Niren Bhatt

Bhatt holds a Master's in Engineering and Business Administration and spent his early working life as a business consultant. In 2011 he left that job to write, which is a late and expensive decision to make in a country where the arts are what you do after the salary is secure.

His first paid writing was commercials and Gujarati plays. That order matters. Advertising teaches you to land an idea in thirty seconds and theatre teaches you to hold a room for two hours without a cut. Almost every trick in a Maddock horror comedy sits somewhere between those two disciplines.

His television record runs to a scale that film writers rarely touch. He is credited as a screenwriter on 3,163 episodes of Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah between 2008 and 2019, on 406 episodes of Jeannie Aur Juju, and on Savdhaan India and Bhai Bhaiya Aur Brother.

Volume like that is not a footnote in a career, it is the career's engine room. A writer who has shipped three thousand comic episodes on deadline has run out of ways to be precious about a scene. By the time he reached the Hindi box office he had already rewritten more comedy than most writers will attempt in a lifetime.

In Gujarati he has exactly three writing credits, and each one did a different job. Bey Yaar in 2014, co-written with Bhavesh Mandalia, ran fifty weeks in theatres and reported a gross of about Rs 8.5 crore, which for a Gujarati film at that moment was a proof of concept rather than a number. Wrong Side Raju in 2016, written with Karan Vyas and Mikhil Musale, won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in Gujarati at the 64th National Film Awards. Ventilator in 2018, again with Karan Vyas, put Jackie Shroff and Pratik Gandhi in the same Gujarati frame.

Three films is a small sample. It is also a complete one: a hit, a national award and a crossover cast, inside four years. Very few writers in any Indian language get all three boxes ticked before their tenth credit.

Made in China in 2019 reunited him with Mikhil Musale and Karan Vyas, this time in Hindi, with Bhatt on screenplay and dialogues. Serious Men for Netflix in 2020 adapted Manu Joseph's novel, and the writing room included Bhavesh Mandalia, the same man he had co-written Bey Yaar with six years earlier. The Gujarati circle kept closing around him even in Bombay.

Then came the run that changed his bracket. Bhediya in 2022 reported about Rs 90 crore. Munjya in 2024 reported Rs 132.13 crore against a production cost put at Rs 30 crore. Stree 2 in the same year reported Rs 874.58 crore worldwide, the highest for any Hindi film of 2024. He is credited as co-creator of the Maddock Supernatural Universe alongside Amar Kaushik, and he wrote Thamma in 2025, the most expensive film that universe has made. On streaming he wrote for Inside Edge and Asur, and two episodes of Ray, one of them in Urdu.

Here is the fact that gets missed. Across the same years he was writing Hindi blockbusters, Bhatt kept writing lyrics for Gujarati films: 24 of them by the count in his own filmography, from Bey Yaar in 2014 through six releases in 2022 alone and on to Lagan Laagii Re in 2026.

That ratio is the argument. Three Gujarati scripts, 24 Gujarati song credits. Most writers who cross over treat the home industry as a launchpad and then bill their old collaborators for the favour. Bhatt kept a standing appointment with the language, at the one job that pays least and travels furthest.