Ekta Kapoor, whose streaming service ALTT, was recently banned by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, spoke at length about her OTT platform in an interview just days before the ban came in place. In the interview, Ekta shared that she had over 100 cases on her during the time she was running the platform. She admitted that being “risque” was a part of the strategy.
In a chat with Faye D’Souza, Ekta shared that when she was running ALTT, formerly ALTBalaji, she was “offending a new person every day.” She recalled that at one point, there was a morcha outside her house, and people were throwing things at the house. “I had gone for a holiday, and my son was inside the house and I didn’t know what was happening,” she said. When asked if being “risque” was a “part of the strategy”, Ekta said, “Absolutely, yes. I would not deny the strategy.”
Ekta then defended her idea of launching the platform and said, “I feel bad girls make history and you have to be out there and some people will hate you but you have to say what you believe in.” She added, “I always say that I don’t have a problem with sex, I have a lot of problems with sexual crime and I feel that people misunderstand the two things so badly that the confusion lands up in bigger crimes later.”
Talking about how she wanted to make ALTTT into sex-positive platform, Ekta shared, “So I have had like 8 girls sitting and I was like, ‘We are going to do something, we are going to launch Alt Balaji and you all are going to curate the content and you all are going to see that we are going to normalise sex for the world and we are going to be risque and we are going to wear it on our sleeves’.” Ekta shared that she wanted to present this in a progressive way and shared, “Because everyone is telling me that you are making these women wear sarees, it is regressive. I think that it is equally progressive and this is equally progressive. Why not celebrate women in costumes like you celebrate women in sarees?”
Ekta said but things went down quickly afterwards and hit them “like a ton of bricks.” “We didn’t know what happened and then it was all…” she said. Ekta said that they eventually gave up day-to-day operations of the platform. “Then you couldn’t curate the content. Some of it was not savoury.. .My mom was like who has put this out? Then I had to walk out of it. Then it was a mess,” she said.
Talking about the current status of the business, Ekta said, “It’s owned by us but we don’t run it so it’s like an arm’s length thing. I don’t really look into it but now, there is a proper team.” Ekta said that until recently, she would find things that were not up to the mark. “At one time, there were girls running it and there were these women and I remember, my head, she called me and said, ‘We are not putting this episode out’. I asked her why and she said, ‘While it is anti rape, I don’t like the way he shot it. It’s like he is celebrating it’. I said then don’t put it out, throw the episode so they threw the episode. I said loss on me,” she said.
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The interview was shared on YouTube before ALTT got banned.
