Featured Links

Photo Gallery of Anagha Fowler


She was visible everywhere — on the ramps, magazine covers and advertisements. Now one can catch her on the net also. Banker-turned-model Anagha Fowler has launched her personal website www.anagha.com. This news may give some respite to her fans, as the almond-eyed model plans to shift her base from India to Australia in the coming months. So even if she says good-bye to Delhi, there is a link available.

In a world where casting couches and leery advertising executives are the norm, model Anagha Fowler, 26, has trod a different route to success. Perhaps the first Indian model to use technology to her advantage - certainly the first to use it so spectacularly ­ Anagha has, within the space of a year, turned from a little-known Delhi wannabe to a much-in-demand international model.

A unique success story sans compare, almost, Anagha woke up one morning, like it happens in books, and decided she needed to do something to kickstart her career. And while she was doing it, she thought, why restrict herself to India? At a time when anything Indian was sweeping the globe, or like she says, India is the spice of the new millennium, the world was her oyster, quite literally.

Born into a traditional Hindu Brahmin family, Anagha always wanted to be a model, but actually ended up taking to banking after her graduation in Economics (Honours!) from St. Stephen's College, where she found another passion ­ basketball! She actually only set foot on the modelling road, however, when a local photographer insisted on taking pictures to show a few people ­ but it wasn't happening fast enough. Along with photographer husband David Fowler, then, Anagha, whose name means pure or without sin in Sanskrit, set up her own web site, www.anagha.com.

"There are no real risks involved in promoting yourself through the Web. And there's a whole world out there; you can decide how you want to appear to them. You have complete control of the images and content that appear on your site," she says. The initial investment cost, she adds, with high graphic content, was a one-off bill of Rs 1,50,000, with hosting charges logging in at approximately Rs 25,000 per annum. Indeed, her networking of the search engines was so good, that for months, whenever you typed in the keywords of Indian and fashion, anagha.com would almost always be on top of the search results.

That wasn't all. Since she was working with the web, it was easy to incorporate as modus operandi the connectivity afforded by the medium. "Marketing your web site requires a little more initiative and investment," she continues. "I produced a post card of my home page and sent it to modeling agencies and senior executives within advertising agencies around the world. The investment here was close to Rs 40,000. And the returns were excellent; I immediately started getting, first, feelers and then offers and contracts from around the world," she gushes. One decent assignment, she points out, covers most of your costs ­ and assignments abroad are extremely lucrative.

Today, she's more successful than the big names you read about, and with a three-year contract with a New York based agency, has made it faster internationally than the ones who go and spend six months in London and come back saying they missed their parathas. Among her assignments since, are location shoots all over the world ­ Prague is her favourite place, followed by Australia.

And naturally, like anything else that is accepted internationally, the Indians have clasped her to their heart. Among her local campaigns are commercials like Ravissant, The Canterbury Tales, DeBeers, Ogaan, Suneet Varma and others, with photographers like Prabuddha Das Gupta, Atul Kasbekar, Tarun Khiwal and Bharat Sikka.

But what about the dangers of the web? What about crank emails, hacking and so on? "So far, I haven't faced any of those ­ except for four nasty emails out of approximately 25000," says the 5-foot-9½ inch tall model.