Never did get back to this. Background to zulm is quite boring really but what I remember this was never meant to be an information/forums site that it became eventually.
I think I can trace so called origins of zulm around 1998/1999 when the “internet boom†was happening and I wanted, like many others, to open an online shop to sell Indian DVDs. But for some reason I only wanted to sell quality Indian DVDs only i.e. the ones that I would consider actually represented quality video and sound – probably because those are the one I wanted to own. And as I type this I just realised that was over 10 years ago now
Call it naivety, inexperience and/or plain stupidity but that was going to the mission statement for a new company to only sell good quality DVDs only – and at the time meant a handful of Dei and Super Digital titles. I actually knew very little about DVDs then apart from I had brought a few dozen and was blown away by the quality of the picture and sound. The few very early DVDs I remember owning was Blade (1998) by Newline and Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (Dei/Eros). Previously I’ve only ever seen Indian films on VHS – and watching MKS on DVDs was a revelation. Buying these discs became a bit of addiction and to think what kind of money was spent buying these discs brings more embarrassment than anything else now but that’s another story
This company was actually setup and wasn’t just vapourware but it never traded or opened for business as I pulled the plug on the whole idea of selling Indian DVDs for various reasons. It was called Ibazaar – company was registered, so was a domain, got banking merchant services approved (so credit cards could be accepted online) and did a whole lot of research and design. I’ve managed to keep most of the stuff I did at the time and I’ve managed to find it on my backups discs and upload some of it;
Some logo designs;
Settled on this final logo;
Sample website and how it would have looked;
http://www.zulm.net/images6/zulm_his/index_copy%281%29.htmhttp://www.zulm.net/images6/zulm_his/index2.htmWhat I wanted to do was provide as much information as possible on each DVD and include some sample screen shots for the DVD. It’s a very time consuming process as the info on the DVD covers cannot be relied on so it had to be a one by one manual task. As you can see I did one before I gave up
As time went on in making this company go live, I learnt loads about technical details of DVDs; video/audio formats, NTSC/PAL issues, aspect ratios, compression etc. and began to realise that most of these Indian DVDs compared to their Hollywood counterparts were poor. After reality hit; inexperience, lack of resources, lack of belief that it’ll work and most importantly lack of quality Indian DVD titles coming out I decided to cut the losses and not start this company at all. I didn’t think selling Indian DVDs especially the way I was setting up to do was going to last, not in the long term anyway. But I was still buying loads.
I found around at that time there was a massive following of DVD review sites and forums; DVDtalk, dvdtimes, dvdreview but very little information about Indian DVDs. Only sites that was around for Indian reviews was from Sunny Audit and one on geocities (now part of yahoo I think, but I've forgotten the names of these sites). Sunny’s site was the one with all the hot info and reviews – I followed that site fanatically and learnt most of the Indian DVD info from there – that was the source for Indian DVD information – anything that was said to be good on the site I think I would buy automatically. And that became the problem for me and why I started on a review site myself. It goes back to this one DVD of Agneepath by WEG that Sunny reviewed and gave it 5 out 5. One of my favourites films and gets a 5/5 star DVD review. I buy it; watch it and I have never been as disappointed in a DVD before as I was with this Agneepath DVD. More and more poor quality DVDs were coming out by then, especially from likes of Video Sound, they were just so poorly done. I started thinking maybe another review site is in order that can provide more accurate information than what’s already available. I was buying tons anyway, so decide to give a review site a try. I didn’t want a movies review site, more a technical reviews of DVD, listing their shortfalls. This goes back to ibazaar – each DVD listed on ibazaar would have a technical review. I had load of scanned covers and screen shots already so put a site together. I went through a few different names for the sites and even did a logo for site called “indianfilm†– look familiar?
This was the actual backdrop used for final zulm.net logo;
... unfortunately I’ve lost the other elements that made the zulm.net logo (I know the film roll thingy graphic was pinched from Ulead’s GIF animator at the time and image was composed using Microsoft PhotoDraw which no longer exits either!). So the only size logo I’ve got is the one on the site.
I personally didn’t like any obvious names for a review site; especially ones that contained the word Review, Film or DVD. So as mentioned before I did actually in reality sit going through an online urdu dictionary back to front until I saw the word zulm – i liked it instantly as it kind of summarises all what’s happened to bring me to a point where I’m starting a DVD review site. Meaning of zulm from wikepedia
“Zulm is the Arabic word used interchangablely for cruelty or unjust acts of exploitation, oppression, and wrong doing, whereby a person either deprives others of their rights or does not fulfill his obligations towards them†– which is pretty apt (although highly dramatic) what Indian dvds were doing to us. I registered .net domain as .com was already taken. I think it was Dec 1 2000 when zulm was put live – it was meant to be information site only, no sponsors, no business links or anything like that. Again going back to ibazaar I realised that a pretty obvious contradiction would naturally occur while doing reviews on the same site you are selling DVDs – why would someone buy a DVD that you’ve just rated badly? Or cynics that we mostly are would you trust a site selling DVDs and saying it’s the best DVD ever? When you’re selling products you don’t want to be berating them at the same time and still expect people to buy them. I personally hate banners and advertisements around websites anyway so one thing I’ve kept from the start are no ad/banner approach on here.
They used to be quite active chat groups on usenet at the time where faddy spread the word about zulm. If zulm survived in those early days it was because of a handful of people; there was faddy, arsh/zoran2009, bhaskar, vjmajic2002 and urbanlegend – members still about I think
And two other people who without them this site would have maybe not survived or even existed in the first place. Thats SunnyAudit and mhafner. I think you find a whole level of respect when you try and do reviews yourself and see how time consuming and draining they really are. And that’s why the old style of site stopped as I don’t have the time nor the effort to put into doing reviews. Actually these days I don’t have time to do anything much.
It was never my attention to keep the site going and always hoped 1- Indian quality would improve – and in recent times they have got to stage where they don’t look total pirate copies or VHS transfers and 2- that someone else would provide Indian dvd info in the same way as zulm did – and that has in way has happened too – all these torrents sites provide better info than anyone else out here and best of all they fight each to “release†new dvds the fastest. I think it’s brilliant.
Hmmmm that's enough for now
Ali
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in one of my posts (never got to correct myself or apologize) but later on I found out that what I compared it with, itself was a pirate DVD (from a shop that didn't sell pirates). YRF KKHH and DTPH initial releases were Progressive (anamorphic didn't exist among Indian DVDs at that time) but their interlaced versions (most likely pirate) too were floating around in the market. Later on I did come across the Prog DTPH (initial release-non anam) and it was at par with KKHH and other DEI-EROS Prog DVDs.