Ekta Kapoor 2.0

IF EKTA KAPOOR’S television universe in 2000 locked up the woman at home, put her on a pedestal, and threw away the key, leaving all the business to the suave man of the world, the 2020 universe created by her stream­ing service, ALTBalaji, has inverted that algorithm. In 2000, it was all about women they could relate to and men they could fantasise about. Now, though, man-children are in the throes of arrested development, borrowing money from their mothers, while grown-up women of the world obsess about making their own fortunes at work and running their homes on their own terms.

You could call it karma. In 2000, Ekta Kapoor’s soaps on Star Plus took women back into the home from which they had escaped, some to live in singleton splendour in Tara on Zee TV, others to breathe the freedom of divorce in Saans on Star Plus. Where women had shown even in the late 1980s that they could become IPS officers (Udaan) or social activists (Rajni), at the beginning of the millennium, Kapoor remade them as domestic goddesses and nothing more.Educated, professional and independent women were marginalised, those who practised the dark arts of kitchen politics were given centre stage.

So it’s only fair that she is the power behind new streaming series such as Kehne Ko Humsafar Hain in which the institu­tion of marriage takes such a beating that the central male character tries it (almost) thrice and Mentalhood in which a charac­ter spells it out, just in case, we missed it: “Saas-bahu fights are 20 years old. Today’s war is between stay-at-home moms and working moms.”

Twenty years on, Ekta Kapoor’s empire of stories stretches from televi­sion to movies to streaming series. The world that Balaji Telefilms constructed for viewers, with K-series upon K-series, is slowly unravelling with her desi digital alter ego, ALTBalaji. Reflecting the coun­try’s changing urban reality, Kapoor is striving to give women back the freedom her soaps denied them for two decades: the liberty to choose work over home, divorce over marriage, and elegant jump­suits over blingy sarees. And yes, argu­ments now end in cutting words rather than stinging slaps, repeated thrice.

In this universe, fortysomething women can contemplate babies through surrogacy to bring joy to their much younger second husbands, fiftysomething fathers of two married women can yearn to change nappies and mop up puke for their new babies with their second wives.

The reason for this change could be, a steady growth in production of serials for television, cutting-edge movies such as Udta Punjab (2016) and Lipstick under My Burkha (2017) made as co-productions, and a three-year-old streaming service, which is now one of the top five OTT platforms in the country. All this and with an ear to the ground in creating a more relatable woman for OTT. Where once, on TV, the woman had no choice but to suffer silently as her husband took a lover or transformed into Mad Mata with a gun when her son raped his wife, she can now, in Kehne Ko Humsafar Hain, take herself off with her unborn baby and move to an­other life in another country. Where once the woman had no choice but to put up with a habitually drunk husband, she can now treat him like the man child he is in Karrle Tu BhiMohabbat (2017-). As Kapoor says, “You have to evolve in your approach towards your work and observation of things happening in society. You have to change with the changing times and try to reflect those changes through your shows, movies, and web series.”

Ekta has always confused her critics. Those who would want to praise her for her independent entrepreneurial achievements feel let down by the way she represents women, while those who endorse her traditionalism are uncom­fortable by her unorthodox personal life. As a single mother who has had a child by surrogacy, Kapoor stands out as an empowered, liberated woman who is creating her own modern version of the family unit. There are other contradic­tions: a child of superstar Jeetendra, she has been at the forefront of introducing new talent into the television industry, from a young Smriti Irani as Tulsi Virani to a young Sushant Singh Rajput as Manav in Pavitra Rishta. As Kapoor says,“I have always been hugely supportive of talent—be it actors, writers, or directors. Before signing them, we don’t see if he/she belongs to Bollywood or from some other part of the country but how tal­ented he or she is and stands true to their respective craft.”

Then there is the risque aspect of ALTBalaji’s series, which includes clearly exploitative stories such as XXX and Gandi Baat. Kapoor prefers to call it con­tent that is versatile and relatable with the mass audience and has a universal appeal. ALTBalaji shows, she says, “Are a healthy mix of thriller, drama, romance, youth drama, horror, comedy amongst others. Each show present on the plat­form or in the pipeline, has been created keeping in mind the audience’s interest across demographic and sociographic segments. Though thriller and action genres are the popular ones among the male audience, we have also witnessed an interesting trend, where male view­ers are extensively consuming shows like Mentalhood which is based on moth­erhood, the teenage drama lass of 2020 and It Happened in Calcutta amongst others.” This raciness, however, doesn’t endear her to the rightwing constitu­ency, which would normally have been her greatest votaries.

The controversies tend to obscure Ekta’s innate talent for giving the audi­ence what they want to watch. So even as the OTT giants Amazon and Netflix focus on the big cities, she has decided to steer her entertainment towards other cities, and has commissioned 57 shows in the next 18 months between Balaji and content partner ZEE5. There are movies lined up, TV shows that are running and the OTT platform has 62 original web series already in the library. In 2020 alone, the publicly listed parent company Balaji Telefilms (of which the family owns 34.3 per cent) produced 823 hours of content. ALTBalaji has seen a 100 per cent rise in its subscription base every year in the last three years. CEO Nachiket Pantvaidya says: “Fifty-six per cent of our consumers are from the non-metro and tier-II/tier-III towns. This rise in viewership is a growing testament to the huge untapped tier-II, III and IV markets for OTT players.”

It helps to have structured R&D, with detailed analytics that track consumer lifetime value (LTV), user data and gener­ate behavioural patterns, especially from users’ drop-off on registration flow. Says Pantvaidya,“In order to provide viewers with an enhanced and seamless viewing experience, we designed the app to have minimum clicks and were able to reduce drop-offs by a substantial percentage. We have also seen deeper engagement of the platform with consumers watch­ing more shows during the lockdown including older library content.”

She has her critics too. Filmmaker and creator of the popular Tara, Vinta Nanda, says,“She’s in the numbers game, which oscillates between a censorious moral attitude towards self-indulgence and ab­solute surrender to base sexual behaviour among characters; be they criminally correct or not. Her storytelling style is very hyper and unapologetic about remaining focused on the bottom line to keep her shareholders happy. Change can only come when she puts her weight behind progressive storytelling, which doesn’t need to depend on regressive behaviours, crime or sex to carry a narrative forward from one scene to the next.”

Kapoor denies that she looks at everything made by the studio. She says, “There are professional teams at the job headed by creative directors and it is practically and humanly impossible to watch everything.” But her actors vouch for her creative insights. Mona Singh who plays Ananya aka Wife No 2 in Kehne Ko Humsafar Hain says the cast insists on listening to the voice notes that Kapoor gives the creative teams dur­ing meetings. Gurdeep Kohli, who plays Poonam, Wife No 1, in the same series, says her handwritten insights scribbled on the margins of their scripts can alter the ethos of entire scenes.

The 45-year-old is famously a stickler for her vision. When she felt the second half of one of her biggest movie hits, Once upon a Time in Mumbaai (2010), wasn’t working, she got the high-pow­ered cast (which included Ajay Devgn, Emraan Hashmi, Kangana Ranaut, et­cetera) to drop everything else they were doing and reshot 20 per cent of the film.
Despite being in the public eye for 20 years, Kapoor has remained quite enig­matic, rationing her public appearances partly on account of being a nervous speaker and partly because of a deep-seated insecurity about her body. She has allowed the urban legends to build around her, whether it is the number of rings she wears on her fingers (when she takes them off, even that makes news), her weekly visits to Siddhivinayak tem­ple in Mumbai or her 3 AM meetings.

But her laidback, shaggy-haired public persona can’t conceal her shrewd brain, which she feeds with smart read­ing and smarter visual snacking. She is constantly updating her knowledge and sharpening her instinct, and when she says hers is a company that makes mil­lionaires, not mere millions, she means it. Her shows have created an army of new stars, resurrected the careers of oth­ers, and generated a slew of writers and directors for a more democratised world of storytelling.

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