A Friday Loyalist

Cinema shaped his childhood; producer Dil Raju, in turn, reshaped Telugu cinema's enduring pulse

- By Sruthi Ganapathy Raman Portrait by Nishat Fatima

Dil Raju’s earliest memories of the movies involve cycling over 10 kilometres from his village to watch NT Rama Rao titles in Nizamabad in the '70s.

Before moving to Hyderabad in 1987 to run an automobile business with his brothers, Raju was putting up 16mm screens to project films for his village, pricing tickets at ₹1. This was his first real connection to cinema.

FILM FEVER

Moving to a city that made movie watching more accessible, he was able to hone this passion into something more tangible. “We would close our shop at 6.30 pm and rush to enter a 6.45 pm show,” he says, recalling how he would head home every Friday, full of joy for having watched a film in the theatre, and excuses for reaching home late. Some movies — Mani Ratnam’s Geethanjali (1989), Sooraj Barjatya’s Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) and Ashok Kumar’s Abhinandana (1988) — demanded excessive viewings. “I cannot tell you how many times I’ve watched these films in the theatres.”

It is this love for films that has backed every decision he has made for the last 22 years in the industry. And that includes making religious theatre runs every Friday for the past two decades. Last December, Raju was appointed the chairman of the Telangana Film Development Corporation (TGFDC), as part of which he is working to make Hyderabad a bustling film hub. It seems a fitting position for someone with such deep love for cinema.

Offices of distributors surrounded Raju’s automobile shop, perhaps a portend of the events to come for the future distributor and eventual producer. He knew then that he wanted to work with films and entered the industry as a distributor in the ‘90s. This not only gave him a ringside view to both successes and failures but made him all the surer that he wanted to eventually produce films. “Whichever films we purchased the rights for, I’d watch them only during the morning shows,” he tells