Marching to her own beat

Elizabeth Koshy is all in blue, standing on the red carpet of the VIP section. Her team has just won the 2018 Lumiere Award for Best Live Action Virtual Reality Film – Rose Colored. Spelled without the ‘u’ in coloured, for it’s an international film, made by an American company – Invar Studios. Elizabeth is one of the founders and happens to be a Malayali who grew up all over India because of an army dad. The move to Silicon Valley happened in 2001 and Elizabeth remained an entrepreneur, trying many different things, before and after.

“I just always wanted to be an entrepreneur. After my MBA, I worked for a while in Nivea and then I started my own business in Bollywood, in entertainment marketing,” Elizabeth says, on a phone call from the US. Those were really eventful years. She organised the Supermodel of World contest that discovered Bipasha Basu. She produced the first 20 stage shows of Shah Rukh Khan and Hrithik Roshan’s first live show. She also managed the career of Rani Mukherjee. “There are a lot of celebrity management companies now but when I started, it was not so,” Elizabeth remembers the 90s fondly.

Like every Malayali woman, she too faced pressures of a marriage in her early 20s. And she was pleased with her mother’s response to the relatives - “What’s the big deal about kalyanam? I want my daughter to stand on her own feet and be something.” Elizabeth can’t say enough about how she blessed she is to have such parents, who never believed in gender or racial bias. “They never made me feel conscious of the fact that I am a girl and I can’t do this or that. Told me to push the envelope, break those shackles and stand out as a leader.”

 She is also extremely proud of her famous grandfather – the late artist Chitramezhuthu K.M. Varghese. “He was one of the founding editors of Malayala Manorama, studied (art) under Raja Ravi Varma. Mahatma Gandhi saw one of his paintings and asked who the artist was. I tell my daughters that through him we have a connection with Mahatma Gandhi,” Elizabeth laughs.  She and her husband Ajay have always given their two daughters the same kind of upbringing Elizabeth received. When they moved to the US, they got their girls – Rebecca and Malaika – trained in sports. 

“The best gift we could give them is the gift of health. And sports will teach you to win, to lose, discipline, and time management.” Both the girls are recruited water polo players. The younger one – Malaika – was selected to the Stanford University’s women’s water polo team. Rebecca was also captain of her water polo team and the first non-white to be one, in her school. “The message I’d like to pass on here is that it is important for women and mothers to be examples for the next generation,” Elizabeth says. When Elizabeth won her award, Rebecca posted on Facebook: “Everyone told her it was a bad idea to start another company at 50 and here she is smiling ear to ear holding that award because she marches to the beat of her own drum.”

Elizabeth has been doing exactly that all through her life – marching into new territories she had absolutely no idea about, for she loved the challenge. “I don’t understand it but then I learn. I hate being in a comfort zone. The fear (of a new technology) pushes me to learn. I read a lot. Even now I am reading on cryptocurrency and blockchain. I surround myself with smart people and people smarter than me.” 

So she when she moved to the US, Elizabeth set up India’s largest CGI animation company called JadooWorks. “I pioneered this creative outsourcing industry between Hollywood and India,” she says. After that there were three years when she worked as head of media entertainment at IGATE. Elizabeth quit three years later to make sure her daughters were doing well. 
The day Malaika got into Stanford, she knew she did her motherly duties and it was time to start another company. Invar came along with two co-founders - Vincent Edwards and Austin Conroy. It was all men working for them.

“I never felt any different because I am a woman, spoke a different accent, a brown person from India.” She tied up with Indian-born British writer Farrukh Dhondy, who is her story doctor. He is writing a film for her. She has also partnered with director-cinematographer Santosh Sivan for a film shot in India – untitled as of now. Elizabeth’s newest project is Hidden Tears, where eminent female actors from Hollywood would share their experience to spread awareness on sexual harassment, in light of the MeToo movement.

Throughout the interview, Elizabeth keeps mentioning a few names, who have been a huge inspiration for her – Dr Kiran Bedi, who has been a friend for 30 years and ghazal queen Padma Shri Penaz Masani. “I met her (Penaz) when I was 18 and she was already very famous. She is the one who told me to always earn my own money and stand on my feet.” Elizabeth appears to have done a lot more than that, after starting her first company with Rs 500 and now, ending up the first Indian woman to win the prestigious Lumiere Award for a VR film.