iWorld
Asian Paints returns with Season 9 of Where The Heart Is
MUMBAI: When doors open and guards drop, homes tend to speak louder than words. That idea sits at the heart of Asian Paints’ long-running storytelling property, Where The Heart Is, which has returned with its ninth season marking more than a decade of chronicling how India’s most recognisable faces actually live when the cameras are no longer rolling.
Launched at an event that blended reflection with quiet nostalgia, Season 9 was positioned not as a reinvention, but as a natural evolution of a platform that has steadily grown alongside changing lifestyles. Opening the season, Asian Paints MD and CEO Amit Syngle traced the origins of the property to the brand’s long-held belief that homes are emotional spaces rather than physical structures. Long before décor trends became social currency, Asian Paints had framed the home as a place of memory, identity and continuity, an idea that later crystallised into its iconic Har Ghar Kuch Kehta Hai philosophy.
That belief, Syngle noted, has only become more relevant with time. As lives get faster and more fragmented, homes remain the one space where people pause, reflect and express who they really are. Where The Heart Is was born from that insight, offering audiences a rare chance to see public personalities in their most private setting away from scripts, applause and performance.
Over the past decade, the digital-first series has grown into one of the brand’s most enduring content properties. It has crossed over 1.5 billion cumulative views, featured more than 50 personalities and opened the doors to over 60 homes across India and abroad. What began as an experiment in long-form digital storytelling has since become a reference point for branded content that prioritises emotion over interruption.
Season 9 builds on that legacy while introducing subtle but significant shifts. This year’s edition opens five distinctive homes, each rooted in a different geography, profession and phase of life. The new line-up includes Sonakshi Sinha and Zaheer Iqbal, Gautam Gambhir, Keerthy Suresh with Antony Thattil, Archana Puran Singh alongside Parmeet Sethi, and entrepreneur Aman Gupta with Priya Gupta.
While the personalities may be familiar, the stories are deliberately intimate. The season leans away from celebrity spectacle and towards everyday details shared meals, favourite corners, inherited furniture, walls layered with memories. Homes are presented not as styled sets, but as living spaces shaped by routine, compromise and affection.
One of the most notable shifts this season is the focus on families. Previous editions often centred on individual journeys; Season 9 places equal emphasis on partners, children and shared decision-making. Viewers see how décor choices become conversations, how renovations reflect evolving priorities, and how personal taste is often negotiated rather than imposed.
The storytelling continues to be helmed by Motion co-founder Joshua Karthik Stories in who has been associated with the property since its early years. Speaking at the launch, Karthik described the series as an exercise in peeling back personas. Once the lights, makeup and public roles are stripped away, what remains is a quieter, more relatable version of the person revealed through the way they inhabit their home.
This year, that intimacy is heightened by a strong theme of transformation. Several episodes explore how spaces change over time through repainting, redesigning, or simply reimagining how a room is used. Rather than showcasing grand makeovers, the series highlights achievable changes: a wall turned into a memory archive, a neglected corner given new purpose, or textures and finishes used to reflect emotional milestones.
That focus mirrors a broader cultural shift. Indian homeowners today are increasingly invested in personalisation, seeing décor not as a one-time project but as an ongoing expression of self. Season 9 taps into this mindset, subtly positioning homes as evolving narratives rather than finished products.
Digitally, Where The Heart Is continues to straddle formats with ease. Designed for relaxed, on-demand viewing, the episodes lend themselves equally to OTT platforms and social feeds, where shorter clips travel widely. Asian Paints has deliberately kept the tone unhurried allowing stories to unfold organically, without the urgency or gloss of traditional advertising.
The result is content that feels observational rather than promotional. The brand’s presence is embedded in the process of transformation and storytelling, not foregrounded as a sales pitch. For viewers, the appeal lies in recognition, the quiet sense that while the homes belong to celebrities, the emotions within them are universal.
As Season 9 rolls out, Where The Heart Is reinforces its place as a cultural archive of sorts, documenting how Indian homes and the people within them continue to evolve. In doing so, Asian Paints once again underscores a simple but enduring truth: trends may change, platforms may shift, but the emotional language of home remains timeless.
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.
