Kingdom of the Soap Queen The World of Balaji Telefilms
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Kovid Gupta
HarperCollins India,
240 pages, Rs. 299
This is the story of Balaji Telefilms, the biggest television production house in the country, which the producer Ekta Kapoor founded as a seventeen-year-old working from her father’s garage and built up into a mammoth entertainment firm. Gupta chronicles the creation of the iconic tele-serial characters of Tulsi and Parvati, how Balaji changed the demographics of television viewership in India, the social impact of its soap operas, and the company’s very successful and high-profile foray into cinema.
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