Hyderabad: The silver screen has indeed been a dream world for millions. Characters played by actors have made people awestruck as well as crestfallen. And many have been immortalised for the characters they have played.
The big screen was eventually boxed in a small screen that made the actor enter the homes of people at an appointed time. First the turn of knobs and then the soft push on the buttons of remote control bars were enough to raise a storm in a teacup or spice up things on dinner tables at homes of millions.
Now, the evolution of entertainment with Over-The-Top (OTT) media has made the classification redundant. Soon it's likely to even make big-screen experience a thing of the past. With the idea of appointed viewing, which dominated the television and film space for decades giving way to 'viewing at will,' classification of actors and their stardom is also undergoing some random changes.
Interestingly enough, many yesteryear actors have seen a revival of their careers through OTT platforms. India is seeing the re-emergence of actors that were cast away in the storm of competition in the industry finding their unique spaces in the OTT world.
One actor who has leveraged the new technology and is probably reaching the second prime of his acting career is Saif Ali Khan. Saif Ali Khan's latest, Tandav and Sacred Games have touched controversy but the production houses have been telling the narrative for an evolved Indian audience. The audience for Sas-Bahu plots were there in the 90s and waned out in 2000, but Indian audiences have evolved and so have the storytelling styles.
The rural audiences are in transition and the urban audiences want newer millennial and post-millennial stories. They want realism, most of them don't want the perfect story, they want their hero flawed, natural and human, battling the real problems of a real world. Manoj Bajpai's Family Man tells the story of an unglamorous secret agent keeping the country safe at the same time battling an Indian middle-class man's challenges. Sushmita Sen and Chandra Singh's Aarya revolves around a normal Indian family forced to enter the crime world to the point of surviving and dominating it. Bobby Deol's Aashram was again a complex narrative meant for the post-truth Indian audience.
Unglamorous reality has its appeal and actors away from the big lights of a Rs 500 crore budget film tend to perform much better, explore characters longer and have a better screen presence to express in the longer version of a web series that has the trappings of cinema, but is an out-of-the-box creature that neither fall in the description of a two-and-half-hour film nor in the section of half-an-hour soap operas that dominated television.
The resurrection of several actors on the OTT platform-driven web series that explore and voice the unorthodox narratives have not been lost out on the government. It is now trying to bring these platforms under some form of a regulatory system which still, like the OTT platform, remains undefined in its scope. There is a change in the horizon where sidelined talents that had the grit to hang-on have found an avenue to express. When the industry was on the verge of being targeted for nepotism, strangely a leveller has emerged in India's entertainment horizon that seems to be free of lobbies for now.
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