New Delhi: India’s entertainment industry is going through a “blockbuster famine” and is lining up a series of local and Hollywood films to get people back to cinemas, reports the Financial Times.
Box office earnings fell by 7 percent to around $1 billion from January to October, compared to the same period in 2023, according to the article, ‘Indian cinema turns to high-octane movies to overcome box office ‘famine’’.
Bollywood, writes correspondent Chris Kay, has been wrestling with a string of flops, which has kept audiences away from movie theatres. Its fans seem to be migrating to movies made in the South, from industries like Tollywood instead, with big-budget action-packed films generating full houses in theatres across the country.
One reason, it says, is that Bollywood’s content hasn’t been able to consistently connect with audiences. “In response to changing preferences, Bollywood has pushed out extravagant features that mirror some of the successful South Indian productions,” Kay writes, citing Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan as the highest-grossing film in 2023 that followed the South Indian blueprint.
Producers are also keen on roping in Hollywood and Western industries, it seems. Jio Studios, especially, is targeting deals with Hollywood and looking to expand globally. A Jio Studios representative predicts that “India’s fragmented entertainment industry would enter a period of consolidation.”
This is all happening while India is witnessing a stock market renaissance, according to Bloomberg.
In the article headlined ‘India Is Witnessing a Roaring Nineties-Style Stock Boom,’ it reports that a shift in equity culture is redefining India’s stock market. More and more Indians are willing to add shares as a mainstay of their investment portfolio and it looks like the current bull run is here to stay.
“The fervour could cement India’s position as a power player within global markets, offering depth and liquidity levels that’s typical of more mature locales,” writes journalist Alex Gabriel Simon. “Individual Indians’ embrace of stocks may also give the local market an increasing immunity to global shocks, with an army of retail investors ready to buy the dip—as they have already.”
The “dramatic” structural change means that the Indian market is now being driven by domestic investors—much like the US stock boom in the 1990s. What’s more, is that more and more Indians are educating themselves on the stock market and investing.
“Cheap copies of books such as Benjamin Graham’s ‘The Intelligent Investor’ and Peter Lynch’s ‘One Up on Wall Street’ are sold at traffic lights and on footpaths in Mumbai and many other smaller cities,” Bloomberg reports.
It’s reached such a point that foreign investors are now asking if domestic flows will drop, so they can buy in and stake a claim. Ordinary Indians are now revolutionising the market, according to Bloomberg.
The New York Times reports that the New York City comptroller, who oversees hundreds of billions of dollars in pension investments, is “pressuring some of the world’s major sugar buyers to stop profiting off child labour, debt bondage and coerced hysterectomies in western India”.
The city’s pension funds own nearly $1 billion in stock in companies like Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Nestle and Mondelez and these companies and their franchisees buy sugar from Maharashtra. But now, the city has taken note of how Maharashtra’s sugar industry is deeply exploitative and is urging the companies to work with labour groups in Maharashtra and improve the supply chain.
The comptroller has also rallied major institutional investors like BNP Paribas Asset Management, Schroders, and Sands Capital— which hold stocks in many sugar-buying companies—to do the same, according to the report titled ‘Can Wall Street Pressure Ease Brutality in India’s Sugar Fields?’
“The moves represent an attempt to pressure companies that, otherwise, face little incentive to change. Sugar is a huge industry in Maharashtra, so buyers and producers alike have tremendous amounts at stake. Indian politicians could pass and enforce labor laws, but they own most sugar mills in Maharashtra and deny or downplay problems,” reports the NYT.
“Abuse is well documented. Female workers are pushed to get hysterectomies to keep working, often to avoid menstruating or becoming pregnant in dangerous, unsanitary conditions. The industry is also rife with child labor. Workers are kept in debt bondage.”
It’s also become a diplomatic issue. Groups representing sugar mills in Maharashtra have complained to the US consulate in Mumbai about “misleading” news reports, implying that there’s a “conspiracy to discourage companies from buying Maharashtra sugar”.
None of the investors are calling for that, the NYT reports, but it looks like they’d prefer corporations to keep buying from a Maharashtra that has improved labour practices.
Meanwhile, BBC’s Geeta Pandey reports on a case that has galvanised men’s rights activists in India: the suicide of Bengaluru software engineer Atul Subhash. His death has put India’s dowry law back in the spotlight with many alleging that women misuse laws to harass their husbands.
While dowries have been outlawed since 1961, it’s still a prevalent practice to expect the bride’s family to lavish gifts upon the groom’s family. According to the NCRB, almost 35,000 brides were killing India between 2017 and 2022 over dowry—that’s an average of 20 women a day. In 2022 alone, over 6,000 bridges were murdered over dowry—an average of 18 women a day.
“Police say they are still investigating the allegations and counter-allegations but Subhash’s suicide has led to growing calls to rewrite—even scrap—India’s stringent anti-dowry law—Section 498A of the India Penal Code,” says the BBC report ‘A man’s suicide leads to clamour around India’s dowry law.’
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
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