Victor Banerjee as the host of Business Legends; (below) guest Rahul Bajaj

This July 21, CNBC-TV18 premieres Business Legends, a documentary series combining narration and interviews to showcase some of the most exceptional success stories in the business.

With industrial historian Gita Piramal providing in-depth analysis, Victor Banerjee slips into the narrator?s seat. Here, Victor tells us why.

Why start this innings on TV and that too with a business show?

For starters, this is not the first thing I?m doing on television. I hosted a BBC show several years ago called Film India. It was an opportunity to look at Bollywood and Indian cinema from a different perspective.

Today, the public have woken up to the speculative Purnendu Chatterjees in their backyard, the Ambani and Birla wars, the use of credit cards and finance schemes in the purchase of fridge, stereo, car, home and even old-age pension. Suddenly, ?money? is the only thing that talks, walks and speaks of your coming of age and helps to come to grips with the realities of a difficult survival problem. Today, the stock market is no longer a rich man?s domain and retailers are not as condemnable as ?race goers? used to be. A decade or two back business was a niche subject?Why is the scene changing?

Does the show deal with strictly the career graph of the interviewees or with their personal lives as well?

No, the show is not a personalised evaluation of our industrialists. It is an objective and truthful account of how some great people in India?s business world started from scratch and with almost nothing, except political manoeuvring and manipulation at times, to become billionaires in a matter of a few decades or less. So yes, it is a sort of careergraph that is drawn clearly and transparently for viewers to watch and budding entrepreneurs to perhaps learn from.

Who impressed you most and why?

Each of the personalities has a distinctly different story to tell in terms of attitudes, moralities, successes and failures. Every one of them is admirable and although some of them are a trifle inarticulate while others loud, each and every one of them has a sharp wit and an incisive brain that I wouldn?t want to tangle with.

How much time are you having to give to the shooting?

The plan is to cover six personalities and all my work, fortunately, is confined to an air-conditioned studio with an excellent coffee machine close by. I also have a bunch of experts who work under the guidance of an amiable researcher and hard-working producer.

Among talk shows, which do you like the most and why?

I really am not much of a viewer of talk shows. Unless they have changed enormously, they used to be conducted with either the interviewer fawning all over the great person being interviewed or the latter being torn to shreds fashionably by someone whose objectivity was a view from the pedestal he or she was self-righteously perched upon.