‘Your face lights up’: PVR’s Ajay Bijli’s mother encouraged him to leave the family firm to start cinema business

Ajay Bijli, founder of PVR Cinemas, like most amateur entrepreneurs, had to struggle to kickstart his cinema business, long before he revolutionised the way cinema is consumed in the country. It was eventually his mother’s nudge that gave him the confidence to take the final decision. 

In an interview with Nikhil Kamath in his podcast, ‘WTF is with Nikhil Kamath’, Ajay Bijli recounted the journey of PVR’s inception. In the episode ‘WTF is Going on in the World of Content’ that also featured Vijay Subramaniam, founder & Group CEO of Collective Artists’ Network, and Sajith Sivanandan: President & Head of Disney+ Hotstar, Bijli acknowledged his mother’s role in guiding him towards leaving the family company and plunging into the cinema business. 

“My traditional family business was a transport company which my grandfather started. His name was Bijli pehalwan, and a lot of people thought that he was a wrestler but he wasn’t. He used to promote wrestling. He started the trucking company and my father took it over and I was supposed to just take over the trucking company,” said Bijli. 

Bijli’s father was into arbitration to settle family disputes. And one such arbitration he picked up was Priya Cinema in Delhi’s Vasant Vihar. 

Ajay Bijli, an alumnus of Modern School, Barakhamba and Hindu College, Delhi University, finished his college in 1988 and joined his father’s trucking company. “I could not make the head or tail of the trucking company,” he added. Bijli revealed in the podcast that he ran the company for two years and “made a disaster of it”. 

“I just wasn’t very comfortable. So, I just spoke to my father and asked if I could do something with the cinema because it was a little decrepit and it was showing…you know you used to have first release movies and second release movies…so second release movies used to get played there. So that's how my journey started,” he said. 

The PVR founder started renovating Priya Cinema in 1990. He said that his inspiration was Bombay’s Sterling Cinema, which was run by the Tatas and was the only cinema with Dolby. The other inspiration was Chankya in Delhi that used to play only English movies. 

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But English movies were hard to come by because these movies were released very late in India. He added that because there were only a few cinemas in India, English movies used to come late. And if an English movie performed well, it would run for around 30 weeks, creating a backlog. 

“That’s a little opportunity I found,” said Bijli who wanted to cater to that demographic. But the issue of prints persisted. Hindi movies, he said, used to come in celluloid canisters costing around Rs 50,000 a print, compared to now when it is around Rs 1,000 a print because of digitisation. 

He ran the cinema for two years before he suffered a personal tragedy. Ajay Bijli said that his father passed away when he was 25 years old, forcing him to go back to the trucking business. He said in the two years he ran the cinema, he used to go and sell tickets and put up posters. “ I used to really enjoy that. That was the highlight of my day,” recalled Bijli. 

Ajay Bijli said that he ran the trucking business from 1992-1994. “In 1994, we had a very bad fire in the trucking company and we lost a lot of money and that really discouraged me,” he said.

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It was at that juncture that his mother guided him. “Mom told me that when you go to the cinema, your face lights up, and when you go to the trucking company, the entire weight of the world comes down on your shoulders. So just forget about this,” he said. This prompted him to give the reins of the trucking company to his cousins who owned a 5 per cent stake in the business. 

“I told him, okay you run it and I will strategically give you whatever direction I can but I just want to straightaway plunge into the cinema business. That’s how I was fortunate enough to get the opportunity to run multiplexes,” added Ajay Bijli. 

The only way to run multiplexes at that time was to pick up cinema halls that were not doing well and whose owners had no interest in the business, he explained. Bijli started the company, PVR, in 1997. 

He said that private equity played a huge role in the business, which is very capital intensive. The first cheque came from private equity fund manager, Renuka Ramnath, and was followed by Warburg Pincus, JPMorgan, ICICI. The company was eventually listed in 2006. 

“Then, of course, the body blow came…the punch in the gut when COVID-19 came…that’s when I realised that putting all your eggs in one basket sometimes can be an out-of-shape scrambled egg as well. I think pre-COVID, post-COVID changed me dramatically,” acknowledged Ajay Bijli. 

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