What led Chandigarh-based author Khushwant Singh to turn his book ‘Maharaja in Denims’ into ‘India’s first AI feature film’

When author and former state information commissioner of Punjab, Knushwant Singh, wrote Maharaja in Denims, it immediately caught Bollywood's attention.And why not? Maharaja in Denims has all the makings of a larger-than-life feature film — a work of fiction that follows the journey of a young boy who believes he is the reincarnation of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, founder of the Sikh Empire.

- GNS News Agency, May 22

Through regression therapy, he finds himself trans-ported into key moments in history, including the Partition of 1947, the anti-Sikh riots of 1984, and eventually the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks.But when no deal materialised and the book was no longer tied up in any rights agree-ments, Singh’s cousin — tech guru Gurdeep Singh Pall — offered an alternative.Pall, known for his long tenure at Microsoft, most recently as corporate vice-president over-seeing business Al projects, suggested they stop pitching the book and instead spend two years turning it into India’s first full-length Al-generated feature film.“It's a period drama. The biggest hurdle was the budget — it would have required hundreds of crores. And post-pandemic, it has become in-creasingly difficult to draw enough people to theatres to jus-tify such an expense,” Singh, who