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Maharashtra governor Ramesh Bias to inaugurate Bharat Rang Mahotsav 2024
Mumbai: The National School of Drama (NSD) has announced the forthcoming Bharat Rang Mahotsav (BRM 2024), the world’s largest theatre festival. BRM will kick off with a splendid inaugural ceremony at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai on 1 February 2024. His excellency governor of Maharashtra Ramesh Bais, accompanied by NSD chairperson Paresh Rawal, will officially open the festival with a special ceremony.
The event is scheduled to take place from 1 February to 21 February, 2024. Spanning across 15 cities in the country, this 21-day theatre festival will feature over 150 performances, and numerous workshops, discussions, and master classes, providing a rich tapestry of Indian and global theatre traditions. Additionally, this year will commemorate the 25-year-anniversary of the inception of Bharat Rang Mahotsav.
The Mumbai press conference was addressed by NSD director Chittaranjan Tripathy, NSD Society chairperson Paresh Rawal, BRM ambassador (Rang Doot) Pankaj Tripathi, Mukti Foundation founder & chairperson Smitha Thackeray, Shri Chattrapati Shivaji Smarak Mandal (Trust) chairman Brigadier Sudhir Sawant and other prominent members of NSD were present at the press conference.
To promote theatre in Mumbai, Mukti Cultural Hub has partnered with Bharat Rang Mahotsav. Mukti Foundation chairperson Smita Thackeray has provided crucial support, enabling Mukti Cultural Hub to host three days festival from 4 to 6 February. Additionally, Shivaji Natya Mandir has generously supported the festival, hosting two days festival in their theatre auditorium on 2 and 3 February.
This year’s festival revolves around the theme Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam, Vande Bharangam, fostering global unity among thespians and artists. Emphasizing social harmony, it seeks to create a sense of a shared world – the entire world one large family, bringing diverse cultures together through the powerful medium of the performing arts for a truly enriching experience.
NSD director Chittaranjan Tripathy expressed profound enthusiasm for the impending festival, stating, “As we embark on the 25th year of the Bharat Rang Mahotsav, it is truly a momentous occasion that reflects our enduring commitment to artistic excellence and cultural diversity. Over the post quarter-century, this festival has served as a guiding light, illuminating the rich tapestry of global theatre traditions. The upcoming edition promises to be a grand celebration, showcasing not only the extraordinary creativity within the theatrical realm but also emphasizing the beauty of collaboration. We are dedicated to fostering the magic of theatre, providing a platform for diverse voices and narratives to thrive. This year’s festivities will not only mark a milestone but also reaffirm our steadfast belief in the transformative power of the performing arts.”
In Mumbai, this cultural extravaganza, set to enchant audiences for six exhilarating days from 1 to 6 February 2024, will culminate with a grand closing ceremony on 6 February at Mukti Cultural Hub. It will feature a total of six captivating plays, each a masterpiece in its own right, spanning various genres and languages. It will commence with the compelling play Humare Ram, featuring renowned actor and NSD alumnus Ashutosh Rana, produced by Felicity Theatre, Delhi, followed by a diverse array of productions, including ‘GAJAB TICHI ADA’ by Rangpeeth Theatre, Mumbai, ‘BABUJI’ by NSD Repertory Company, New Delhi, ‘THE ZOO STORY’ by Panchkosi, Delhi, ‘TODI MILL FANTASY’ by Theatre Flamingo, Goa, and ‘SWAHA’ by Darpan, Lucknow.
The 25th year of this festival holds special significance as it brings together diverse theatrical voices in a celebration of the magic of theatre. Audiences can expect a captivating array of theatrical forms, including international productions, folk and traditional plays, modern dramas, graduate showcases, and collegiate street plays. The festival will unfold in parallel venues across Mumbai, Pune, Bhuj, Vijayawada, Jodhpur, Dibrugarh, Bhubaneswar, Patna, Ramnagar, and Srinagar, ensuring a nationwide celebration of the transformative power of theatre.
In an innovative move, this year NSD also introduces Rang Heat, an annual initiative aimed at establishing Asia’s inaugural global theatre market and nurturing international collaborations. in the theatrical domain. Rong Hoat will unite theatre artists, programmers, patrons, and supporters, fostering the discovery of hidden talent, showcasing international projects, and facilitating both creative and financial partnerships. Participants will gain exposure to a broader audience, fostering potential collaborative ventures and injecting dynamism into the global theatre landscape.
The BRM extends beyond the stage, offering a plethora of enriching experiences. Parallel exhibitions, director-audience dialogues, discussions, and seminars will explore various facets of theatre, sparking stimulating conversations and insights. Attendees can engage in masterclasses with veteran thesplans, immerse themselves in the vibrant Rang Haat, and explore the diverse offerings at the Food Bazaar, letting the spirit of theatre truly captivate them.
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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.
