Alam Ara, the first Indian feature film with sound, produced and directed by Ardeshir Irani, was released on March 14, 1931. In the following decades, feature films became one of forces that bind India together. But there are concerns that the number of Indians watching films in cinema theatres is fast declining.

A combination of factors has contributed to the current state of despair, especially in Bollywood. The rise of social media, more than a decade earlier, and Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram turning into public squares, served the greater good initially, but quickly turned into toxic carriers and amplifiers of misinformation and targeted attacks. The immense reach of social media platforms — also encrypted mobile messaging applications such as WhatsApp — has served to magnify the concerted attacks on the Hindi film industry through egregious hashtags and trending campaigns like Boycott Bollywood. Millions of posts carrying misinformation and falsehoods cumulatively created a degree of popular antipathy towards a much-loved industry.

Cinema and stardom are all about enigma. Over the decades, actors, directors, and producers were inhabitants of an inaccessible galaxy. Their descent into the social media space seeking engagement and their collaborations with overzealous paparazzi who fed their most banal moments to smartphones, where people saw them in their kitchens, in gyms, in their living rooms, have diminished their mystique and destroyed the myths around them. Further, social media fan clubs of actors — many of them sponsored — started spewing venom at........

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