The changing face of hindi film entrepreneurs
A still from Band Baaja Baaraat
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Scam 1992 (on Sony Liv), which told the story of
Harshad Mehta in granular detail, was the breakthrough series. It followed his rise from a lowly stockbroker to a messiah who controlled the fate of the market, painting Mehta as simultaneously arrogant and ambitious, irrepressible and charismatic, leaping from risk to risk without a care for failure. It was the most compelling portrait yet of an entrepreneur on Indian screens.
In the black-and-white era, as well as the first two decades of colour cinema in India, film characters with an entrepreneurial spirit were rare. There were practical reasons for this. In the post-independence years, it was difficult for young people to strike out on their own. When the hero in a 1950s or 60s film ran a business—or ran from it, like Shammi Kapoor in