MAM
Fringe festival finally hits Mumbai stage in March
60 plus shows from 10–15 March 2026 at NCPA plus Bandra venues.
MUMBAI: The Fringe is no longer on the fringe, it’s centre stage in Mumbai, ready to turn the city into a creative playground. After nearly 80 years of shaking up global performance culture from Edinburgh to Prague and Adelaide, the world’s largest open-access arts movement makes its India debut with the Mumbai Fringe Festival from 10 to 15 March 2026.
Kicking off at the iconic Tata Theatre, NCPA, the six-day celebration will spill across Bandra’s buzzing creative circuit, Khar Comedy Club, 3 Art House and indifferent @ Gharonda delivering nearly 60 performances in comedy, theatre, poetry, storytelling and experimental work. This isn’t a sit-down spectacle; it’s a city on the move, with audiences hopping between venues to catch new voices and bold ideas in their rawest form.
The lineup mixes homegrown stars with international heavyweights. Rohan Joshi, Kanan Gill, Varun Grover, Aakash Gupta, Priya Malik, Amandeep Khayal, Urooj Ashfaq and Amit Tandon bring the Indian edge, while global gems include Nigel Miles Thomas’s award-winning solo Sherlock Holmes: The Last Act, The Shakespeare Edit’s striking Macbeth adaptation and David Hoskin’s genre-blending Haunted House (mime, comedy, storytelling mash-up). True to Fringe spirit, the programme thrives on intimacy, invention and fearless creative risks.
Tickets are already live on Bookmyshow, with several shows sold out, signalling strong early buzz. Co-founders Steve Gove (of the 25-year-old Prague Fringe) and Simar Singh (UnErase Poetry) are steering the ship, united by the belief that Mumbai and India is primed for the Fringe model.
Steve Gove said, “Bringing Fringe to Mumbai has been a long-held dream. Cities around the world have embraced this model and watched it reshape their creative landscapes. Mumbai has the energy, the appetite and the talent to make this extraordinary.”
Simar Singh added, “The Fringe model gives artists complete freedom. It creates space for new voices and unexpected ideas to meet audiences directly. Mumbai deserves a platform like this.”
Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society chief executive Tony Lankester chimed in, “Born in Scotland nearly 80 years ago, the Fringe has always stood for joy, openness and giving everyone a platform with minimal gatekeeping… We are delighted to see the Mumbai Fringe carry this same spirit forward.”
In a country bursting with artistic tradition, the Fringe’s arrival feels both overdue and electric, a chance for audiences to experience unfiltered, up-close performance that has quietly shaped modern theatre worldwide. Grab tickets on Bookmyshow before the best spots vanish. Mumbai’s creative margins just got a whole lot louder.
AD Agencies
Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
