India, Dec. 12 -- What are micro dramas? Anne Chan, a Hong Kong-based distributor for the medium, described them as the '90s soap-opera The Bold and The Beautiful on steroids. She said it in an interview with NPR in February, but it's a fitting analogy. The videos that swim through our feeds are certainly micro - they last 90 seconds to three minutes. And they pack in the drama - it's exaggerated tragedy, horror, comedy and romance. But their real calling card is that they're all tailored to the mobile-screen, a portrait mode that is longer than it is wide, rather than the wide frames of the cinema or TV screen.

The genre took off in China around 2018, spread to Korea and the US and has been popular in Indian regional languages too. No s...