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Tune talks as maestros strike a chord at IFFI’s Lata Mangeshkar tribute

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MUMBAI: Goa’s sea breeze wasn’t the only thing humming at IFFI, the music world’s past, present and future converged on one stage, and the room practically vibrated with melody, memory and mischief. At the Lata Mangeshkar Memorial Talk, two of India’s most compelling composers Vishal Bhardwaj and B. Ajaneesh Loknath turned a tribute into a masterclass on the country’s sprawling, shape-shifting soundscape.

Moderated with warm wit by journalist Sudhir Srinivasan, the session, titled The Rhythms of India: From the Himalayas to the Deccan, played out like a living jukebox, one where anecdotes replaced tracks, and where the bonds between Hindustani, Carnatic, folk, indie pop and film music were mapped not through charts but through lived experience.

What unfolded was part confessional, part craft lesson, part cross-cultural jam session and wholly irresistible.

The event began with a disarming ice-breaker: each composer was asked to speak about the other. What came instead was a duet in praise.

Vishal Bhardwaj, the man behind Chappa Chappa, Paani Paani Re, Dil Toh Bachcha Hai Ji and countless earworms, admitted he became an Ajaneesh Loknath fan the moment the haunting Kantara theme held him hostage.

“That theme still haunts me,” he said, calling it one of the finest film motifs he has ever heard. “It elevated Rishab’s performance. I had to look up the composer.”

Ajaneesh, visibly moved, countered with childhood memories of hearing Chappa Chappa on the radio and feeling its swing embed itself somewhere deep so deep that it resurfaced decades later in Kantara’s tribal chants. “You inspire me,” he said simply. “Your music is so rooted.”

When the talk turned to Paani Paani Re, the room leaned in. Bhardwaj revealed how the song was born from trance-like solitude, dummy words (“Rahna rahna re…”) and inspiration from an Osho Commune cassette filled with stone chimes.

But the real goosebumps arrived with Lata Mangeshkar’s intervention.

She changed his original phrasing by shifting the emphasis, a minuscule adjustment that transformed the song’s emotional gravity. “You’ll have to share composer credit,” Bhardwaj jokingly told her. “No need,” she replied. “I am a composer. Today, I’ll just be the singer.”

Her musical intuition, he said, elevated the track to timelessness.

Both composers spoke passionately about resisting Bollywood’s old habit of filling soundscapes with decorative noise.

Bhardwaj argued that frequencies should breathe, not battle. Ajaneesh explained how the wrong complexity can bury a song’s soul, a lesson he learnt when early demos of Kirik Party were rejected until he added the everyday vocal slang (“arey re re re”) that gave the track its flavour.

Simplicity, they agreed, is not lack of craft, it’s control of ego.

Why do so many Indian composers speak of music as a force flowing through them rather than from them?

Bhardwaj offered the clearest answer, “The closest thing to silence is music. Good tunes feel like they come from somewhere else. Bad ones, that’s me interfering.” His own creative ritual is delightfully earthy, playing tennis. “I compose best when I’ve beaten someone 5–2,” he laughed. “If I lose, no tune arrives.”

Ajaneesh nodded, saying his Kantara score felt “guided by a higher force”. “I’ve never claimed credit for it,” he said. “I don’t know how it happened.”

The conversation swerved into linguistics, and suddenly the hall turned into a mini-class on how languages shape melody.

Bhardwaj spoke of how each word carries weight, tempo and texture, “Goli maar bheje mein changed the entire sound of the tune. The language guides the music.” He gave a hilarious account of composing in Malayalam, memorising lines like a schoolboy reciting poetry, afraid of stretching the wrong syllable.

Ajaneesh broke down why dubbed tracks often lose their emotional charge: listeners relate to the native rhythm of their tongue, not its translation.

Both composers explored why nonsensical vocal riffs tan-ta-da, arey re re, ulul chalul survive decades.

They’re not gibberish, Bhardwaj argued. “They’ve become part of our cultural vocabulary. Drama enters a room with a ‘tan-ta-da-da’.”

Ajaneesh added that voice carries emotion that no instrument can replicate, “Try playing tan-ta-da on a keyboard, it won’t give you the joy a human voice does.”

When asked how Kantara maintained its authenticity while reaching national scale, Ajaneesh credited “the innocence of folk”.

He revealed that nearly 70 per cent of the soundtrack’s percussion was recorded on location, not in studios with tribal musicians performing in their own spaces, where their energy was unfiltered.

“What I heard, I took inside me. What I felt, I gave back cinematically,” he said. The electric-guitar shock in Varaha Roopam, he explained, was deliberate, a release valve after the emotional tsunami of the climax.

The moderator pointed out the narrative surprises in both composers’ tracks Varaha Roopam’s shift from narasura chant to rock fusion, or Bhardwaj’s Yedam flipping into unexpected EDM.

Bhardwaj likened songs to babies, “You birth them, clothe them, groom them. But the first instinct, the fragrance of the original tune is the most sacred. You must protect it.”

Ajaneesh agreed, saying his biggest struggle is always the opening line, the musical hook that sets the emotional ceiling of the entire track.

What was framed as a memorial talk became a panoramic journey across decades, dialects, disciplines and divine accidents. From Chappa Chappa to Kantara, from Urdu’s perfume-like fragrance to tribal chants echoing through forests, the audience travelled across India without leaving their seats.

If Lata Mangeshkar’s legacy is the thread running through the nation’s melodic history, Vishal Bhardwaj and Ajaneesh Loknath spent this session showing just how many colours that thread can hold.

The result? A masterclass that didn’t just honour the Nightingale, it echoed her belief that music, at its purest, is not manufactured. It is received. And when the receiver is open, India sings through them.

 

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Netflix celebrates a decade in India with Shah Rukh Khan-narrated tribute film

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MUMBAI: Netflix is celebrating ten years in India with a slick anniversary film voiced by Shah Rukh Khan, a nostalgic sprint through a decade that rewired how the country watches stories. The campaign doubles as both tribute and reminder: streaming did not just enter Indian homes, it quietly rearranged them.

Roll back to 2016 and television still dictated schedules. Viewers waited weeks, sometimes months, for favourite films to appear on prime time. Family-friendly filters narrowed options further, and piracy often filled the gaps. Then Netflix arrived, softly but decisively, carrying a catalogue of international titles rarely seen in Indian theatres and placing them a click away. Old blockbusters and new releases suddenly coexisted on the same digital shelf.

The platform’s real inflection point came in 2018 with Sacred Games, a breakout series that refused to dilute India’s grit for global comfort. Audiences embraced its unvarnished tone, signalling readiness for stories that did not need box-office validation or censorship compromises. What followed was a steady procession of relatable narratives. Competitive-exam anxiety fuelled Kota Factory. College relationships unfolded in Mismatched. Everyday pressures, not grand spectacle, proved bankable.

Language barriers thinned as foreign series arrived with Hindi, Tamil and Telugu dubbing, expanding viewership beyond urban English-speaking pockets. Marketing mirrored the shift. For global releases such as Squid Game, Netflix leaned on regional creators and influencers to localise buzz and make international content feel native.

The library widened beyond fiction. Documentaries stepped out of festival circuits into living rooms. Stand-up comedians found scale. Established filmmakers, including Sanjay Leela Bhansali with Heeramandi, embraced the platform’s long-form canvas. Subscriber numbers swelled to 12.37 million in India, according to Demandsage, and behaviour followed suit. Late-night binges became routine. Friday release rituals loosened. Watch parties turned solitary screens into social events.

Economics demanded adjustment. Early subscription pricing carried a premium aura that deterred many households. Over time, Netflix recalibrated plans to align with Indian spending sensibilities, conceding that accessibility is as critical as content. To extend momentum around marquee titles, the platform also experimented with split-season releases, stretching anticipation and watch time.

The anniversary film, narrated by Shah Rukh Khan, captures the linguistic shift that mirrors the cultural one: from “Netflix pe kya dekha?” to “Netflix pe kya dekhein?” The question moved from recounting the past to planning the next binge. In ten years, Netflix morphed from foreign entrant to familiar fixture, exporting Indian stories abroad while importing global ones home. The remote no longer waits; it chooses, clicks and moves on. In the streaming age, patience is out, playlists are in, and the next episode is always one tap away.

 

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e-commerce

Tulasi Mohan Padavala elevated to Associate Director at Blinkit

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Gurugram: Blinkit has elevated Tulasi Mohan Padavala to associate director, capping a three-year climb inside the quick-commerce firm and signalling confidence in an executive steeped in ecommerce, category management and on-ground sales execution.

Padavala shared the update publicly, saying he was “happy to share” the promotion, a succinct announcement that nevertheless marks a notable step up within one of India’s fastest-moving delivery platforms. The new role follows nearly three years at Blinkit, where he most recently served as senior category manager from February 2023 to January 2026, focusing on strategic sourcing and assortment planning.

The promotion places Padavala in Blinkit’s mid-to-senior leadership tier at a time when the company continues to expand its rapid-delivery footprint and sharpen category economics. His brief tenure as associate director began in January 2026, with responsibilities expected to span category growth, supplier strategy and cross-functional execution.

Before Blinkit, Padavala spent a short but intensive stint as global ecommerce manager at Wholsum Foods, the parent of Slurrp Farm and Millé, between November 2022 and February 2023. There he worked on digital marketplace expansion and online retail operations, adding a direct-to-consumer and international ecommerce layer to his résumé.

A longer stretch at Amazon shaped much of his cross-border commerce experience. As business development manager for Amazon’s India Global Selling programme from February 2021 to October 2022, Padavala helped Indian D2C brands enter the North American market. His remit ranged from seller recruitment and category revenue management to coordination with industry bodies, regulators and logistics partners. Key outcomes included launching more than 50 D2C consumable brands in the United States, driving a cumulative gross merchandise sales figure of $1m in FY21-22, tripling sales for participating brands during Prime Day through marketing and visibility levers, growing the monthly recurring revenue of more than 10 newly launched sellers from zero to an average $20,000 each, and negotiating ecommerce partnerships that reduced initial launch costs by 20 per cent.

Padavala’s earlier career was forged in the field rather than the dashboard. At Coffee Day Group, he spent close to five years across multiple sales leadership roles. As sales manager in the Greater Delhi Area from July 2019 to January 2021, he led vending-machine and consumables sales for small and medium enterprises with a team of more than 15 assistant and territory sales managers, managed over 2,000 clients, drove upselling and cross-selling, maintained channel partnerships and ensured timely collections. Prior to that, he served as area sales manager in Delhi between May 2018 and June 2019, handling south and east Delhi markets, and earlier in Hyderabad from April 2016 to May 2018, where he led Andhra Pradesh sales for the vending division, supervised service and logistics functions and managed a base of more than 600 machines with a four-member team.

His professional arc began with internships that combined analytics and process improvement. At Boehringer Ingelheim in 2015, Padavala analysed the impact of brand extension on the drug Pradaxa, identified key performance indicators through market research and assessed sales forecasts, recommendations that drew positive responses in pilot studies. Earlier, at Genpact in 2014, he automated manual sales-order backlog reporting using VBA and Excel, increasing efficiency by 800 per cent, and worked on benchmarking metrics within supply-chain planning processes.

From automating spreadsheets to scaling cross-border ecommerce and now steering quick-commerce categories, Padavala’s trajectory tracks the evolution of India’s retail economy itself. Blinkit’s bet is clear: blend data, discipline and delivery speed. The promotion formalises what his career already suggests. In the race for instant commerce, experience that moves from warehouse floors to global dashboards is no longer optional. It is the engine.

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e-commerce

Bharatpe plays a super over as Rohit Sharma fronts T20 push

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MUMBAI: When the stakes rise and seconds matter, even payments need a match-winning finish. That’s the cue for Bharatpe, which has rolled out Super Over, a nationwide campaign led by Indian cricket captain Rohit Sharma, timed neatly ahead of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup.

The campaign draws a straight line between the pulse of cricket and the pace of everyday digital payments. A new brand film taps into India’s emotional bond with the game, while positioning UPI as the quiet hero that keeps daily transactions ticking along at match speed.

As part of Super Over, users making payments via Bharatpe UPI can bag daily rewards ranging from match tickets and signed merchandise to a chance to watch a T20 World Cup fixture alongside Rohit Sharma himself. Both consumers and merchants are also assured Zillion Coins on every eligible transaction, adding a little extra sparkle to routine payments.

Behind the scenes, Bharatpe is also batting for safety. The platform is backed by Bharatpe Shield, a fraud-protection layer designed to offer enhanced security, comprehensive coverage and dedicated support aimed at helping users transact with greater confidence as digital payments scale up.

Announcing the campaign, Bharatpe head of marketing Shilpi Kapoor said Super Over mirrors the aspirations of everyday Indians, combining speed, security and instant rewards to make UPI transactions feel both reliable and rewarding.

The campaign will play out across digital platforms, social media and on-ground activations nationwide, staying live through the T20 World Cup season proof that in cricket, as in payments, timing is everything.

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