IIT-Indore paper decodes success in Bollywood

IIT-Indore recently came up with their paper titled ‘Uncovering Randomness And Success In Society’, which studies and analyses the success rate of Bollywood stars.
Led by Sarika Jalan, associate professor at IIT-Indore, three PhD students – Camellia Sarkar, Anagha Madhusudanan and Sanjiv Kumar Dwivedi, apply Random Matrix theory- which is a nuclear physics theory- to the social structure of the Hindi film industry from a period of 1913 to 2012.The study covers almost 9000 films made in this timeline. After six months of rigorous data collection done last year, the trio led by Sarika began the research work and the paper has been recently published in some of the globally recognized science journals.
Sarika tells us, “The Indian film industry has evolved a lot over a period of time. Bollywood was given the status of an industry in 1998. We have taken the Filmfare Awards, one of the most prestigious and longest running awards of the film industry since 1953, as the basis for determining success for the actors. In this, we have only included their nomination and not winning of the award. It’s wonderful how a scientific theory like this can be applied to a complex real system like Bollywood. The results have astonishingly turned out to be true!”
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Sarika and her team let us know about the most striking finding of this study. Sarika tells, “Lead actors have come and gone; an era that belonged to Ashok Kumar was soon taken over by Rajesh Khanna and then by another popular actor and so on. But there is only one actor who once after becoming a lead has never had to hand over that position - Amitabh Bachchan. He is the only actor for whom none of our theories work. We have not been able to define whether he is a supporting or a lead actor because he defies all predictions and theories. His graph is very different from that of other actors. It’s strange but true. Although we have successfully shown how interactions in Bollywood can predict an actor’s success, for Amitabh Bachchan it simply cannot be applied. He has not only been an immensely popular actor among the audience, but his quality of work has also been equally appreciated, no matter how many odd projects he has worked on at a time.”
But she quickly adds, “However, the classification of female actors could not be achieved just as aptly because of gender biasness. We could not find a basis that can be considered for all the female actors in this time period because not only have they been paid comparatively lesser than their male counterparts, but even in the credit list of the film, a lead female actor’s name has often appeared after the name of male leads. But over the past few years, because of more and more women-centric films being made and actresses being increasingly given significance. Barring a few of them like Helen, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Kareena Kapoor Khan, most actresses have not had a systematic presence over the years.”
The team is also working on its next set of data starting from 2013, so that the predictions can be extended to the next few years.
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