India, Aug. 23 -- Alam Ara, the first Indian feature film with sound, produced and directed by Ardeshir Irani, was released on March 14, 1931. In the following decades, feature films became one of forces that bind India together. But there are concerns that the number of Indians watching films in cinema theatres is fast declining. A combination of factors has contributed to the current state of despair, especially in Bollywood. The rise of social media, more than a decade earlier, and Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram turning into public squares, served the greater good initially, but quickly turned into toxic carriers and amplifiers of misinformation and targeted attacks. The immense reach of social media platforms - also encrypted mobile messaging applications such as WhatsApp - has served to magnify the concerted attacks on the Hindi film industry through egregious hashtags and trending campaigns like Boycott Bollywood. Millions of posts carrying misinformation and falsehoods cumulatively created a degree of popular antipathy towards a much-loved industry. Cinema and stardom are all about enigma. Over the decades, actors, directors, and producers were inhabitants of an inaccessible galaxy. Their descent into the social media space seeking engagement and their collaborations with overzealous paparazzi who fed their most banal moments to smartphones, where people saw them in their kitchens, in gyms, in their living rooms, have diminished their mystique and destroyed the myths around them. Further, social media fan clubs of actors - many of them sponsored - started spewing venom at each other, targeting rival stars. The audience would join in. Trolled, abused, and shouted at, the stars got reduced to mere mortals. The etymology of the word entertainment can be traced to French and Latin words that mean "to hold together", "to engage". In Hindi, manoranjan refers to something that holds your attention. These words have deviated from their original meanings to a baser usage that refers to amusement. But we are no longer amused; we are worried that the traditional business model of feature films is declining. That may be so with other industries as well. But the public is not fulminating about, say, the iron and steel sector. Nobody is complaining about nepotism in manufacturing. Bollywood is the glittering target that everybody aims at. There is vicarious pleasure in tearing into the gilded lives of Bollywood icons. In our age of digital metrics, it does not matter whether an argument has a basis or an accusation is backed by evidence. Virality seems to matter more. We are living in an age of rapid transformation. In the 1980s, I heard a song at home in Benaras: Mere hum-nafas mere hum-nawa mujhe dost ban ke dagha na de (My dear soulmate and my confidante, do not be a friend and then betray). It was three years before a friend at my engineering college in Aligarh helped me understand the meaning of the lyric. Today, I can get Artificial Intelligence to take those words and write me an Urdu couplet in the same style in seconds. Our habits and tastes are evolving to something completely different, and every industry is trying to realign to changing demands and tastes. Cinema is both an art form and a business product. The experience of watching a film in a theatre can be demanding: You need to take out three to four hours from your schedule, travel to the theatre, spend your money on an "overpriced" ticket, and confine yourself to the world of the film during its duration. The film had better be entertaining. Also, unlike in the old days, numerous venues are competing for your disposable income. Each such venue, including the cinema ticket counter, will suffer until the disposable income increases. New avenues - concerts, vacations - are winning; the older ones, especially the cinemas, are losing out. Cinema is also in trouble because of the high maintenance costs involved in its production and exhibition. PVR-Inox, the biggest player in the exhibition sector, is reportedly bleeding because of high realty costs. It has resorted to generating revenues from advertisements before the film and during the interval, and the intermission snacks. India is probably the only country that has intervals during film screenings. The filmmaker has to build a popcorn interval. Waiters wander up and down the aisles, selling snacks, receiving UPI payments, while some people are trying to watch the film. Such distractions reduce the chances of people immersing themselves in a film. The very idea that the movie theatre was built, which is to watch films, has been reduced to a secondary or parallel activity. I have been making Hindi films for 25 years. The Hindi filmmaker is having a tough time. Production costs have skyrocketed. While the rise in production expenses can be limited to around 20% more than what it was five years ago, fees charged by the stars and directors have climbed by 200% to 500%. And, no star or director guarantees a big enough Friday. Streaming platforms don't like theatres, and theatres are finding it tough to coexist with the OTTs. Neither is going anywhere. We need new formulae and new budgets. Producers and the stars have to engage more aggressively with fresh ideas. There is still a large audience that likes to go to the theatres. Millions of young adults are joining the cinema-going crowds every year. They will dictate the films they would like to watch. And the discourse needs some compassion. A thousand books are published every year, and only a few are as beautiful as Banu Mushtaq's Heart Lamp and go on to win the International Booker Prize. The rationale for beauty and success is similar in songs, essays, paintings, and sculptures. Each decade in Bollywood has had its share of beautiful and popular films and box office failures. The good news is that filmmakers are obsessive people. We will make our films somehow. They will play in the cinema houses. We will continue to believe that we will find enough audience to sustain our art. Each part of the machine will adapt and make the machine work. Every weekend, there are films released in theatres. Go watch them....