Vishnu R Kamat: sophisticatedly committed to ‘colour’

Person undergoing post graduation in ‘paint technology’ would not have been seen in today’s ‘colour matching’ scene of Indian graphic arts segment if professor Vilas Gupte teaching at VJTI, Mumbai had not identified Vishnu R Kamat as the perfect choice for this field and brought him to Advanced Graphic Systems (AGS) – a company offering vast range of quality control instruments related to COLOUR. A young bright creature who joined AGS immediately after passing out his post graduation in Sept 1999, Vishnu R Kamat continues to shoulder the responsibilities of making people understand the values and hues of COLOUR in broader perspective not just with naked eyes, but through the instruments with standardised specifications. ‘Spectrophotometers’, as these are called, are none other than the perfect tools to measure all values of colours which human eyes generally are not able to evaluate that accurately. However, as per Kamat, the going has never been so easy to make people understand the importance of spectrophotometer, as the operators engaged in any industry producing colours with printed sheets, paints or fabrics, etc were apprehensive enough as by using these instruments would loose their personal importance. “This was exactly when computerisation was introduced in banks and the staff engaged got panicky same way,” added Kamat. Nevertheless Kamat, whose early field was ‘paint’ industry sorrounding Chennai, never lost his patience, made it succeed which took him a considerable time of six long years. It was the year 2005, when Gretag motivated AGS to focus additionally the graphic arts industry in India and make it adopt ‘Spectrophotometers’ way of handling ‘colour’ at all level during the process of reproduction. It was the time when Kamat was made responsible to handle all India graphic arts market which he continues uptil now with great success rate as AVP-Sales.

Vishnu R KamatThanks to globalisation concept, that brought a new wave of vision in India too. International / multinational companies like ‘Wall Mart’ or ‘Avery Dennison’ while placing the orders with their venders desire to have regular ‘reports’ via these kinds of instruments (Spectrophotometers) in respect of creating the exact colour shades specified by them as standards to be followed world over by any process of reproduction on any kind of substrates. Contrary to earlier days, printers having nextgen management teams have become much receptive in terms of using these kinds of sophisticated instruments with strong support base offered by companies like AGS.

Today, AGS represents world largest organisation in ‘COLOUR’ measuring instruments (after merging of GretagMacbeth and X-Rite). As Kamat perceives that in today’s scenario, when the printer invests couple of lakhs or crores in sophisticated printing related equipments, they should not mind acquiring one of the spectrophotometers to take on a total control on ‘COLOUR’ thus not deviating at all in terms of producing exact shade. With these instruments, one can keep pace with the technology advancements and take the place on next level by achieving lesser overhead costs, lesser rejection apart from creating a good status amongst printer buyers’ community.

Last word of caution from Kamat comes as: “This concept needs to come from ‘top to bottom’ within the organisational structure and not vice versa, which can effectively bring in much positive results.”