Updated on
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14 Jun 2026, 3:19 pm
Filmmaker Robbie Grewal is getting much appreciation for his work on the Amazon MX Player series Made in India: A Titan Story . The series chronicles the rise of Tata’s watch brand Titan under the leadership of Xerxes Desai (Jim Sarbh). Interestingly, Robbie’s directorial debut, Samay: When Time Strikes (2003), also starts with a Fastrack advertisement. “It just did not cross my mind at all that I made a film called Samay , and, now, a series about samay (time). Somebody told this to me the other day,” says Robbie before adding, “You could say that I unknowingly manifested the Titan series all those years ago.”
There are many other similarities between Samay and Made in India: A Titan Story . In both, the protagonists have revelations from mundane events that lead to important discoveries in their endeavours. Samay’s cop Malavika (Sushmita Sen) realises a missing link in the murder case she investigates as she hears someone singing, ‘Aankhon Hi Aankhon Mein Ishara Ho Gaya’. Similarly, Xerxes Desai has breakthroughs during the development of the Titan watch from mundane observations. These moments show that a sudden shift in perspective while looking at everyday life can spark genius, whether it be a police officer’s intuition or an entrepreneur’s vision.
While Robbie Grewal is the writer and director of Samay , the scenarists for Made in India: A Titan Story are Karan Vyas, Kandarp Shroff, and Niraj Dasa. However, Robbie says that a director owns the material that they work on when they onboard a project. “Any good director would take the material in his hand and evolve it to his liking. The same applies to Made in India .”
For example, the audience knows that Xerxes and his team will eventually prevail over their obstacles and make Titan a success, but the series makes you curious as to how they will achieve this at each stage of the story. The makers use cliffhangers cleverly, such as at the end of episode five where Xerxes tells his team that it is all but over for Titan and the company might shut down in a few months. As the director explains, “If it tells the audience that Titan is successful in the fifth episode itself, why would they come to the sixth one? We changed the ending of the episode by putting that scene at the end to ensure audience engagement.”
Another interesting aspect of the series is that it steers clear of conventional underdog narratives, while making you root for the characters as you would with underdogs. For example, when a Swiss watchmaker insults JRD Tata (Naseeruddin Shah), saying Indians do not know how to make watches, you would want the latter to prove the former wrong and help make Titan a success. Robbie elucidates, “We have seen many stories of underdogs winning. A small person from a tiny colony starts a business and it becomes huge from a garage, for example, is a fantastic formula when done well. Not all formulas are bad.”
This uncommonness of the story is exactly what drew Robbie into the project. “Tatas made watches and even planes. So the audience might wonder, ‘We know this already, what is the big deal about an autobiographical story about them?’ However, Made in India breaks the grammar of typical rags-to-riches stories. Someone noted this in one of the reviews: that it is not MS Dhoni’s story but rather Saurav Ganguly’s.”
Speaking of icons, Made in India: A Titan Story brings back Naseeruddin Shah in a performance that is reminiscent of his peak work in Hindi cinema. “You do not direct actors such as Naseeruddin Shah. I brief him abo
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