Rahul Sharma

Rahul grew up in Pune going to the cinema every Friday with his father. Not the multiplex. The old single-screen theatre near their house that smelled of popcorn and worn-out velvet seats. His father kept a small notebook where he wrote down the name of every film they watched and what he thought of it. Rahul started doing the same when he was eleven. He still does it now, except the notebook is a Google Sheet with about nine hundred entries.

He moved to Mumbai after college and got his first paid writing job at a small entertainment website that no longer exists. The money was bad and the deadlines were brutal, but he got to write about films every single day, which felt like an unfair arrangement in his favour. He spent the next few years covering box office numbers for a larger publication before joining DJYoungster, where he has been writing ever since.

His thing is the numbers. Not because he thinks box office is the point of cinema, but because he finds it genuinely fascinating what those numbers say about the country. A film doing twice its expected business in tier-two cities tells you something. A big-budget release flopping in its first weekend tells you something else. Rahul writes about both, without pretending one is more important than the other. He also reviews films, and he tries hard to be honest even when honesty is inconvenient.