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That day mustn’t come again

Published

16 years ago

November 26, 2009

I flew back in Delhi after an exhausting day of work at the B.A.G’s Mumbai office. I sat to pursue my daily unwinding ritual of channel surfing. Least did I expect to see the dastardly act that was shaking the city and draining blood of the country.

I immediately got on the phone to connect with the News 24 Mumbai and Delhi team. The channel had already dispatched reporters who were already present and reporting from ground zero. I watched the news feeds as they came in and as they were being relayed then on the channel. The terrorists had entered the heritage Taj Hotel- the most esteemed and loved landmark of the city, and taken the staff and guests hostage. They had grounded themselves at the Oberoi Trident firing at unsuspecting people and horrifying people like an untold unheard nightmare. They had sprayed bullets on unsuspecting people at the Chattrapati Shivaji Terminus and Leopold Café. AK-47s had been used and we got news of 20 people being murdered at the busy CST station and hundreds wounded.

At the popular hang out Leopold Café, news came in of five people being killed and many more injured. The terrorists were still on the loose prolonging the tragedy. Any person familiar with Mumbai knows the mad rush the CST station witnesses every single day, clamouring on to trains that accommodate hundreds of people more than capacity. Every person who goes to Mumbai has the Leopold Café on their tourist destinations, for its quaint feel and heritage. I was numb as an Indian with the thought of the havoc the act would have caused at the sites and how many more would suffer in this mindless war that had been waged on us.

Minute by minute more news kept coming in. News 24’s resident editor Hemant Sharma stood organizing his whole team and simultaneously giving piece to cameras one after the other. From the youngest of reporters to the most experienced, all set out to report the horror. The police had cordoned off the Taj and the other attacked sites and rescue operations were ensuing. Additional Commissioner of Mumbai Police had received information that a colleague had been injured in the gunfire at the Cama and Albless Hospital for women and children. They took a Toyota Qualis and proceeded in that direction. Two terrorists stepped out from behind a tree and opened fire with AK-47 automatic rifles. Priti Sompura, News 24’s reporter, was present with the cameraperson steps away from the site. Kamte had managed to retaliate, wounding a terrorist in the arm. In few minutes, news of them having succumbed to their wounds infuriated and saddened the nation.

At the Taj, India witnesses that the Anti Terror Squad Chief Hemant Karkare had arrived and looked set to lead his team to bring the nightmare to an end. He geared up in moments in his helmet and bullet proof jacket. Was there hope for the nightmare to end shortly, reporters asked…

It was through the live reports that we saw him go… Through the ropes and into the hotel, braving the threat he faced in his line of duty. Within seconds, the terrorists eliminated him. Their bullets pierced his so called bullet proof outfit. News 24’s anchor Sayeed Ansari told the nation of the death of one of the finest police officers to his audience. Such was the rush of blood and the magnitude of the tragedy, that his voice choked and eyes watered as he stood speaking to the camera. Another blow to efforts to end the disaster burning…another irreplaceable loss that had engulfed us all.

Every moment was a shocker, every second a life changer. News 24’s Managing Editor Ajit Anjum, Director News Supriya Prasad and Input Head Rahul Mahajan rushed back from where they were to the news room to bring the shocking incident to their audience. Rahul Mahajan caught the first flight to Mumbai to bring the intensity and magnitude of the attack to the television screen. Supported ably by Shadab Alam, Mukul, Arun Pandey, Manish, Shashi Shekhar, Vikas, Preeti Sompura and Santosh Tiwari, the teams ensured reports relayed on the channel without any interruption.

Raman Kumar and Amit Kumar, handling Delhi bureau, spent their night alternating between the Prime Minister’s Office and the Home Minister’s office seeking their reactions and responses to the tragedy. Manish Kumar and the whole fleet of reporters coordinated with Hemant Sharma on a minute to minute basis to bring news as it happened. Naveen Bisht, Adarsh Rastogi and their teams packaged all reports non stop in tandem with the reports.

The Taj Hotel was totally under siege, and the freaks inside were firing randomly at staff and guests. Chefs, servers, attendants, people out for tea and dinner, foreigners out on vacation… There was only a number attached to the men and women who were falling dead with each aimless bullet being fired by the mad men inside. Bombs went off in two taxis close to where Vivek Gupta was reporting for News 24. Saved by a hair’s distance, it was all a joke to the men who had planned it all. To those suffering, to the ones reporting, to those witnessing – just an indescribable feeling raging within.

Bullets were in an arms reach and terror was striking one the same plane on which stood the men and women reporting development, moment after moment. From News 24, cameramen Murganathan, Prahlad Singh, Vijay Chaudhary, Jitendra Singh, Imteyaz Khan and Akhilesh Singh positioned themselves at various points around the Taj, and the other sites. Reporters Priti Sompura, Vivek Gupta, Bhupendra Singh, Ankur Tyagi, Pravin Mishra and Vinod Jagdale stood, lay down, squatted – like the hundreds of other reporters from various news channels to report what was the worst terror attack on the nation.

News came in that the CST station and Leopold Café had been taken over by security forces. 52 people had been killed at CST and 109 injured. 10 people had been killed at Leopold and many other were left maimed and bleeding. Hospitals were bustling, trying to aid the injured. Meanwhile, a one-sided war was raging at the Taj, Oberoi and Nariman house – all a stone’s throw away from each other. India watched as the moment by moment account was brought to them live by those standing at arm’s length with death. India united as news of the tragedy their compatriots faced stared them in their face.

Amidst reports and the madness of bringing it all live from the newsroom, I called my friends in Mumbai enquiring about their safety, several of them including Sabina Sehgal Saikia. I could hear the numbness of their family members as they spoke flatly about their loved ones.

Day after day, worse news kept coming in. And the fact that ten men had held the country to ransom for 24, then 48, then 72 hours exposed the helplessness of the common man and infuriated us all as never before. And for all the four days, Resident Editor Hemant Sharma relayed developments second by second in coordination with the Delhi team. Anchors Sayeed Ansari, Anjana Kashyap and Akhilesh Anand reported the minute by minute developments on all days non-stop. Reporters like Ankur Tyagi, Sanket Pathak, Anuja Karnik, Aarti Dani, and Anshul Agrawal along with camerapersons Dilip Rawani, Naveen Pandey, Mintu Singh, Kanti Parmar, Sameer Sherke and Babaji Nanaware continued to report and bring live second by second developments. Supplement reporters who had been flown in to support the Mumbai team included Satyendra Upadhyay and Nalini Rajput.

Amidst the humdrum, one wondered why when we are surrounded by enemies, can we not have a centralized anti terror agency to ensure that such an incident doesn’t reach the proportions it reached? Why did our heroes have to die so arbitrarily while protecting us? Could there be no concerted effort to end the nightmare? Why was New Delhi at such a loss after the death of three fine officers and why could it not garner a unit to end the ensuing disaster? No one seemed to be in command; no one seemed to be leading the way to end the nightmare.

A year later, the Chief Minister of Maharashtra has honoured Priti Sompura, Vivek Gupta and Ankur Tyagi with the Maharashtra Congress Committee award for their efforts in reporting the horrific day in the face of acute danger. News 24 recounts the horror of this day last year with its show, Morche Par Reporter, that also commemorates the men and women from across news channels who reported the days of horror for their compatriots and helped unite the country into one in the hours of grief and mourning.

We all asked a hundred questions, vented our fury, wrote, debated, argued and fought…and then fell silent. Like we always have done…like we always do…A year later, there is yet no unified command in place with the anger, sorrow and helplessness that engulfs me like the billion people of India.

(Anurradha Prasad is News24 Editor-in-Chief and BAG Films & Media CMD)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the author and Indiantelevision.com need not necessarily subscribe to the same)

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GUEST COLUMN: The year OTT grew up and micro-drama took over India’s screens

Published

2 months ago

December 23, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: 2025 will be remembered as the year India’s OTT industry stopped chasing scale for its own sake and began reckoning with how audiences actually consume content. Completion rates fell, patience wore thin and the limits of long-form excess became impossible to ignore. In this guest column, Pratap Jain, founder and CEO of ChanaJor, traces how micro-drama moved from the fringes to the centre of viewing behaviour, why short-form fiction emerged as a retention engine rather than a trend, and how platforms that respected time, habit and emotional payoff were the ones that truly grew up in 2025.

If there is one thing 2025 will be remembered for in the Indian OTT industry, it’s this: the industry finally stopped pretending.
Stopped pretending that bigger automatically meant better.
Stopped pretending that viewers had endless time.
Stopped pretending that scale without retention was success.

What began as a quiet reset in 2023 and a cautious correction in 2024 turned into a very visible shift in 2025. Business models matured. Content strategies tightened. And most importantly, platforms started aligning themselves with how Indians actually watch content, not how the industry wished they would.

At the centre of this shift was micro-drama—not as a trend, but as a behavioural inevitability.

When OTT finally understood the time problem

For years, long episodes were treated as a marker of seriousness. A 45–60 minute runtime was almost a badge of credibility. Shorter formats were pushed to the margins, labelled as “snack content” or “mobile-only.”

That belief quietly collapsed in 2025.

What platform data showed very clearly was not a drop in interest—but a drop in patience. Viewers weren’t rejecting stories. They were rejecting commitment.

Across platforms, the same patterns appeared:

* First-episode drop-offs on long-form shows kept increasing

* Completion rates continued to slide

* Viewers were sampling more titles but finishing fewer

At the same time, shows with episodes in the six to 10 minute range started showing the opposite behaviour: higher completion, higher repeat viewing, and stronger daily habit formation.

Micro-drama didn’t win because it was short. It won because it respected time.

Micro-Drama didn’t arrive loudly. It took over quietly.

There was no single moment when micro-drama “launched” in India. It crept in through dashboards and retention charts.

By mid-2025, it was clear that viewers were happy watching four, five, sometimes six short episodes in one sitting—even when they wouldn’t finish a single long episode. Romance, relationship drama, slice-of-life conflict, and grounded comedy worked especially well.

This wasn’t disposable content. It was compressed storytelling.

In shorter formats, there was no room for indulgence. Every episode had to move the story forward. Weak writing was punished faster. Strong writing was rewarded immediately.

Micro-drama raised the bar instead of lowering it.

Where ChanaJor naturally fit into this shift

ChanaJor didn’t pivot to micro-drama in 2025 because the market demanded it. In many ways, the platform was already built around the same viewing behaviour.

From the beginning, ChanaJor focused on short-to-mid-length fictional stories that felt close to everyday Indian life—hostels, rented flats, office romances, small-town relationships, young people figuring things out. Stories that didn’t need heavy context or cinematic scale to connect.

What worked in ChanaJor’s favour in 2025 was clarity:

* A clearly defined audience
* Tight episode lengths
* Storytelling that prioritised emotion and pace over spectacle

While several platforms rushed to copy global micro-drama formats, ChanaJor stayed rooted in familiar Indian settings and conflicts. That familiarity mattered. Viewers didn’t have to “enter” the world of the show—it already felt like theirs.

Why audiences started responding differently

One of the biggest misconceptions going into 2025 was that audiences wanted shorter content because their attention spans had reduced. That wasn’t entirely true.

What viewers actually wanted was meaningful payoff per minute.

On platforms like ChanaJor, episodes didn’t waste time setting the mood for ten minutes. Conflicts arrived early. Characters were recognisable within moments. Emotional hooks landed fast.

A typical consumption pattern looked like real life:

* One episode during a break
* Two more before sleeping
* A few the next day

This is how viewing habits are built—not through marketing spends, but through comfort and consistency.

Viewers came back not because every show was a blockbuster, but because they knew what kind of experience to expect.

2025 was also the year OTT faced business reality

The other big change in 2025 was on the business side. Subscriber growth slowed. Discounts stopped hiding churn. Customer acquisition costs rose.

Platforms were forced to ask harder questions:

* Are viewers finishing what they start?
* Are they returning without reminders?
* Is this content worth what we’re spending on it?

This is where micro-drama began outperforming expectations. A well-written short series could deliver sustained engagement without massive budgets. It didn’t peak for one weekend and disappear—it stayed alive through repeat viewing.

Platforms like ChanaJor benefited because they weren’t chasing inflated launch numbers. The focus was on consistency and retention, not noise.

Failures Became Visible Faster

2025 also exposed weaknesses brutally.

Several platforms assumed micro-drama was a shortcut—short episodes, quick shoots, instant traction. What they discovered was that bad writing fails faster in short formats than in long ones.

Viewers dropped off within minutes. Episodes were abandoned mid-way. Weak stories had nowhere to hide.

Micro-drama didn’t forgive laziness. It amplified it.

The platforms that survived were the ones that treated short storytelling with the same seriousness as long-form—sometimes more.

OTT Stopped Chasing Prestige and Started Chasing Habit

Perhaps the most important shift in 2025 wasn’t technical or creative—it was psychological.

OTT stopped trying to look like cinema. It stopped chasing validation through scale and awards alone. It began behaving like what it actually is in people’s lives: a daily companion.

Platforms like ChanaJor found their space here because that mindset was already baked in. The goal wasn’t to dominate a weekend launch. It was to quietly become part of someone’s everyday viewing routine.

That shift changed everything—from release strategies to how success was measured.

What 2025 Ultimately Taught the Industry

By the end of the year, three truths were impossible to ignore:

* Time is the most valuable thing a viewer gives you
* Retention matters more than reach
* Format must follow behaviour, not ego

Micro-drama didn’t take over because it was fashionable. It took over because it fit real life.

Looking Ahead

Micro-drama is not replacing long-form storytelling. It is redefining the baseline of engagement.

Longer shows will survive—but only when they earn their length. Short-form fiction will continue to evolve, becoming sharper, more emotionally confident, and better written.

Platforms like ChanaJor have shown that it’s possible to grow without shouting—by understanding the audience, respecting their time, and telling stories that feel real.

2025 wasn’t the year OTT became smaller. It was the year it became smarter.

Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect our own.

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Piyush Pandey: India’s greatest adman never stopped watching, listening and loving life

Published

4 months ago

October 24, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: The lights went out on Indian advertising this Diwali. Piyush Pandey, the wordsmith who turned bus rides and roadside tea into unforgettable campaigns, died on Friday aged 70. Just four months earlier, at the Emvies awards in Mumbai, veterans had touched his feet for blessings while young hopefuls queued for selfies. He looked frail but smiled through every encounter. Humility was his signature; genius was his secret.

Pandey never claimed special talent. His gift was simpler and rarer: he kept his eyes open. The famous Fevicol advertisement—a Jaisalmer bus groaning under passengers clinging to every inch—came from a real sighting. The magic was slapping a Fevicol poster on the back of the bus. “Keep your eyes open, keep your ears to the ground and have a heart willing to accept,” he told newcomers at Ogilvy. It wasn’t a slogan. It was scripture.

Piyush Pandey

He joined Ogilvy & Mather in 1982 at 27, after failing at cricket, tea tasting and construction. When Mani Iyer, who headed the agency, introduced him to me as creative director in the late 1980s, Pandey’s deep, soft voice belied a fierce passion for the craft. Like Roda Mehta, who ran media at Ogilvy, he was generous with his time, patiently explaining the thought behind many a campaign to me. Those campaigns moved hundreds of thousands of crores worth of products off shelves over their lifespans.

His method was observation turned into emotion. The Dum Laga Ke Haisha Fevicol spot was originally made for a smaller brand called Fevitite. The Parekhs, who owned Pidilite, told him the ad was too good to waste. Reshoot it for Fevicol, they urged. He did. That single decision spawned a series of award-winning campaigns and turned Fevicol into the category itself.

His philosophy was disarmingly simple: love life. “Whether you are sipping tea from a roadside vendor or in a five-star hotel, whether you are travelling by second class or in a Mercedes-Benz,” he would say. Great ideas came from loving all of it—the chaos, the mundane, the sublime. “Be open to accepting ideas from the world. Be open to sharing ideas with the world. Learn to talk but most importantly also learn to listen.”

Piyush Pandey Pandey despised lazy advertising. Technology for its own sake was pointless; celebrities without ideas were useless. “Many TVCs are pathetic these days when they use celebrities. They are made very lazily,” he once said. For him, the idea came first. Technology could enhance it; fame could amplify it. But without a core truth, it was just expensive noise.

He believed consumers, not suits or pony-tailed creatives, made advertising great. “It’s when he or she accepts the product and emotionally bonds with it, the product becomes a brand,” he said. His advice to brand managers was blunt: stop being salesmen. Build brands, not just products.

I lost touch with him for decades as I went about building the indiantelevision.com group and all its ancillary services. Journalism and writing as I used to practice when I was younger was relegated to the background. It was during the pandemic that I reached out to him and requested him to spare some time for an online interview. To my surprise, he remembered me and he readily agreed. It was an interesting conversation about how Ogilvy was serving clients during the pandemic and how its creative edge was being maintained. We had agreed we would speak for 30 minutes, but the conversation went on for an hour. It was peppered with Pandey-isms. But that was the last time we spoke at length to each other, though we said hello to each other at advertising industry get-togethers which I rarely attended. Sadly, for me.

The man who taught India to watch, listen and love has gone silent. But his voice echoes still—in every vernacular tagline, every slice-of-life commercial, every campaign that dares to see India as it truly is. Pandey didn’t just sell products. He gave an entire nation permission to speak in its own accent, to find poetry in the everyday, to believe that the roadside and the boardroom could meet and make magic.

The lights dimmed this Diwali, but the spark he lit—built on observation, fuelled by empathy, sustained by love—will burn for generations. That’s not advertising. That’s immortality.

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The slow eclipse of India’s media and broadcasting pioneers

Published

8 months ago

June 22, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Once, they blazed across the Indian media landscape with the swagger of pioneers. Entrepreneur-led behemoths like Subhash Chandra’s Zee Entertainment, Kalanithi Maran’s Sun TV, Prannoy Roy’s NDTV, and Raghav Bahl’s Network18 weren’t just market leaders — they were institutions, holding their own even as foreign giants circled hungrily.

Today, those stars are fading. Some have already fallen.

Network18 and TV18 are now firmly in the grip of Reliance Industries and Disney Star. NDTV, long a bastion of editorial independence, is under the control of the Adani Group. Its founders — Roy and Radhika — have exited stage left, their names now relics of an era that once prized journalistic idealism.

Zee, once the crown jewel of Indian broadcasting, is barely hanging on. The Chandra family — once majority owners — now clutch a meagre four-odd per cent stake. It’s a dramatic fall from grace fuelled by Subhash Chandra’s ill-advised adventures into infrastructure. To bankroll these forays, he pledged Zee shares, opening the gates to lenders who came calling. The result: a sharp dilution of promoter ownership and a credibility crisis. The failed merger with Sony’s Indian arm, Culver Max Entertainment, only added insult to injury — scuppered reportedly due to concerns about Zee’s financial hygiene. A company once viewed as squeaky clean had its reputation muddied.

Sun TV, the fourth of the old guard, is also showing cracks. Helmed with iron discipline by Kalanithi Maran, it long stood as a symbol of stability. But the facade is now under strain. A family feud has burst into public view, with brother Dayanidhi Maran accusing Kala of wresting control of Sun TV through backdoor share acquisitions. Legal notices have flown, regulatory filings issued, and the company insists all was above board. Still, some reputational damage has been done — and the gossip mills are churning.

The result is a media map being redrawn in real time. Where once these founders shaped the narrative, today they’re either sidelined, embattled, or ousted. And as corporate titans and conglomerates take over, the question is whether passion-led media can survive in an era of balance sheets, bottom lines, and boardroom power plays.

India’s media isn’t short on ambition. But nostalgia alone won’t stop the sun from setting on yesterday’s giants.