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Meet Lady Chatterjee

Now, a 3D animated `item girl' to promote Saregama's latest album

India has an answer to the Annoying Thing better known the world over as Crazy Frog, the super celebrity 3-D animated character that inspired ring tones, video tones, music videos and even a TV series. Only that India's answer is a woman. An item girl. Lady Chatterjee, developed by Saregama and C. B. Arun Kumar, is India's first animated item girl and video tone. The animated Bengali girl, sporting a bindi and a Barbie-figure-hugging low-hip jeans and tube top, the promoters claim is the sexiest and cutest item girl anyone has ever seen.

"Basically, Lady Chatterjee was created to promote an album. It's a concept album about chatting on the mobile. So the thought stems from there... relationships developed from the Internet and the mobile. It is an album of eight songs," says Atul Chudamani, vice president, Saregama.

"Normally, you do a video. So, we said, `Let's see if we can.' We had a song called Lady Chatterjee, a simple two-line Bengali song about a girl who chats online all night. We put our heads together. There was no 3-D animated character. These days, everybody is talking about item girls. So we decided Lady Chatterjee would be an item girl who doesn't want to be different," says Atul

"The idea is to have a little fun. We create a character who becomes popular and you never know what the spin-offs could be. A TV channel could want to do a TV series, games. She might do more music, she might appear in a movie. You have a property to work with," he adds. The album will be among the first from the country to be marketed through the Internet and the mobile phone.

Free downloads

Yahoo is offering free downloads for a month. Ring tones and video tones are available as paid downloads. The music will be available online for paid downloads on www.soundbuzz.com from May 15. The album, created by composer-singer-arranger Sawan Dutta, features RJ Shabbi. C. B. Arun Kumar, the creator of Lady Chatterjee, acknowledges that the basic idea was derived from the title song. "She's a sexy, young, cute, fully animated and better than any item girl you can find. It's a take off on the perfect kind of item girl who is as light as a ballerina and as bubby as Bollywood."

Arun produced the first Indian 3-D animation Series "Jungle Tales" (appeared on Cartoon Network), for MPC Animation, which won the Apsara Award for Best Animation Serial in 2005. He's confident that this could India's answer to Crazy Frog.

Watch out for the videos.

SUDHISH KAMATH

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