Back in school, Gaurav Banerjee wrote some poetry, following in the footsteps of his father, a civil servant who was also a poet. He didn’t think it was anywhere close to what his father wrote nor good enough to be shown to anyone. Consequently, for the longest time, he believed he didn’t have a creative bone at all. It was only several years later, while heading a Bengali language channel at Star India (later Disney Star, now JioStar) that he offered some inputs to a television show writer who turned around to tell him that he was actually a writer at heart. And now, as managing director and chief executive officer of Sony Pictures Networks India, where he provides a platform to multiple stories and storytellers across television and digital platforms, life seems to have come full circle. “I love content. I think I’m most comfortable shaping content and working with writers, directors and producers, who do this so well and much better than I could do,” Banerjee, 49, says.
We’re seated in his fifth-floor cabin at the Sony office in Mumbai’s Malad area where the sounds of water trickling from an indoor fountain temper the chat. “If I can help them, guide them or just provide a platform to encourage them, that gives me a lot of energy. Content is the reason to be in the business,” he adds.
Little is known about Banerjee beyond his professional roles. He sheepishly admits that is true and that he has never knowingly posted anything on social media.
While he believed as a child that creative writing was not his cup of tea, Banerjee, who studied history at Delhi’s St Stephen’s College and followed it up with a master’s degree in filmmaking and TV production from Jamia Millia Islamia University, was keen to explore a career in journalism. In the mid-1990s, when he was in college, television news was just taking off with the rise of Prannoy Roy, Vinod Dua and Rajdeep Sardesai coinciding with events like the 1996 general election and the Kargil War. Born to parents who were both academics (both taught English literature in different colleges in Madhya Pradesh before his father went into civil service), Banerjee had grown up reading 12 newspapers at home everyday.
While his grades were not always great, his parents pushed him to study liberal arts at a time when most boys were encouraged to go into science and technology. In fact, Banerjee recalls that in class XI, in his arts section, there were 42 students, 36 of whom were women. Three of the six boys had taken up arts because they played cricket and therefore, were never in class.
“I was quite scared. I didn’t know it was so skewed when I made that choice. When I walked into that class, I did wonder if I had made a big mistake,” he says. He is quick to add his father was very good about those things; even when Banerjee himself told him he should study science, he said that didn’t make sense and that he should just go where his talent seemed to lie. “In retrospect, it was quite amazing considering the state of that world in the mid-1990s. I don’t think it was ever a thought that I could become an engineer or a doctor… with only a limited chance of being somewhat employable in anything except academics, journalism, and maybe the civil services,” he laughs.
However, having seen his father’s life as a civil servant, Banerjee was clear he wanted a different path. With the way television news functioned in the mid-1990s, it felt like a great confluence of two things he was equally interested in: academics and journalism. “It was a classic combination of seriousness and glamour that I had hit upon,” Banerjee says. Except that he didn’t want a career simply in journalism, it had to be a job at NDTV where most folks from Jamia went to work after college.
During a chance meeting he tagged along for, a friend of his father, also a journalist, pointed out that he would be one among hundreds of English-speaking reporters at NDTV, and so it might make more sense to try his luck at the newly emerging Aaj Tak, a Hindi news channel from the India Today group where his English language skills would be a rarity. He scribbled Uday Shankar’s mobile number on a napkin—Shankar headed the network then—urging him to call and see if he could get an interview. A brusque phone conversation later, Banerjee found himself in Shankar’s Delhi office on a chilly evening, waiting for four hours after class because Shankar had forgotten about the meeting.
Banerjee eventually got the job at Aaj Tak and was put on the assignment desk where he was routinely dumped on the night shift. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it allowed him, a trainee, to make major decisions when nobody was around. His history lessons soon paid off and he made his way to prime-time shows when the Afghan War broke out in 2001. He moved on to launch the English channel Headlines Today for the India Today group. By then, Banerjee was more comfortable speaking and anchoring in Hindi and was soon hired as lead anchor by Shankar who had joined Star News.
“After that, I began to feel that I didn’t really want to be an anchor. I’d done it for many years by this time, and felt that I’m a little less comfortable being the front and face of something and much more just being an orchestrator and conductor,” Banerjee says. By then, Shankar had moved on from news to entertainment and was heading Star India. So Banerjee sought a meeting, and eventually transitioned to lead content strategy for the network’s regional entertainment channels, helping the company expand into new markets with the launch of Star Jalsha in Bengal and Star Pravah in Maharashtra. Appointed head of content strategy for Star Plus in 2009, he tasted success in fiction with soaps like Diya Aur Baati Hum and Sasural Genda Phool, eventually getting promoted to general manager of Star Plus in 2013 and taking on leadership of the content studio in 2015.
The transition from news to entertainment came with some common lessons, according to Banerjee. “They’re similar worlds because you are essentially still competing for attention. Those rules are the same everywhere. The second thing I learned was that it’s also about building a terrific team and keeping them excited and motivated,” he says.
Pointing out that the Star stint involved many different things, Banerjee says he went from programming for prime time on the Hindi news channel in 2004 and launching Bangla and Marathi entertainment channels to working on the movie portfolio, a video-streaming platform and building a working relationship with the international headquarters in Burbank, California. Having joined Star India in January 2008, Banerjee moved to Sony only in 2024.
“So I don’t feel like I’ve come away from one company after 20 years. As far as Sony goes, it was an incredibly coveted job and we are fortunate that we’re in India at this moment where we have a really large and young population. The opportunity is enormous, and everywhere in the world, including at Sony, people recognise that. There are some short-term challenges on our particular business and it’s for me and my team to solve those,” Banerjee says.
For one, the company would love to have a much wider footprint since it has so far primarily been only in Hindi and believes it must speak more meaningfully in all the major Indian languages.
Culver Max Entertainment, earlier known as Sony Pictures Networks India (SPNI) reported a 45.3% decline in FY25 consolidated net profit to ₹481.21 crore, according to an RoC filing by the company. Revenue from operations last fiscal was down 4.3% to ₹6,261.16 crore. The total income of the company, which owns over 25 channels in entertainment, sports, and infotainment along with OTT platform SonyLIV, was at ₹6,459.43 crore in FY25, down 4.34% year-on-year, according to financial data accessed by the business intelligence platform Tofler.
The linear TV network is known for shows such as Indian Idol, India’s Got Talent, and Mahabali Hanuman while the streaming platform has titles such as Scam 1992—The Harshad Mehta Story, Rocket Boys, Gullak and Maharani to its credit. In the former, Sony competes with the likes of Zee and the combined Jio Star entity that owns TV channels like Colors, Star Plus, Star GOLD, Star Sports and Sports18. Meanwhile, the OTT ecosystem houses rivals such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video besides the newly merged JioHotstar. Along with rising content costs, the plethora of entertainment options available to viewers today remain challenges for broadcasters and content creators across the board, according to industry experts.
Banerjee says that they want to have a more meaningful play in Tamil, Telugu, Bangla and Marathi. “So we want to be a pan-India network. We also want to be a content company which is agnostic to distribution platforms, and does as well on digital as it does on TV. Those are the two things that we’re trying to change.”
Banerjee says the CEO job suits his inclination to let the spotlight shine on others. At the same time, being CEO is a fundamentally different job than any other because you don’t really have a specific task. “For doing several specific jobs, you have other people. And if you do those, you’re being really annoying to them, stifling them, and coming in their way,” he says. It’s hard when you’ve grown from within the industry and quite frequently, the instinct might be to want to do it yourself but the right thing to do is to set the stage, find the right people and be there for them as somebody they might want to talk to, he feels. That translates into being a little bit more of a coach than a player and therefore, avoiding the shenanigans of social media, he says in response to my earlier question on why he prefers to keep a low profile.
“As a player you can’t avoid the spotlight because for whatever work is done, credit or discredit will and should come to you. That’s no longer necessary,” he smiles.