film

While We Watched explores the changes in contemporary Indian mainstream media over the previous decade, through profiling Ravish Kumar, senior executive editor at NDTV, at work in the studio and with his subjects.Indian media ownership,bias and the post-truth, divisive, populist content have led to many mainstream television news channels being labelled Godi media (equivalent to the phrase lapdog media, and incidentally coined by Ravish Kumar).

The documentary follows Kumar as he tries to stick to factual news, criticizing the Indian government and its ecosystem whenever instances of incompetent governance and majoritarian policies emerge. It chronicles the discussions between Kumar and the NDTV team on the events that they need to cover, the preparatory work of fact-checking and witness interviews before Kumar can go live on the primetime show he anchors. It contrasts the coverage by Kumar with that of competing television channels whose anchors are shown hyperbolically conflating criticism of the government's policies with treason and going on diatribes against alleged internal and external enemies of India. It also covers the threats of violence against the NDTV news team, and the financial troubles plaguing media houses that are seen as critics of the BJP, the ruling party in India. Kumar is filmed interacting with his wife and young daughter - particularly having to deal with his daughter's fears for his life - and appearing at public events, alternately being heckled and lauded by audiences. It ends on the highnote of Ravish Kumar winning the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2019.

While We Watched frequently features scenes of NDTV staff cutting cakes to mark the departure of yet another colleague. Raids by tax authorities, dwindling government advertising revenue, banks refusing to provide loans and threats of violence and even arrest have led to many journalists leaving. Shukla observed that these "cake cuttings" were what convinced him to tell the story and in fact became a leitmotif of the documentary.