For the love of Bollywood: Meet Emirati Bader Ali Habib and his passion for ‘desi pop culture’

Dubai: Long before he ever visited India, 35-year-old Emirati Bader Ali Habib knew Mumbai through the movies. His earliest memories as a child are of sitting in front of the television, watching ‘Channel 33’, captivated by colourful song-and-dance sequences, elaborate costumes and larger-than-life emotions. “There were football matches. There were cartoons. There were all the usual childhood distractions. But for some reason, I could never get out of Bollywood," he said. The first Hindi film he watched in a cinema was Dil To Pagal Hai (1997). But even after the film ended, his fascination for the world of Bollywood lingered on. That fascination would quietly shape the next three decades of his life. Discovering another world Growing up at a time when the internet was picking up, he found himself reading everything he could about the industry. Some of his first hunting grounds were websites dedicated to Bollywood movies – India FM (which would later become Bollywood Hungama) Cine Blitz and Stardust. “I used to read reviews by critics like Taran Adarsh and was fascinated with how he analysed the movies. I read so many reviews that eventually I started reviewing films, too,” he said. Returning from the cinema, he’d jot down his thoughts and share his reviews on his Facebook account. It was a time when Bollywood was going through one of its most transformative periods, with several trailblazers redefining the industry’s content. Music director A. R. Rahman was changing the sound of Indian cinema, by blending global influences into Bollywood music. Superstar Aamir Khan had a streak of hits, from Lagaan (2001) all the way up till Taare Zameen Par (2007), each touching on different subjects and director/producer Anurag Kashyap delivered Gangs of Wasseypur (2014), a movie on mafia-like families fighting for control of a coal-mining town. That’s when Habib began to realise just how vast the country was and how different people’s lives could be. “It started to strike me how India has the Tier 1 cities, and a movie like ‘Wake Up Sid’ (2009) could only be set in cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore. But Anurag [Kashyap] can tell stories that are more centric to the hinterlands. That’s what expanded my understanding of India and its geography. So, for me, Bollywood was a way for understanding India,” he said. Another movie that had a big impact on him was Rang de Basanti (2006), a political drama and coming-of-age film. “For me Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra [the movie director] had a huge role to play in moving me from that ‘La la land’ to having a more analytical approach to movies. Aamir Khan, in fact, really influenced the way I looked at cinema,” he said. Mumbai, the city he already knew One of his first visits to Mumbai was in 2016, and one he remembers vividly. “It was raining that day, as it often does in Mumbai,” he said. For him, that trip to Mumbai, and all the trips since, have been similar to visiting a theme park – sitting next to a studio where classic songs were recorded, or visiting studios that produced epics like Mughal-E-Azam. It was on one such trips in 2024, that he sat in Prithvi Theatre – the cultural hub built to honour the legacy of one of India’s biggest moviemakers Prithviraj Kapoor – with his wife Sakina, that the idea of ‘Saanjh’ was born. From fan to founder Sitting at the location that celebrated the Kapoor family dynasty, listening to conversations around them rooted in culture and art, Habib and Sakina spoke about how they wished to create something similar in Dubai. “Dubai has a lot of events happening – there are mehfils [cultural gatherings] and concerts. But there's very little happening where communities come together to celebrate something beyond just music,” he said. “The motto of Saanjh was to bring people together under the umbrella of pop culture, celebrating cinema, films, movies, directors, producers … everything to do with cinema,” he said. In November 2024 Saanjh was founded and one of the first events Habib organised in 2025 was a talk with the man who had played a role in kindling his passion for Bollywood – director and producer Anurag Kashyap. “His film Kennedy was ready to release, and we requested for a screening in Dubai,” he said. But along with the screening, Habib also organised a masterclass and fireside chat with the filmmaker, which was a concept not yet explored in Dubai. The response from the community was phenomenal. “We were expecting about 45 people to show up for the masterclass. Nearly 95 showed up,” he said. What was more surprising for Habib was seeing the kind of attendance at the event. “Most of the people who came were either budding film-makers, editors, short film-makers, people with films that had already been shot, but they wanted to understand from Anurag on how to release them. So, these were industry specialists, not just fans,” he said. This feedback from the community confirmed a suspicion Habib always had – there were film-making specialists in