Rahsaan Noor in a still from the film

His plan B is The Great Shift. Noor tells us that even he was in denial till the beginning of March because, like everyone else, he hadn't experienced anything like this before and thus didn't know what to expect. "I am a huge basketball fan and [the pandemic] didn't hit me till the NBA decided to postpone its entire season. Sitting in India, I thought at first that the lockdown would last a month. But that turned into two, and it now looks like we might even lose the rest of the year," he says, adding that this eventuality led him to start conversations with Aditya Goel, one of the executive producers of the shelved film, about how the world as we know it is going to change. Noor tells us, "We were brainstorming about how we could alter the [Hindi] movie's script when it hit him that we need to start a dialogue around the change that's imminent, so that we can create new processes to deal with it. There's a great shift coming, he said, and that's how we also hit upon the title of the documentary series."

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The pilot has already been launched, and it takes a 360-degree look at how different entrepreneurs are grappling with loss of work. The episode illustrates the example of how Japan moved from entrenched oligarchy to supporting MSMEs immediately after WWII, to become an economic superpower in the modern day. And Noor, who plays the role of the narrator, also asks the viewer, "Can this [pandemic] be viewed as an opportunity? Is this a chance to restructure systems for sustainability? And is the idea of social entrepreneurship and innovation the new way forward?"

These answers will, of course, become clearer with time but meanwhile, the filmmaker hopes that the series acts like a table that has people seated around it, and from which ideas are sparked to give entrepreneurs the confidence to break their existing fears and take action. He says that creating the series has been akin to sitting in a college cafeteria where you are bombarded with ideas that creative people have been churning in their head. They are racking their brains for logistical solutions, laying out plans to tackle a post-lockdown reality, though the question remains: will these also go astray? Well, let's hope not, for everyone's sake.

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