“‘Main Monica’ has been a personal journey for Ranjeet, Amber and me,” says Writer, producer Paromita Ganguly!

Even though she comes from a different background, Paromita Ganguly always enjoyed writing. So, after finishing her studies, she worked for national TV channels, international networks, Ads and so on. Her latest Main Monica, streaming on Amazon Prime Video, is also being talked about. Paromita shares about her journey so far, response around Main Monica and more.

“Being a scientist’s daughter, our lives involved a lot of travelling and that has opened me to varied mindset and cultures. Always on the move, I could not make many friends, so it was mostly me and my sister spending time together. That’s when my mind would wander into an imaginative space filled with stories that I made up,” she shares.

A biotechnologist by education, Paromita’s mind was always drawn towards art. So, for post graduation, she studied film direction and video production and started working as a producer for promos and marketing campaigns for some leading broadcast networks of the country. Her work received her several international awards like the Promax world awards and the prestigious New York festival awards.

“In 2014 I founded my own venture Creative Play along with my partners Ranjeet Chitrakaar and Amber Wasi. I wrote and produced short films under this banner that have received nominations and wins from the prestigious Cannes film festival, Berlin film festival and an Academy award nomination in short’s category.

We also directed and produced TV promos for major Indian and international broadcasters like Colors TV, discovery channel, Fox network, Zee TV, Star TV, Astro network, Bloomberg TV, UK based Lebara play and went on to producing branded commercials and shows for Quaker, Tropicana, Glenmark, Pepsi, Mahindra etc. Around the same time in 2015 we started writing Main Monica into a web series from a film that we had written back in 2011. After years of writing and developing characters and their worlds, finally in 2018 the series got approved by Amazon Prime and finally in 2022 we finished everything including casting and production in collaboration with Arre studios,” she reveals.

Creative Play plans to start 2023 on a high note. “We’re passionate about storytelling and each of us have our individual styles and genre of interest. There are a couple of concepts that some OTTs are interested in, which are all in the writing and development stage now. We are also working on a very big project which is in fantasy-drama-comedy space and venturing into feature films too,” she says.

Main Monica has been a personal journey for the trio. “Every scene in this series is based on situations we have experienced or characters we have witnessed firsthand. Every character and their traits are inspired by people we know, hence the humour of the show is so relatable and puts a person in splits. We have tried to imbibe ‘Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro’ kind of writing where the scale of events in the story like murder, kidnapping, ransom are all filmy and larger-than-life but the comedy of errors happening in these situations are very day-to-day practical and silly,” she adds.

The show has been very well received. “People are really enjoying the nuances of the characters and their scenes. Rajveer, Lingapalli, Mangu and Jasbir are being loved a lot,” she smiles.

Urging more people to watch the series, Paromita adds, “Please watch Main Monica. A lot of hard work and sacrifices have gone into making good content hence don’t shy away from appreciating if you like it so that we can bring even better stories for you.”

Keerti Kadam.