Outside the Royal Opera House, it poured like notifications do on modern mobiles. The monsoon in Mumbai had already overstayed its welcome by months. Half a year of rain is unheard of here. What is also unheard of is an AI film festival in the bastion of Indian cinema, I’d say the Global South’s cinema -- Bollywood. And that is what I was there to witness: climate change. Outside, the rain poured in veils out of season; inside the Opera House on November 2, a bunch of nerds fueled by dreams of silicon and algorithmic ambitions had gathered to shake Bollywood. Or at least so they think. I had come to witness the tremors. If any.
Climate change, it seems, is the new world order, both meteorologically and culturally. And your opinion on it is as relevant as a physical map inside a self-driving car. The architects of this particular upheaval on this rainy evening were Hardeep Gambhir and Chandan Perla. They and their team, a cohort of late teens and early twenties, had convened the “AI x Filmmaking Festival - Artist Edition.” They drew so much flak for it online that if they had received a rupee for every curse uttered, they could have funded this event on their own.
So, I went. A digital dinosaur in a tar-pit of nascent mammals. And I was assailed by two relentless forces: the unseasonal, vertical river outside, and the seasonal, horizontal energy of several hundred 20-somethings buzzing within one of India's oldest art venues. The first words I eavesdropped were not about mise-en-scène or the French New Wave, or even the death of parallel cinema in Bollywood, but “short attention span,” “moat,” “burn cash,” and “Sequoia.” I had come early to feel the vibe, and the vibe smelled distinctly of venture capital, not vinegar from old film reels. But that, I suspected, was the entire point. This wasn't about cinema as we knew it; it was about cinema as a deployable, digital asset.
The sheer, ludicrous velocity (not to mention audacity) of it all was the first clue. The entire ‘festival’ was conceived and birthed in three weeks. Three weeks! Less time to craft a good logline for a screenplay I plan to write. These kids, who by their own admission knew little of cinema’s history, ironically knew everything about its potential future. But importantly, they knew how to manufacture an Event, and they understood how to mine for the most important currency today: attention.
The main attraction on the red carpet wasn't a star, but a robot from the Chinese company Unitree, christened ‘Vidyut’ with a sticker on its chest plate. It reminded me of a joke from a time when I was their age, in the last millennium. The Russians unveiled a centimetre-thick microfibre so strong it could tow a truck. Not to be outdone, the Chinese engineered a version a millimetre thick. The Americans flaunted one that was just a nanometer. And the Indians? They asked the scientists to peer through a microscope. Etched on each fibre: “Made in India.” ‘Vidyut’ was a fitting metaphor. The kids here aren’t building the fibre, also known as Bollywood; they believe they’re stamping their name on its future.
I am a fossil here. A cassette tape in a Spotify playlist. The number of times Hardeep and Chandan referenced being "snubbed" by Bollywood smacked of a delicious, painful inexperience. At my age, you stop taking snubs personally, or even talking about it, you ‘meh’ and move on. But at their age and for today’s generation, every snub is a foundational myth, a superhero scar to be displayed on the banner of their revolution. These are young entrepreneurs accustomed to the instant gratification of a 'shoutout' and its resultant social capital. They see Bollywood’s gated community and can’t fathom why the gate won’t open to a well-crafted tweet. Come to think of it, why shouldn’t it?
Chandan Perla took the stage first, a full 20 minutes late. I feel at home instantly, at least in this department, they remember IST stands for Indian Stretchable Time, another joke from my millennium. His smile was a permanent, radiant fixture, a beacon of unwavering belief. “Energy, energy, energy!” he chanted, trying to coax it from an audience whose scepticism was as palpable as Mumbai humidity. Both he and Hardeep spoke of using AI to “democratise filmmaking,” a noble, potent phrase. They had even managed to lure some Bollywood dignitaries – Tanmay Bhat, Karan Anshuman, and Shakun Batra – who discussed AI with the reverence and healthy caution of seasoned chefs examining a new, powerful, but potentially toxic spice.
The generation gap was the headline act of the evening. It was in the way Tanmay Bhat laughed, a touch insulted, when Hardeep referred to him first as an "influencer." For Hardeep's generation, that’s not an insult; it’s a job title with more clout than ‘critic’. The language of the event was superlative-laden, with things not just being good or bad but mind-blowing or not even worth mentioning. Hardeep spoke of July 2025 with the nostalgia of events that occurred years ago, typical of the young. The event, funded with what seemed like a crore of sponsor money (AI companies shooting from the shoulders of these kids) thrown at a wall of pure vibe, was a grand experiment: give teams AI tools, a few days, and see what sticks. From 1,265 three-member teams who applied, 13 films emerged.
The films weren’t bad. But they weren't a revolution, either. As someone who writes about AI, I’ve seen work that is more polished, more conceptually daring, and completed in a shorter time, such as that done by my friend Sumit Purohit. A year ago, these films might have taken my breath away. Now, they felt… average. Yet, within that was the glimmer of potential. The winning short, Astitva, was a sci-fi imagination about a world where humans who can replace body parts with digital ones have their emotions, and it falls to machines to remind them of it. The irony was as thick as the rain outside. Here was a film, birthed from artificial intelligence, mourning the loss of human feeling to artificial intelligence – the very algorithms that hijack our attention and curate our digital lives. It was a good metaphor, not for the future, but our present.
Chaos was the event's co-pilot. The event lineup printout sheet was distributed approximately an hour after the event began. There was a jazz band. They were terrific, filling the opera house with soulful, analogue waves. But why? Why a jazz band at an AI film festival? I fancied a scenario: someone, in a panic, realised that after the screening of the films, the judges would need about half an hour to judge and debate the winner. What would the audience do in that time? Another person must have suggested a great jazz band they knew. A decision must have been made instantly, on the day of the event, for the modern AI stage to be ironically clogged with ancient, beautiful instruments. Why not screen global AI short films in that gap? The thought, it would seem, never had the bandwidth to land. In three weeks, there is only time to do, not to ponder. This was the event equivalent of a stream-of-consciousness novel, written in real-time by a dozen authors on 12 different stimulants.
It brought to mind an Assamese phrase my father often used to describe my generation’s doings, which, weirdly, I’m using to describe theirs: ‘dhan kheror jui’ – the fire that catches in dry hay. It burns with an intense, brilliant, but terrifyingly brief flame, yet leaves behind not even a single ember as evidence. This festival was precisely that. A glorious, crackling, momentary blaze. More bootcamp than festival. Yet, let’s not forget, while it burns, such a fire can also ignite a wildfire that consumes entire landscapes. For the sake of these kids, I hope this is the start of a conflagration that burns down the old, dead wood to make way for some new growth.
The final, poignant irony struck me as I prepared to leave. These kids, who have likely never queued for a film festival pass, were throwing one. And though I didn’t stay for the special, invite-only afterparty, I could see the final layer of absurdity: in Mumbai, the legal drinking age is 25. Almost none of these aspiring world-beaters would be allowed to legally buy a whisky in the city they've come to conquer. The arrogance to challenge a century-old industry, it seems, comes free with youth, no ID required.
I don’t have children. But my friends do. And when I am with them, the chasm is evident, wider than what I had with my parents' generation. They are digital natives to my analogue immigrant. They see a film not as a sequence of captured moments on celluloid, locked in cans, but as a fluid, mutable file of pixels and bytes that can be altered at a moment’s fancy using AI. And no, I won’t become my father to call that a sin; it is simply a new grammar.
I am obsolete. My kind is obsolete. And I have made peace with my impending fossilisation. My only hope is that Bollywood realises its own obsolescence a little faster, so it might have a fighting chance at evolution. The kids here will not change much with a brazen three-week flex they mistakenly called a ‘festival’. But they have indeed planted the seeds for those like them to think, do and not see the world for what it is, but change it according to their immutable will.
I have spent a lifetime wrestling with imposter syndrome. These kids? They have the unshakeable certainty of those who have never known a world without a search bar. They are sure. And that certainty, that unreasonableness, is their greatest fuel.
George Bernard Shaw once said that all progress depends on the unreasonable man. Steve Jobs, a prophet for this new congregation, paraphrased it: the ones who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. On that rain-lashed November night, inside a temple of the old gods of cinema, a bunch of crazy kids, too young to legally drink, tried to build a new altar. They did it with chaos, with cash, and with a breathtaking, poignant, and utterly unreasonable faith in the power of a vibe energised by AI. The rain outside seemed like a standing ovation from a chaotic universe. And the future, at least for a few noisy, messy hours, felt terrifyingly, exhilaratingly, theirs to code.
