Sessions | Talks
14:00 - 14:15 ⋅ Afternoon
Bangalore International Centre
We say movies are getting longer, louder, and running out of ideas. This talk follows the data trail Bollywood leaves behind, charting the economics, representation, and changing tastes of the our movie-obsessed nation.
Surbhi Bhatia
Data Journalist·Independent
Everyone has opinions about Bollywood. Movies are getting longer. Actresses have a shelf life. Everything is a remake. Audiences don't go to theatres anymore.
Surbhi spent the last few years asking what happens when you stop repeating the chatter and start plotting it.
What followed is a series of visual stories about the economics of movie-making in Bollywood: the risk-reward dynamics of production and distribution, on and off-screen representation, box office patterns, and how audience tastes have shifted over decades. Each project starts with the long data trail a film leaves behind after the opening-weekend noise fades, and ends with a chart that says something the gossip never quite could.
This lightning talk walks through those projects and the process behind them. Using her own work and the visualizations that inspired it, Surbhi shows how pop culture we already obsess over can be a rich and surprisingly rigorous ground for visual exploration.
You will leave with a fresh way of looking at Bollywood, and hopefully, a few ideas for the data trails hiding in the culture you care about most.
Surbhi is a data journalist, and has spent many years searching for insights and composing stories that are coded and designed to turn numbers into striking and memorable visuals. She loves working on diverse topics to uncover what really may be happening in the boundless worlds of bollywood movies, digital commerce, climate change, urbanisation, and chocolates!
She has worked with different mindsets across many settings like: urgency in newsrooms, immersion in academia, clarity in communications, and creativity in design studios. She agrees that correlation is not causation, but believes strongly that walkable cities make for a better life. She has worked with xKDR Forum, Mint, World Bank, Thibi, Open Network for Digital Commerce, and written for Kontinentalist, Nikkei Asia, Indiaspend, The Hindu, and more. Her work has been recognised by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW), Festival de Datos, and The Pudding.