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SWA’s ‘Sab Khairiyat?’ highlights need for mental health support in writing community
Mumbai: The Screenwriters Association (SWA), a collective voice for the rights and welfare of screenwriters, recently hosted ‘Sab Khairiyat?’, a discussion focusing on seeking mental health support as writers and their challenges. Moderated by the renowned screenwriter Anjum Rajabali, the session brought together esteemed screenwriters Preeti Mamgain, Ishani Banerjee, Mitesh Shah, and Adhiraj Sharma to share their personal experiences and insights.
The session highlighted the often-overlooked mental health struggles that screenwriters face, including isolation, loneliness, the stress of meeting deadlines, and anxiety due to financial insecurity. With about 50 per cent of screenwriters enrolled in screenwriting courses seeking psychiatric help, the discussion aimed to break the taboo around the need for mental health support within the creative community and dispelling the image of the tortured artist. It also focused on the collective bargaining for the fundamental rights of writers.
Anjum Rajabali elaborated on the concept of losing oneself in the passion for writing, often abandoning reality to immerse in their fictional worlds. He discussed the dual nature of writers’ psyches, swinging between feelings of godliness and servitude, which fuels their creativity. He emphasized, “Writers have to ‘bleed on the page,’ as temporary loss of self-identity while being deeply invested in characters yields powerful results. Self-doubt is an inevitable part of the creative process and writers must embrace this journey to succeed.”
Adding further, Mitesh Shah, said, “I prefer observing my characters from a third-person perspective, which helps me grow as a writer and person. For me, achieving material success did not equate to happiness, which led me to take breaks to enjoy life.” He shared his experiences with burnout, having taken on extensive work in television writing.
President of the Screenwriter’s Association of India, Preeti Mamgain, opened up about how passion can turn into possessiveness when writers become deeply attached to the characters they create. She spoke about how letting go of her ideas and characters, especially when facing initial rejection, was extremely challenging. Learning to collaborate and accept changes to her work was traumatic but ultimately beneficial.
Adhiraj Sharma spoke about his initial desire to create his own world through writing, only to realize that even in this space, complete control was unattainable. He discussed how writing became a way to escape the real world, but as guidelines and rules came in, he found that even in his own world, he couldn’t be a god. He also highlighted the mental toll of becoming a “creative machine” in the advertising industry.
Ishani Banerjee discussed the cathartic nature of writing, where distress in characters elicits empathy from the audience. She believes that writers are merely vessels for the stories that demand to be told. She also spoke about how the interplay of distress in characters and the empathy it evokes in the audience makes the whole experience profoundly cathartic.
The event highlighted the inherent strength in safeguarding writers’ rights and ensuring fair treatment through the collective bargaining of fundamental rights. It emphasized how solidarity and support can help bring about a profound sense of security among writers and keep anxiety at bay. By nurturing dialogue, enhancing awareness, and staunchly advocating for writers’ mental well-being, the event marked a significant stride toward a more robust, equitable future for the industry.
Few highlights-
1. Passion turns into possessiveness when writers create their own world in their stories. For Preeti, letting go of the idea of the characters of her stories or facing initial rejection was an extremely difficult challenge.
2. Storytelling serves as a therapeutic outlet for writers, providing a means for self-expression and introspection amidst moments of self-doubt and existential questioning.
3. Writers have a complex relationship with their craft which can also take a toll on their mental health. From navigating the fine line between godlike control and submission to the page, to the therapeutic role, writing can play in resolving personal turmoil.
4. External factors, such as societal upheavals and personal challenges, impact the creative process, highlighting the symbiotic relationship between the writer’s craft and the world around them.
5. Writers shed light on the importance of maintaining a balance between personal struggles and their passion for storytelling and the harsh realities of the industry, revealing the delicate interplay between creativity and pragmatism.
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
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.
