My most favorite "baby" photo: Me in the mud (1968) The offical Volker Schürmann homepage ... no, not my idea, certainly not! Name any actress, give me some facts and I'll set up a nice homepage for her, no problem! But doing such a page with myself as the subject really feels strange. Anyway, people, you've twisted my arm long enough. So here it is! And thinking it through, I came to the conclusion that playing some kind of Q & A would make sense. There were numerous people asking for something like that. So I decided to take all their questions, filter them a bit and then come up with answers to selected issues ... selected issues?? Yes indeed, I left out those areas, where answering would be too embarrassing for me. You know what I mean, right? Marks at school and other boring things, obviously! Alright, now for the questions: Q: Where are you from? Q: Are you married? Q: How come you'd gotten involved with Bollywood? Q: Do you speak Hindi or any other Indian language? Q: Who are your favorite actresses and actors? Q: What is your best loved Hindi movie? Q: Where does the information for the site come from? Q: Where do you find those photographs? Q: What do you do for a living? Q: Do you answer all of your emails? So far for the questions. Should you want to know even more, then please feel free to send me an email! Also please do so, if you want to share ideas for new sites, new services or anything of that sort with me. I'm always looking for exciting projects. Question: Where are you from? Answer: My former boss, a photographer, took his photo of mine (1984) Originally? Lüdenscheid (yap, again with umlaut) in Germany, Europe. I was born there on 23rd of April 1963. These days I'm living in Wuppertal, about 30 miles North-East of Cologne, 80 miles North of Frankfurt. So now finally you know why my name does not sound Indian at all, right? I still have to figure out where my ancestors came from but it seems all of them were European. Talking of my family. My parents, Friedrich Wilhelm and Ellen, my brother Axel , his wife Yvonne (she's from the North of Germany) and their baby son Dennis are with me in Wuppertal. Also my mom's bobtail doggie (called "Teddy" - all fluffy, but still 47 kgs in weight and with rather frightening claws and teeth!) always is around. Apart from them, my grannie (my mom's mom) is the only one of my closer relatives who is left. Question: Are you married? Answer: Why do you ask? Seriously, no, I'm not married. You see, when everybody else was going to parties and started dating, I started getting interested in computer science. That was in the late 70s and computers to me appeared to be the most exciting thing on earth ... and even now, after more than 20 years of debating and fighting with those machines, I'm still fascinated. Taking a break somewhere in the Italian mountains (1988) Though, a lot has changed! In the beginning it was all about programming, trying out new tricks on the machine. There was no Internet or anything and therefore no communication with others doing the same. In the early 80s I opened up my first BBS - a Bulletin Board System, which is a local site you call with your modem to exchange emails. That was turning point number one! I discovered that my place is not that of a user but that of a service provider, maintainer and programmer. I created dozends of BBS software packages over the years. The ix/MBox package for UNIX is the most famous one of those. It "speaks" English, German, French and Spanish and was/is in use almost everywhere on this planet. After two years with that specific project I felt like finally doing away with all the computers and to start a normal life. That was in 1994, the year the World Wide Web reached Wuppertal ... you guessed it, right? That was turning point number two! Getting a life? What for? Internet access is all you need! And so IŽd put my BBS package on the Web, created my first homepage and started exchanging emails with people around the globe. Again, I was totally excited and spent every single minute I possible could with writing tools for the Internet and the Web ... Oh, sorry, what was the question again? Am I married? No, I'm not! Question: How come you'd gotten involved with Bollywood? Answer: Well, you see the charming young lady in the picture below, don't you? It's all her fault! She dragged me into it. She appeared on my TV screen, did her dance number and that was it ... Juhi in a TV ad for a very wellknown producer of hair oil (19??) Juhi Chawla is her name, Hindi film heroine her profession. She was performing to a song from the movie PARAMATMA (1994) together with Mithun Chakraborty. Those days, of course, I had no idea who she was and what she was doing there ... actually, I didn't even know what part of the world she was from. I only knew, that the broadcast came from an Asian TV station in London. Unfortunately, the programme of that station usually was scrambled and so I wasn't able to watch it at all. However, I couldn't get her and her performance out off my mind. So I wrote a few lines describing my dilema and forwarded those to a European satellite TV newsgroup on the Internet. And believe it or not, a bunch of NRIs had managed to understand my vague description. They told me about the Indian film industry, Bollywood, the music in the movies and everything. They also pointed me to a newsgroup called RMIM, rec.music.indian.misc. Which is, as the name implies, all about Indian music. Alright, I wanted to know more, so I subscribed to that newsgroup and ... understood nothing! A lot of talk about songs with lyrics given in a strange language, written down in a very, very unusual way, names of movies and stars I never had heard before. Altogether I was totally lost. But I kept listening for a while. Some names appeared, that I remembered from the emails I had received earlier. So I listened even closer and slowly but steadily I managed to find out which actors and actresses were starring in specific movies ... That was also the point, when I sent my first little article to RMIM. I asked people about that clip I had seen on TV ... of course I did not expect an answer at all. No, frankly, I expected to be kicked out - a westerner with zero knowledge disturbing the RMIM community. The opposite happend! Even people, who usually only comment on compilcated problems concerning transliteration or translation of Shers and Ragas, sent me emails offering help, pointing me to websites with photos of the actresses and asking questions like "How come you'd gotten involved with Bollywood?". I have to add, that everyone asking that question, had a line in the mail that said something to the effect of "no offense intended".    My mom with her monster doggie (1996) I was pretty surprised, to say the least! And I started asking ... about the actresses, the movies, the songs, the languages, India, everything. I'm afraid, I must have offended some of those friendly folks with the odd question! But still they kept answering even my dumbest questions and somehow managed to keep my interest in the movies up for months. Remember, there was no way of watching any Hindi movies at that time! All I knew I had learnd through emails and RMIM. Being a computer fanatic obviously I was searching for a way to store the information. That was the time, the Bollywood Movie Database was founded - a list of movie titles, cast, song titles and so forth. That went on for almost a full year. And with that database behind me I finally was able to take part in the discussions on RMIM. I knew the facts, I knew the names and I was able to produce the data that was requested by people. A good start but highly frustrating at the same time cause all those movies I wasn't able watch! But then, in April 1996, someone from the satellite TV newsgroup wrote to me, asking whether I would like to take part in an experiment. It was all about descrambling satellite transmission ... certainly I wanted to take part in that! A tiny bit of hardware, a laptop, a piece of regular descrambling unit, the software written by that guy and finally, finally I was able to watch TV ASIA ... My first ever Hindi movie was ANOKHA ANDAZ with Manisha and Harish. Mediocre movie is the friendly way of putting it but I was so excited! NAJAYAZ was my first Juhi movie - can you imagine the joy I felt while watching her for hours and hours? (By the way, I'm a ZEE TV subscriber now for the third year running, so there really is no need to send the lawyers! The descrambling software did only work with season 8 cards!) Well, I'm still watching the movies, I'm still maintaining the database and I'm still a big, big, big Juhi Chawla fan! Question: Do you speak Hindi or any other Indian language? Answer: Speaking Hindi? Woh kyaa hota hai? Nah, ok, if you insist ... but you'll come to regret it! In actual fact, I started learning it with my "Teach Yourself Hindi" book. But somehow the Hindi spoken in that book and the Hindi spoken in India seemd to be a tiny bit different. Right, not that different and having that book around helped me a big deal in the beginning. I tell you, not learning itself is a problem but finding dictionaries and grammar books is! Again the RMIMers had to help me out there and they did very successfully. Did I mention, that I was one of those ignorants, who always think that Hindi is equals to "Indian", the only language spoken on the Indian Subcontinent. These days I know about the 17 major languages, the 3000+ dialects, the various scripts and what not ... My father on the top of some mountain. One step backwards and we would have a nice shot of him in free fall (1988) I tell you, that barrage of different languages can put you off the idea of learning Hindi! But then I watched a show on TV that was rather good when certain Ritu (Mahima Choudhury) and later Tanya Singh were doing it together with Roshan Abbas. They did the show in a language mix of Hindi and English - and I love that! It was so helpful for me to get every comment in Hindi as well as in English. Those folks taught me Hindi via TV, just like the presenters at SKY NEWS, Lisa Aziz, Kay Burley and the likes, taught me English a few years earlier - thanks ladies! Ich meine, wir Deutschen sprechen normalerweise Deutsch, also haben sie's ganz gut hingekriegt, oder? Anyway, a language with a script you cannot display on a computer screen was something that revived the computer freak in me. The hardcore RMIMers use a transliteration scheme called ITRANS to write lyrics for the ISB (ITRANS Song Book). There is marvelous piece of software that re-converts ITRANS texts into Devanagri script and other scripts. Very impressive! Exactly what it takes to get me busy ... so I tried my luck on a programme that would do the conversion on the fly. No problem! It's called KYAA and is a vocabulary drill practice package that comes with a dictionary of 2000 words, each in English, German and Hindi. And cause that worked like a charme I also did JAADOO. With that you can type in ISB entries the easy way: You hack in ITRANS and on screen you see Devanagari ... well, right, I admit, because of the ugly font used by both of the programmes I was banned from visiting India. No, not really! In actual fact, someone came forward and worked on my first font and now it even looks like Devanagari. You know what the real problem is? I'm the only one on earth who does not use that vocabulary drill bit to improve on his Hindi ... Question: Who are your favorite actresses and actors? Answer: In best filmi magazine style I'll answer this one twice! First my favorites in western movies: Marylin Monroe, Greta Garbo and Myrna Loy. Then of course Cary Grant. And also Martin Sheen, believe it or not. Forget about all those "loud" action heros and brainless bombshells ... not for me, no thank you! What counts is the way they deliver dialogue. I'm a sucker for witty comments! Now for the Indian movies. Favorite Hindi film heroine? Guess! Right, Juhi. And then it's Raveena and Ramya for the looks, Madhuri and Sri for acting capabilities - watch their good films and you'll get the point! Kajol? Please don't ask, I'm totally unsure about her! Heros? Actors: Aamir, Amitji, Dilip, no doubt about that ... also Nana, but only for KHAMOSHI. And Anupam - I think he is the most talented ACTOR in India! Heros: SRK, Anil, Jaggu, Salu, even Sunil is getting better and better. My personal opinion! Nothing more, nothing less ... Question: What is your best loved Hindi movie? Answer: Tough question! Next to me there is a big red metal box containing almost 200 video cassettes (S-VHS quality) with Hindi movies. Some of them I've watched more than 20 times - no exaggeration! And I think the number of times I did watch a movie has something to do with how much I like or dislike it. So here we go: HUM HAIN RAHI PYAR KE (Juhi, Aamir) LAMHE (Sridevi, Anil) QAYAMAT SE QAYAMAT TAK (Juhi, Aamir) RAJU BAN GAYA GENTLEMAN (Juhi, SRK, Dingie) ROJA (Madhoo, Arvind) LAADLA (Sridevi, Raveena, Anil) AAINA (Juhi, Jags, Dingie) JUDAAI (Sridevi, Urmila, Anil) VIRASAT (Tabbu, Pooja Batra, Anil) MAIN KHILADI TU ANARI (Shilpa Shetty, Raageshwari, Akki, Saifu) SHOLAY (Hemaji, Jaya Badhuri, Amitji, Dharma, Sanjeev Kumar (!)) BETA (Madhuri, Anil) DARR (Juhi, the Rukhster, Sunny) This list is subject to change ... basically not a great deal of shifting is going on, only the length of the list is growing and growing. There are quite a few real good movies! Question: You are running quite a few websites. Where does the information for those come from? Answer: From people like yourself! It's true, so you'd better believe it! In the beginning I had to chase after every bit of information. These days I'm flooded with it - and that is a good thing! In case you have browsed the database you must have seen some names time and again: Dharmesh, Shenaz, Sunny, Dhanya, Neelima and many, many more. Those folks are running their own sites on the Internet, dedicated to their favorite star. At the same time they share every bit of information they get with me and some even pay for my provider bills!    I'm the one on the left side, storming uphill yet again (1983) Think of this, running a site like THE BOLLYWOOD MOVIE DATABASE costs some $200 to $300 US every month only for renting webspace and paying for line capacity! All the programming and web designing is done on a voluntary basis. Without help, there would not be a site called THE FILES, no BOLLYWOOD MOVIE DATABASE, no nothing! I think that's an aspect nobody does realise. Sure, my name is sign-posted allover those sites, but in reality I'm only the guy who maintains those services and who collects and organizes the data ... and does the odd scan! In the end, it's all about teamwork! If you're trying to run a major site all on your own you're bound to run into trouble there. You need help and support ... unless you can afford to pay small fortunes for interviews and photographs like filmi magazine apparently can. Anyone interested in statistics? The most successful site of THE BOLLYWOOD MOVIE DATABASE these days, THE FILES, serves at least 100000 visitors each month. I said EACH MONTH, alright?! So there must be quite a few Bollywood fans out on the Internet, right? Question: Where do you find those photographs? Answer: Outch! You're not supposed to ask questions like that! See, main Germanistan mein rahta hu, and we're having pretty funny laws overhere: Everything that is not explicitly allowed is forbidden - I think that summs it up perfectly! Totally forbidden is to scan photos from the magazines and spread those scans via the web. Even if the magazine is printed and copyrighted in the UK. My response to that? I do not do scans from the magazines! Seriously, I don't do it, promised! I do understand why magazine makers are so concerned about copying their stuff - they have to pay for interviews and photos and they have to come up with real money! So very rightly they hunt down everyone stealing photos/articles from them! Should you find one single image on the sites of THE BOLLYWOOD MOVIE DATABASE, that shows an image copied from any of the magazines, I'll personally make sure it vanishes from our pages instantly! Not interfering with the magazines was a policy I followed right from the first picture I published on the web! All the shots used by the BOLLYWOOD MOVIE DATABASE are taken directly from the movies. In a sense, a violation of copyright laws still takes place, we shouldn't forget that ... on the other hand, copyright laws in the land of the copycats, what are we talking about here?!? Plus, all the images of THE BOLLYWOOD MOVIE DATABASE have been retouched heavily and to some extend are "pieces of art" by themselves, so to speak. Any objections? C'mon Mr. Producer and Mrs. Bhatt (any other female producers around?), we're doing free advertising for you! Question: What do you do for a living? Answer: You may have noticed, that people call me "the scanman" sometimes. That title was given me by Dharmesh ("Pintu"), well known for maintaining Madhuri's Unofficial Homepage, because I was doing scans of the heroines all the time. And that is no coincidence! I'm trained in photography studio/laboratory work. And for 17 year I worked in that field. And the photographer in me is still alive. Especially I love photos in black & white, as you might probably have noticed while browsing this little resume of mine ... Unfortunately/fortuately, professional photography has been invaded by computers, scanners, printers and things. The golden era is well and truely over. I realized that and I also realized that clients tend to criticize your work only to get a discount on the price. You can take that for some time but in the end it really gets to you! So finally I called it a day with photography and turned my interests towards computers professionally. Now I'm running my own Internet agency, creating web sites, setting up online shops and stuff like that. Let me warn you, Internet business is not like everybody is telling you! Only a handful of people are making money on the Internet. Even gigants are not likely to be cashflow positive till the end of year 2000! They only make money with selling "worthless" shares at the stock exchange! Be very, very careful with investing into socalled "Internet Stocks" - there is no value for money, only hope for a bright future. If you are prepared to take on a gamble, well, good luck ... Question: Do you answer all of your emails? Answer: A more recent photo (2003) Yes ... almost all ... most of the time! We're talking about everything up to 30 mails each day landing in my personal maildrop. Two or three of those are business related, five or six are from friends allover the globe. The rest has something to do with the sites. New movie data, facts for THE FILES, addresses for THE LINKS, generally I'm supplied with all sorts of information that way. And then of course there are many, many mails from fans (not of mine!) who are looking for autograph addresses, filmographies, release dates, dates for live shows and so forth. Of course, having quite a bit of information available, I can come up with the requested fairly often. Unfortunately there also are cases, where I can't help at all. Interestingly, both scenarios make me try harder. For different reasons, maybe, but still with the same effect! It's my way of saying THANK YOU to all those, who have helped me in learning about Bollywood and finally in setting up the sites!