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This Diwali should I gift Chocolates or Mithai?
All of us know that as Diwali is nearing there is always a debate; should I gift Chocolates or mithai at home, to my friends and my business partners. It’s been a tradition that every part of India celebrates this great festival of lights by sharing joy and happiness with sweets. But over a period of time as the new generation has entered this world there has also been a marginal deviation in the thinking when it comes to gifting and sharing sweets during diwali. This is partially because of the strategy adopted by many chocolate brands (which include homemade chocolate brands and products from the big MNC’s) who have entered this market to capture some share of the mithai market during this great festival across India. Let’s look at some key differentiators between the two.
1. Traditional & Emotional: Diwali is a festival which has lot of history and tradition which date backs to many years. Most of them love to preserve the values of traditions connected with sweets made and prepared at home. These traditionally prepared sweets bring in plenty of love and emotional expressions when they are exchanged with your relatives, family members and friends. While the promotional campaigns of many chocolate brands try to bring the emotions through their advertising but they are not able to capture the real essence that a mithai is able to deliver. Every ingredient that goes into a mithai has that warmth and emotional connection with the audience which touches his or her heart.
2. Wider Choice: There is no limit when you think of preparing mithai. Since mithai is very meticulously prepared by hand the touch of authenticity further enhances its taste, which is missing in chocolates though some brands try to use some special ingredients to come closer to the mithai. The good old parents and grandparents always relish the wider choice that one has when it comes to mithai. The natural ingredients have more positive impression as compared to the artificial flavors.
3. Pricing v/s Presentation: Mithai’s are still easily affordable as the prices are not so steep. You have a larger choice to pick from. You can taste it at the sweet shop before you decide to buy your preferred mithai. And when you prepare it at home you can use genuine ingredient to make it healthier, tasty and less expensive. This is not true with Chocolates but when it comes to Corporate gifting due to its attractive packaging and presentation Chocolates scores over the mithai.
4. Innovative & Delicious: One can experiment lot of innovation while preparing a Mithai and that has been the hallmark of traditional sweets. One of the most popular items that have caught over the years has been the mithai for health conscious audience. This is prepared from quality dry fruits which are preferred over the chocolates by many diabetics as chocolates are perceived to be more rich and sweet. But chocolates have a larger shelf life compared to mithai and therefore it has an added advantage as compared to mithai when gifting to the corporate and sending it out of station through couriers, to far off friends.
Both chocolates and mithais have their merits and demerits when it comes to sharing and gifting during diwali. But with the change in the audience pattern there is a different point of view between the two. While mithai has still stuck to the core values of maintaining the traditional image but the chocolates has wooed the new generation audience with their product and packaging to explore chocolates instead of mithai every diwali and every other festive season.
Let us wait and watch the various marketers in this category are planning and what would be their strategy to woo the mithai audience.
(These are purely personal views of Ganapathy Viswanathan, who is an independent communication consultant with over two decades of experience in branding, communication and public relations, and indiantelevision.com does not subscribe to these views.)
MUMBAI: 2025 will be remembered as the year India’s OTT industry stopped chasing scale for its own sake and began reckoning with how audiences actually consume content. Completion rates fell, patience wore thin and the limits of long-form excess became impossible to ignore. In this guest column, Pratap Jain, founder and CEO of ChanaJor, traces how micro-drama moved from the fringes to the centre of viewing behaviour, why short-form fiction emerged as a retention engine rather than a trend, and how platforms that respected time, habit and emotional payoff were the ones that truly grew up in 2025.
If there is one thing 2025 will be remembered for in the Indian OTT industry, it’s this: the industry finally stopped pretending.
Stopped pretending that bigger automatically meant better.
Stopped pretending that viewers had endless time.
Stopped pretending that scale without retention was success.
What began as a quiet reset in 2023 and a cautious correction in 2024 turned into a very visible shift in 2025. Business models matured. Content strategies tightened. And most importantly, platforms started aligning themselves with how Indians actually watch content, not how the industry wished they would.
At the centre of this shift was micro-drama—not as a trend, but as a behavioural inevitability.
When OTT finally understood the time problem
For years, long episodes were treated as a marker of seriousness. A 45–60 minute runtime was almost a badge of credibility. Shorter formats were pushed to the margins, labelled as “snack content” or “mobile-only.”
That belief quietly collapsed in 2025.
What platform data showed very clearly was not a drop in interest—but a drop in patience. Viewers weren’t rejecting stories. They were rejecting commitment.
Across platforms, the same patterns appeared:
* First-episode drop-offs on long-form shows kept increasing
* Completion rates continued to slide
* Viewers were sampling more titles but finishing fewer
At the same time, shows with episodes in the six to 10 minute range started showing the opposite behaviour: higher completion, higher repeat viewing, and stronger daily habit formation.
Micro-drama didn’t win because it was short. It won because it respected time.
Micro-Drama didn’t arrive loudly. It took over quietly.
There was no single moment when micro-drama “launched” in India. It crept in through dashboards and retention charts.
By mid-2025, it was clear that viewers were happy watching four, five, sometimes six short episodes in one sitting—even when they wouldn’t finish a single long episode. Romance, relationship drama, slice-of-life conflict, and grounded comedy worked especially well.
This wasn’t disposable content. It was compressed storytelling.
In shorter formats, there was no room for indulgence. Every episode had to move the story forward. Weak writing was punished faster. Strong writing was rewarded immediately.
Micro-drama raised the bar instead of lowering it.
Where ChanaJor naturally fit into this shift
ChanaJor didn’t pivot to micro-drama in 2025 because the market demanded it. In many ways, the platform was already built around the same viewing behaviour.
From the beginning, ChanaJor focused on short-to-mid-length fictional stories that felt close to everyday Indian life—hostels, rented flats, office romances, small-town relationships, young people figuring things out. Stories that didn’t need heavy context or cinematic scale to connect.
What worked in ChanaJor’s favour in 2025 was clarity:
* A clearly defined audience
* Tight episode lengths
* Storytelling that prioritised emotion and pace over spectacle
While several platforms rushed to copy global micro-drama formats, ChanaJor stayed rooted in familiar Indian settings and conflicts. That familiarity mattered. Viewers didn’t have to “enter” the world of the show—it already felt like theirs.
Why audiences started responding differently
One of the biggest misconceptions going into 2025 was that audiences wanted shorter content because their attention spans had reduced. That wasn’t entirely true.
What viewers actually wanted was meaningful payoff per minute.
On platforms like ChanaJor, episodes didn’t waste time setting the mood for ten minutes. Conflicts arrived early. Characters were recognisable within moments. Emotional hooks landed fast.
A typical consumption pattern looked like real life:
* One episode during a break
* Two more before sleeping
* A few the next day
This is how viewing habits are built—not through marketing spends, but through comfort and consistency.
Viewers came back not because every show was a blockbuster, but because they knew what kind of experience to expect.
2025 was also the year OTT faced business reality
The other big change in 2025 was on the business side. Subscriber growth slowed. Discounts stopped hiding churn. Customer acquisition costs rose.
Platforms were forced to ask harder questions:
* Are viewers finishing what they start?
* Are they returning without reminders?
* Is this content worth what we’re spending on it?
This is where micro-drama began outperforming expectations. A well-written short series could deliver sustained engagement without massive budgets. It didn’t peak for one weekend and disappear—it stayed alive through repeat viewing.
Platforms like ChanaJor benefited because they weren’t chasing inflated launch numbers. The focus was on consistency and retention, not noise.
Failures Became Visible Faster
2025 also exposed weaknesses brutally.
Several platforms assumed micro-drama was a shortcut—short episodes, quick shoots, instant traction. What they discovered was that bad writing fails faster in short formats than in long ones.
Viewers dropped off within minutes. Episodes were abandoned mid-way. Weak stories had nowhere to hide.
Micro-drama didn’t forgive laziness. It amplified it.
The platforms that survived were the ones that treated short storytelling with the same seriousness as long-form—sometimes more.
OTT Stopped Chasing Prestige and Started Chasing Habit
Perhaps the most important shift in 2025 wasn’t technical or creative—it was psychological.
OTT stopped trying to look like cinema. It stopped chasing validation through scale and awards alone. It began behaving like what it actually is in people’s lives: a daily companion.
Platforms like ChanaJor found their space here because that mindset was already baked in. The goal wasn’t to dominate a weekend launch. It was to quietly become part of someone’s everyday viewing routine.
That shift changed everything—from release strategies to how success was measured.
What 2025 Ultimately Taught the Industry
By the end of the year, three truths were impossible to ignore:
* Time is the most valuable thing a viewer gives you
* Retention matters more than reach
* Format must follow behaviour, not ego
Micro-drama didn’t take over because it was fashionable. It took over because it fit real life.
Looking Ahead
Micro-drama is not replacing long-form storytelling. It is redefining the baseline of engagement.
Longer shows will survive—but only when they earn their length. Short-form fiction will continue to evolve, becoming sharper, more emotionally confident, and better written.
Platforms like ChanaJor have shown that it’s possible to grow without shouting—by understanding the audience, respecting their time, and telling stories that feel real.
2025 wasn’t the year OTT became smaller. It was the year it became smarter.
Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect our own.
