The year was 2000 and Amitabh Bachchan was going through one of the worst phases of his life. His business venture had floundered. The creditors were at his door, forcing him to actually do the unthinkable: approach big producers for jobs. It was at this juncture that Sameer Nair, then head of programming, STAR TV, approached him with an idea.

The rest, as they say, is history. Kaun Banega Crorepati (KBC) amassed eyeballs like no other programme. Amitabh Bachchan bounced back, as did STAR TV. And, of course, so did Sameer Nair.

A long time ago, there was Doordarshan. And then there was Sameer Nair. Media circles believe that television history in the last couple of years can be summed up in two phases: the Doordarshan era and the Sameer Nair age. This January, as we get primed for Shah Rukh Khan’s KBC 3, doff your hat to Sameer Nair, CEO of STAR Entertainment India.

For those who came in late, Sameer Nair is not just the man who got Amitabh Bachchan inside your living room, Monday to Thursday, in KBC — a record-breaking success story. He is also the creative engine who propelled a whole lot of saas-bahu soaps that were lapped up and lathered by the nation. And for STAR TV, he is the man who has kept the channel on the top for the last six years.

“He is a brilliant television mind. He is among the best. He understands scheduling, distribution, programming. He is a good leader and great with people management,” says Anil Wanvari, CEO of indiantelevision.com, a leading services company for the Indian television industry.

For 41-year-old Sameer Nair, getting Shah Rukh Khan to host a TV quiz show was quite a coup. A Mumbai-based tabloid says that SRK has been booked for a whopping Rs 280 crore — reportedly double the amount that Bachchan got. KBC-3 with Shah Rukh will, undoubtedly, be the final icing in Nair’s multi-layered cake in a career spanning a decade in television.

Ironically, Sameer Nair almost went for the cake himself when in his twenties — as a tall and lanky youth — he completed a three-year hotel management course and even tried his hand at rustling up 250 chicken rolls a day. He woke up at 4 am, readied the rolls and delivered them to a Parsi food outlet near the Stock Exchange in Mumbai. On his way back home, he would pick up 20 kilograms of chicken from Crawford Market, have a quick nap, and then start boiling and shredding the fowl for his rolls.

Nair would, no doubt, have been a successful restaurateur by now had it not been for his teacher-mother, who put a stop to his nocturnal adventures. “You must be completely nuts to be doing all this nonsense. Go and find yourself a legitimate occupation,” she said.

So Nair — who had studied at Wilson College and done science in St. Xavier’s (flirting for a short while with the idea of becoming a scientist) — switched tracks from catering to advertising. But his journey to STAR had its share of stations — including a short halt in Dubai. He worked for a while for the marketing department of Yellow Pages, for a royal pay of Rs 1,100, but moved to Chennai after getting married to Jaya Menon, (he is now married to former Britannia managing director Sunil Alagh’s daughter) whose father, P. N. Menon, was a well-known director. It was in Chennai that he learnt the ropes of filmmaking.

When he joined STAR TV in June 1994, he once again started at the bottom of the heap. He did some behind-the-scenes interviews — and ended up interviewing Amitabh Bachchan several times in his programme called Bol Bollywood. And then he slowly worked up the ladder of success. He was first able to showcase his persuasive managerial skills when he started a programme on forthcoming films. Nair went and acquired nine new films in two days. And those were the days when TV had to wait for five years after a movie’s release before it could be telecast. Not surprisingly, by 1999, Sameer Nair had been appointed the programming chief of STAR.

Media pundits stress that Nair turned around the fortunes of STAR TV in India. In 2000, STAR Plus had a viewership share of 4.6 per cent and was ranked seventh on the national radar — lower than channels such as Zee Cinema, Sony and Zee. Kaun Banega Crorepati singularly changed the fortunes of the floundering STAR Plus. With KBC, and the K soaps — so called because the names of most serials tended to start with the letter ‘K’ — the channel catapulted to the number one position, pushing Sony and Zee far behind. In 2001, for example, STAR Plus had 43 programmes out of the top 50 TV programmes. Sony had 20 in the top 100 and Zee had five. And things haven’t changed much since then. Even today, STAR Plus has 44 programmes in the top 100, while Sony has one.

In 2002, Nair was promoted to chief operating officer of STAR India. Within six months, he raised STAR’s distribution from 5.4 million subscriptions to over 10.7 million. Today, as the Indian Readership Survey of 2006 points out, STAR Plus is the second-most viewed channel after Doordarshan.

Industry insiders say that the man is a grassroots person and a great listener. He says he still remembers what his boss from Hong Kong, Tony Watts, told him when he took over programming: “At a TV station you are an invited guest in that person’s home, so there is a certain amount of courtesy and decorum that is required of you. With this medium you can reach a lot of people quickly and actually influence them. The awareness of that has to be kept in mind in whatever you do.”

In an interview to indiantelevision.com, he spoke about what drives him. “You can’t forget that you have to work hard to find the rainbow, and then only will you find the pot of gold behind it.”

Some would think Nair has already struck gold. Nair, though, is still digging.