Educationist Vijay Dhar opens a three-screen, 520-seating capacity auditorium in the Valley in partnership with movie theatre chain Inox to provide Kashmiris with big-screen entertainment that they had missed out on for over three decades
Educationist Vijay Dhar ahead of the inauguration of INOX multiplex comprising three cinema auditoriums with a capacity of 520 seats on September 19, 2022, in Srinagar, India. Image: Waseem Andrabi/Hindustan Times via Getty Images
Vijay Dhar would find every excuse to travel from Kashmir to Delhi on a Friday. He would lie to his family that he had a meeting and would return only on Mondays after watching the latest movie in a theatre in the national capital. It was a time in the early 90s when a militant group had ordered the shutdown of theatres in the Valley and the cinema-crazy Dhar found it impossible to stay away from the big-screen experience.
More than three decades after theatres were shuttered in the region that has constantly been under the shadow of terror, Dhar has taken the first step to revive the movie culture in the Valley. Along with Indian movie theatre chain Inox, he has opened the first multiplex in Srinagar after 32 years.
“Cinema has been in my blood. The film industry in Kashmir is probably the oldest in the country—it was in 1932 that the first cinema, Kashmir Talkies [later renamed Palladium], was set up in Srinagar. Bombay Talkies started in 1934. Apart from that, we used to run a cinema here called Broadway. It was quite popular, but had to be shut down,” says Dhar, who is chairman, and whose son Vikas is managing director. “We found that 60-70 percent of the old and new generation in the Valley have never seen a movie in a cinema hall here. We thought we must provide them with the same facility and the same entertainment that they would get in Delhi, Jammu or elsewhere in the country.”
Once sure of his intentions, Dhar rang up Inox’s chairman and MD Pavan Jain, who “just dropped the telephone”. “I thought he wasn’t interested,” recalls the 81-year-old Dhar, son of the late DP Dhar, a Kashmiri politician and Indian diplomat. However, the next day, he got a call from the CEO, saying they were on board.
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(This story appears in the 21 October, 2022 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)