Sony Pictures Networks India CEO Gaurav Banerjee on running a media empire and holding India's attention

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.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,