While the focus was on the renaissance in Marathi cinema, Gujarati cinema crept up with its own surprises. The sharing of a WhatsApp message by a colleague revealed that a Gujarati film called Bey Yaar was packing in audiences weeks after its release, when so many Bollywood films sink after the first weekend. This film also got a wide international release and has taken Gujarati cinema to another level.

Gujarat has a film industry which works in fits and starts - there were phases when actors like Kiran Kumar, Aruna Irani, Upendra Trivedi, Naresh Kanodia and Rita Bhaduri ruled the small film industry. The movies - like so many commercial Gujarati plays - were family melodramas, more often than not set against a rural backdrop, with a lot of song-dance and dandiya. These films did business in their own limited circuits and did not make much of an effort to step into the world outside. So, Gujarati cinema chugged along like this for a while, without any dramatic change in content or style, and never managed to grab a young viewership. This is pretty much the problem Gujarati theatre faces too - an aging audience; the new generation either does not speak the mother tongue well, or is not interested in the old-fashioned stories.