Abhishek Mishra Interview
Abhishek is the creator of In Other Words (IOW), a fast-growing Hinglish platform dedicated to decoding the hidden craft, meaning, and philosophy within Indian cinema. Through deep analysis and cultural commentary, he is redefining how audiences engage with popular films.
Q. How did content creation come to you? Was it a plan, or was it something you stumbled upon and stayed with?
I didn’t plan to become a creator. I planned for engineering, an IIM degree, product management at Samsung—the whole legible career ladder.What I had actually been doing my entire life, quietly, was the thing I do now: watching films and sensing the architecture beneath them—the ideas, emotions, and meanings that nobody says out loud.
In Other Words (IOW) wasn’t an idea I woke up with one morning. It was a private compulsion that eventually found a public format. I didn’t stumble upon the instinct; that was always there. I stumbled upon the medium.
The real leap came two years ago when I stopped treating the thing I couldn’t help doing as a hobby and started treating it as work.
In other words, I didn’t decide to become a creator. I decided to stop pretending I wasn’t already one.
Q. What is a belief about yourself that content creation has challenged the most?
What often appears to be passion can sometimes be hunger—the desire to be seen, understood, and validated.Content creation gives you a dashboard of numbers and public verdicts almost every day. It forces you to confront what is truly driving you.
The belief that broke for me was the idea that the wound and the work run on the same fuel. They don’t.
One of the slowest lessons I’ve had to learn is how to create from devotion rather than from the wound—to treat a video as an offering rather than a request for proof that I exist.
Some days I manage it. The test isn’t the views. The test is whether I would still have made the video if nobody watched.
Q. What kind of stories in films do you find yourself returning to again and again, and why?
It’s essentially the same story every time: a person waking up to the gap between who they are performing as and who they actually are.Ved in Tamasha builds such a convincing mask that he forgets there is a face underneath it. Amrita in Thappad experiences a single moment that forces her to confront the unfairness embedded within her life. Dev, across both Devdas and Dev D, represents two versions of the same man—one who drowns in that gap and one who somehow finds a way through it.
I return to these stories because they revolve around a moment of recognition—the instant when your conditioning becomes visible and refuses to disappear again.
Beyond the story itself, I’m equally fascinated by how meaning is communicated. I’m drawn to films where the most important ideas live beneath the dialogue: a recurring colour, a carefully composed frame, a motif that is never explained because the filmmaker trusts the audience to feel it.
That instinct lies at the heart of doosre shabdon mein. I keep returning to films that say their most important truths without explicitly stating them—and invite you to notice.
Q. Have you ever defended a film that you knew was flawed because it meant something personal to you?
Tamasha.When it was released, many people called it self-indulgent. The story-within-a-story structure, the Corsica detour, and a protagonist who spends much of the film being difficult to like—those criticisms are fair.
The flaws are real, and I won’t argue otherwise.
I defend it because it diagnosed something in me before I had the language to describe it: the experience of becoming so attached to a performance of yourself that you lose sight of who you really are.
That long, uncomfortable middle section—where Ved has to dismantle the version of himself he built—is one of the most honest things I’ve seen a mainstream film attempt.
I didn’t watch Tamasha. I felt understood by it.
A film can be structurally imperfect and still be the truest mirror someone ever hands you. That’s why I’ll continue defending it.
Q. What is your favourite film, and why?
Rockstar.Yes, it’s another Imtiaz Ali film and another Ranbir Kapoor performance. Apparently, the man has a permanent claim on some part of my psyche.
What makes Rockstar my favourite is that it explores one of the most seductive and dangerous ideas I know: the belief that real art requires real suffering.
Jordan hears that idea, chases it, and mistakes heartbreak for depth. Then genuine loss arrives, breaks him open, and the music finally becomes authentic.
I love the film the way you love something that is slightly poisonous.
Much of my own inner work has involved moving in the opposite direction—learning to create from devotion rather than pain, and letting go of the belief that suffering is a prerequisite for meaningful work.
Rockstar romanticizes the very myth I’ve spent years trying to outgrow.
And yet it remains my favourite because a part of me has never fully stopped believing it.
A favourite film isn’t necessarily the one you agree with. It’s the one you can never quite win the argument against.
Q. If there is one creator you would like to collaborate with—or interview—who would it be?
The real, reachable names I’m already pursuing are Bejoy Nambiar and Sajid Ali. Their work rewards the kind of close reading I enjoy, and I believe those conversations could become genuinely interesting.But the dream conversation—the one that would actually make me nervous—is with Imtiaz Ali.
Not because I want to discuss filmmaking craft. I want to discuss life.
I want to understand how much of him believes in destiny and how much he believes in rationalised truth. That’s the conversation I’m most interested in—not how he makes his films, but what within him keeps making them.
Bio
Abhishek is the creator of In Other Words (IOW), a Hinglish YouTube channel where he close-reads Bollywood films and music for the craft, meaning, and philosophy hiding in plain sight — the story under the story. Under his signature sign-off, doosre shabdon mein ("in other words"), the channel has grown past 400,000 subscribers & 265,000 Followers on Instagram by taking popular cinema as seriously as anyone takes high art.He calls himself India's first De-Influencer: less interested in telling people what to watch than in changing how they see. Alongside IOW, he runs Let's Jam, a live Bollywood singalong series in Mumbai and Bangalore. A former product manager, he left the corporate track two years ago to make this his full-time work, and is based in Bangalore.
Interviewed By Ashima Choudhary
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