When a megastar like Ranbir Kapoor sits down to discuss artificial intelligence, fatherhood, and the burden of headlining a monumental adaptation of the Ramayana, the tone is naturally philosophical. From the comfortable vantage of cinema royalty, technology looks like an abstract frontier—a curious creative partner or an existential debate for future generations. Yet just a few miles away from the climate-controlled promotional suites, in the dusty, corrugated-roof workshops of Goregaon and the cramped post-production alleyways of Mumbai, artificial intelligence is not an intellectual parlor game. It is a line item, an unsettled invoice, and a looming question about whether next month’s payroll will clear.
Take the fabricators who historically bring Hindu epics to life. A single mythological blockbuster traditionally keeps dozens of micro-enterprises afloat for up to two years. There are the specialized brass-turners who cast ornate prop daggers, the handloom weavers in suburban cooperatives who dye yards of coarse cotton for ancient foot soldiers, and the boutique rendering houses that clean up background wires on ten-second clips. These operations rarely employ more than twenty people. Their margins hover stubbornly in the single digits, and their working capital is almost always tied up in 90-day receivable cycles that make every payroll an exercise in high-wire acrobatics.
When major studios begin exploring synthetic backgrounds, algorithmically generated crowd scenes, and automated digital costuming, the disruption does not start with the director’s chair. It hits the subcontracts. A small prosthetic firm that recently invested twenty thousand dollars in high-grade silicone and specialized molds can suddenly find its scope halved because a visual effects suite promised the producers they could generate creature skin digitally for a fraction of the studio’s overhead. The studio saves a rounding error on its hundred-million-dollar ledger. The prosthetic workshop, meanwhile, faces a landlord demanding six months of advance commercial rent on space it can no longer justify filling.
It would be foolish, and deeply unproductive, to view this shift through a purely Luddite lens. Cinema has never been a museum; it has always adapted or died. When Indian film made the leap from black-and-white celluloid to color, and later from physical film stock to digital sensors, traditional darkrooms shuttered, but entirely new ecosystems of colorists, digital imaging technicians, and specialized camera rental houses sprang up in their place. Technological evolution is inevitable, and generative tools undoubtedly offer independent creators unprecedented access to high-concept storytelling. The goal cannot be to freeze the production pipeline in amber to preserve an inefficient past.
The real trouble lies in the speed of the transition and the sheer asymmetry of bargaining power. When tech-enabled efficiency sweeps through an industry, the savings tend to pool at the top, while the transition costs are dumped unceremoniously onto the bottom of the supply chain. Independent sound designers and boutique rotoscope artists are being asked to deliver faster turnarounds at lower rates because their studio clients assume the software does all the heavy lifting. But software licenses are expensive, cloud-computing fees are dollar-denominated, and the banks offering micro-loans to small enterprise owners do not accept vague promises about digital productivity as collateral.
Furthermore, we risk forgetting that the cultural heft of projects like the Ramayana depends on the institutional memory preserved in small workshops. An algorithm trained on Western cinematic templates or generic historical imagery cannot replicate the distinct, regional hand-embroidery of a Gujarati artisan who knows how sunlight hits real silver thread. When an economic squeeze forces those artisans out of business and into unrelated gig work, that generational knowledge vanishes from the industrial base entirely. Digital polish can produce vastness, but it often struggles with authentic weight.
It is easy to see why industry figures reflect on AI through the lens of fatherhood and artistic legacy; we all wonder what kind of world our children will inherit. But legacy is not built exclusively on what appears on the marquee. It is built on the health of the entire economic scaffolding that allows art to be manufactured at scale. If studio heads and A-list talent want their grand epics to inspire the next generation, they must care as much about the vendor contracts on the ground as they do about the pixels on the screen. Progress does not have to mean a scorched-earth policy for the small shops that laid the foundation.