And so, we drive towards Andheri, to meet a leading film distributor. Our film, “Pune Highway” is ready, the last pass of sub-titling is done, and so we drive, Bugs Bhargava Krishna and I… excited to show our year and half labour of love to him—it’s the first screening to a neutral person. The distributor, dear reader, as the term suggests is the person/team, who distributes your film, market it, if you choose to go “big”—he will tell us, any one of the following things… We should refrain from risk, stay with OTT, or maybe he will advise that the movie has elements that will appeal to a larger mass, maybe we should undertake a conservative 100 multiplexes in Maharashtra, before it finds its resting home at one of the OTTs. Or he may say, this is potentially a sleeper hit, let’s go to 1,000 cinemas in select cities, our film has bits of everything, whodunnit, whydunnit, howdunnit, bromance, romance.

My banker says, with some fear in his eyes—“Rahul Bhai, your film is OTT, not for the masses but the classes” (that’s such a cliché I think to myself)—do you want to  compete with s0me big SRK release?”