iWorld
Anthem for Lok Sabha 2014 launched by ADR
NEW DELHI: ‘Wo Waqt Kabhi Jise Aana Tha’(the event that was to happen is now here) is the new anthem of the Association for Democratic Reforms, an NGO working to raise critical issues involved in the Lok Sabha elections. The video has been placed on the NGOs website.
The song, composed and sung by Harpreet, talks about the state of affairs in the nation even after six and a half decades of independence. The video elaborates on how criminalization of politics and the nexus between money, crime and muscle power has affected the governance and delivery of even the bare minimum services and amenities to the citizens of the country.
The video has been directed by Gaurav Raturi, founder of Filmbooth, best known for the International Filmbooth Festival Spoofmania organized in Delhi. The lyrics have been penned by Deepak Dhamija, founder of Shoelace Productions and an IIM- Calcutta alumni.
At a time when around 800 million people will go out to vote in the coming 45 days, the website www.myneta.info will help the electorate to make an informed choice in deciding the future of the nation.
ADR founder trustee Prof Jagdeep Chhokar said, “In the coming elections a fairly large number of young voters will go out to vote for the first time. The song aims at making people realize the power their vote carries. A song has the ability to not only stay on the lips of the people, but it also stays in the mind. Social media has an immense role to play in this election.”
ADR head Anil Verma added, “Music is the food of the soul. The soulful rendering of the ADR Anthem by Harpreet and his team has touched not only our emotional chords but awakens our sensibilities to be a responsible citizen and vote to usher in a change for better governance. Mera Vote Mera Desh!”
Anthem video director Gaurav Raturi said, “Music and visuals go beyond words and slogans. What better story one can get to tell the people of India than to tell the people of India to vote responsibly. We all have tried our best to match the brilliant lyrics and soulful singing by Harpreet. Let’s see how the voters of India find it. All excited to be part of this anthem.”
Harpreet said, “While working on the song, I grew not only as a musician but also as a citizen of the nation. To be a part of ADR’s anthem song was a journey in itself. I never felt I was working on a song, but it was like an act to serve the nation in the real sense.”
Lyricist Deepak Dhamija said, “It is time for people to know that if any revolution has to come, it will come through the ink on the fingers of the people after voting. The political class has ignored the real issues and demands of the people of the nation. It is high time we all come forward to make an informed choice and vote for the right candidate. ADR is doing a great job, and the creative people must come forward to support the cause for which the team of ADR is fighting.”
The ADR anthem song has also been shared by Facebook India as part of ADR-Facebook collaboration for the campaign to create a culture of informed choice.
eNews
How short, addictive story videos quietly colonised the Indian smartphone
A landmark Meta-Ormax study of 2,000 viewers reveals a format that is growing fast, paying slowly and consumed almost entirely in secret
CALIFORNIA, MUMBAI: India has a new entertainment habit, and it arrived without anyone really noticing. Micro dramas, those short, cliffhanger-driven episodic stories built for the smartphone screen, have quietly embedded themselves into the daily routines of millions of Indians, discovered not by design but by algorithmic accident, watched not in living rooms but in bedrooms, on commutes and in the five minutes before sleep.
That, in essence, is the finding of a sweeping new audience study released by Meta and media insights firm Ormax Media at Meta’s inaugural Marketing Summit: Micro-Drama Edition. Titled “Micro Dramas: The India Story” and based on 2,000 personal interviews and 50 depth interviews conducted between November 2025 and January 2026 across 14 states, it is the most comprehensive study of the category in India to date, and its findings are striking.
Sixty-five per cent of viewers discovered micro dramas within the last year. Of those, 89 per cent stumbled upon the format through social media feeds, primarily Instagram and Facebook, without ever searching for it. The algorithm did the heavy lifting. Discovery, as the report puts it bluntly, is algorithm-led, not intent-led.
The typical viewer journey begins with accidental exposure while scrolling, moves through a cliffhanger-driven incompletion hook that makes stopping feel unfinished, and is reinforced by algorithmic repetition until habitual consumption sets in. Only then, when a platform asks for an app download or a payment, does the viewer pause. Trust, not content quality, determines what happens next, and many simply return to the free feed rather than pay. It is a funnel with a wide mouth and a narrow neck.
The numbers on consumption tell their own story. Viewers spend a median of 3.5 hours per week watching micro dramas, spread across seven to eight sessions of roughly 30 minutes each, peaking sharply between 8pm and midnight. Daytime viewing is snackable and low-commitment, squeezed into morning commutes, work breaks and coffee pauses. Night-time is where the format truly lives: private, uninterrupted and, for many viewers, socially invisible. Ninety per cent watch alone, compared to just 43 per cent for long-form OTT content. Half the audience watches during their commute, well above the 37 per cent figure for streaming platforms, a direct reflection of the format’s low time investment advantage.
The audience itself breaks into three segments. Incidental viewers, comprising 39 per cent of the total, are passive consumers who stumble in and rarely seek content actively. Intent-building viewers, the largest group at 43 per cent, are beginning to form habits and seek out episodes but remain cautious. High-intent viewers, just 18 per cent, are the ones who download apps, tolerate ads and occasionally pay: skewing male, younger and urban.
What audiences want from the content is revealing. The top three genres are romance at 72 per cent, family drama at 64 per cent and comedy at 63 per cent, precisely the same top three as Hindi general entertainment television. The format rewards emotional familiarity over complexity. Romance in particular thrives because it demands low cognitive investment, needs no elaborate world-building and plays naturally into the private, pre-sleep viewing window where inhibitions lower and emotional intimacy feels safe.
The most-recalled shows, led by Kuku TV titles such as The Lady Boss Returns, The Billionaire Husband and Kiss My Luck, share a common narrative DNA: rich-poor conflict, hidden identities, power imbalances, melodrama and cliffhangers that make stopping feel physically uncomfortable. Predictability, the research warns, is fatal. Each episode must re-earn attention from scratch.
The terminology question is telling. Despite the industry’s embrace of the phrase “micro drama,” viewers have not adopted it. They call the content “short story videos,” “short dramas,” “reels with stories” or simply “serials.” One respondent from Chennai said bluntly that “micro sounds like a scientific word.” The category is at the stage that OTT occupied in 2019 and podcasts in the same year: widely consumed, poorly named and not yet crystallised in the public imagination.
Platform awareness remains alarmingly thin. Only three platforms, Kuku TV at 78 per cent, Story TV at 46 per cent and Quick TV at 28 per cent, have crossed the 20 per cent awareness threshold. The rest languish in single digits. This creates a trust deficit that directly throttles monetisation: viewers who cannot remember which app they used are hardly primed to enter their payment details.
Yet the appetite is clearly there. Sixty-five per cent of viewers watch only Indian content, drawn by the TV-serial familiarity of the storytelling, the comfort of Hindi as a shared language and the sight of actors they half-recognise from decades of television. South languages are rising fast: Tamil, Telugu and Kannada together account for 24 per cent of first-choice viewing. And AI-generated content, still a novelty, has landed better than expected: 47 per cent of viewers call it creative and unique, with only 6 per cent actively rejecting it.
Shweta Bajpai, director, media and entertainment (India) at Meta, called micro drama “a category that is rewriting the rules of Indian entertainment,” adding that the discovery engine being social distinguishes this wave from previous content formats. Shailesh Kapoor, founder and chief executive of Ormax Media, was characteristically measured: the format, he said, is showing “the early signs of becoming a distinct content category” and, given how closely it aligns with natural mobile behaviour, “has the potential to scale very quickly.”
The format’s fundamental mechanics are working. It enters lives quietly, through boredom and a scrolling thumb, and burrows in through incompletion and habit. The challenge now is monetisation: converting a category of highly engaged but deeply anonymous viewers into paying customers who trust the platform enough to hand over their UPI credentials. The story, as any micro-drama writer knows, is only as good as the next cliffhanger. India’s platforms had better have one ready.
