a slew of crucial experiences in the modern day world; getting involved in the streets, selling drugs, messing with guns, running from cops, robbing houses, etc. He finally feels like he’s a part of something real. In the process he discovers what money is capable of and what it could possibly do for him and his brother. He could permanently take him far away from not only the farm, but his Father. Nevertheless things get complicated at home as he starts sneaking off the Grove during nights trying to make this dream a reality.
These moments influence, change, and transform him in the most beautiful yet wicked of ways, in which Mason learns how savage the world can be. All of these events build to a bloodcurdling climax of no return and play a key role in his understanding as to why his Father kept the world hidden from them in the first place...
The Chola Chronicles
The Chola Chronicles is a 2D animated TV series under development in four languages (Tamil, English, Hindi & Telugu) based on the epic novel Parthiban Kanavu by the renowned author Kalki Krishnamoorthy. The Chola ruler King Parthiban has a dream . . .he wants to make his empire the most powerful in the region. However, before he can do this, he is killed in battle. His son, Prince Vikraman, is a child at the time, but he carries his father’s dream in his heart. He grows up in the shadow of the burgeoning power of the mighty Pallava ruler Chakravarti Narasimha Varman. How will
Vikraman fulfil his father’s vision? The Chola Chronicles deals with the attempts of the prince Vikraman to attain independence from the Pallava dynasty ruler, Narasimhavarman
The Fires of Passion
Pre Independence India. A Scottish planter, his bored English wife, an Anglo Indian girl, nefarious Indian revolutionaries and a man-eating tigress for whom nothing matters more than the hunger in her belly. Set in the Nilgiri mountains, this evocative book captures elements of the author’s ancestry, his fascination for the Indian jungles, and its denizens, both human and animal, and perhaps even echoes his personal life.
This is perhaps the most personal of Kenneth Anderson’s books, although his claim to fame were the non fiction works on hunting man-eating tigers and rogue elephants.
“What a wonderful story. We picked it up expecting to find a typical jungle adventure of a courageous hunter pitted against the unforgiving wilderness. That, indeed, is the setting of the story but it is only the background.Against this is a tightly woven and intricate tale of love,lust, political skulduggery, racial
conflict,murder and …inevitably… a voracious man-eating tigress. Anderson weaves all these disparate elements together with seemingly effortless skill creating some vividly unforgettable characters. The Anglo-Indian Ranger's daughter, the vibrant June Gardner, leaps out of its pages and deserves to have a life beyond her full-blooded and strong-willed appearance in The Fires of Passion. The descriptions of the jungle and its denizens are vintage Anderson. More unusual are his pulsating passages that justify the unusual blouse-ripping title of this gripping book!"
– Hugh & Colleen Gantzer
The Calcutta Chromosome
The Calcutta Chromosome is a medical and mystery thriller TV Series based on the novel of the same name, set in 1990s Calcutta and New York City at some unspecified time in the future, that dramatizes the adventures of apparently false people who are brought together by a mysterious turn of events. The book is loosely based on the life and times of Sir Ronald Ross, the Nobel Prize–winning scientist who achieved a breakthrough in malaria research in 1898. The novel was the recipient of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best Sci-fi in 1997.
The book employs a factual background for the invented events in the novel, drawing upon Ross' Memoirs which were published in 1923.
From Victorian lndia to near-future New York, The Calcutta Chromosome takes us on a wondrous journey through time as a computer programmer trapped in a mind-numbing job hits upon a curious item that will forever change his life. When Antar discovers the battered I.D. card of a long-lost acquaintance, he is suddenly drawn into a spellbinding adventure across centuries and around the globe, into the strange life of L. Murugan, a man obsessed with the medical history of malaria, and into a magnificently complex world where conspiracy hangs in the air like mosquitoes on a summer night.
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Selva K
Selva K
Selva K