Media · ten years · since 2016
Bobhata
Marathi infotainment. Six hundred thousand followers, still going. The longest-lived thing I have built, and where I learned what "in their own language" actually costs.
Bobhata is a Marathi infotainment portal I co-run with my wife Swati and Ramdas Kaka. We have been at it since 2016. About six hundred thousand people follow it. It is the longest-lived thing I have built, and the place where I learned what “in their own language” actually costs: not translation, but the whole apparatus of writing, editing, distributing and answering readers in Marathi, every day, for a decade.
Bobhata 2.1
2.0 was the move from Drupal to Next.js and Strapi, with an AI writer behind it. 2.1 is the move to video. A reel engine turns a JSON plan into a finished Marathi video, and the site now has a Shorts feed, a stage for long films and 54 series pages. The UX fixes came with it. How I built it.
The site itself is at bobhata.com.
How it started
When we started, hardly anything interesting was happening in Marathi online. ScoopWhoop, Vice and Vox were making good content in English. I kept feeling that a lot of this world-level content was not available in Marathi. Jio was arriving and internet was becoming abundant. The question I could not get past was why such a thing did not exist in my own language.
Three of us started it: me, Swati and Ramdas Kaka. We had worked on and off on creating something before that, and talked about it for a long time. Then we decided to take the plunge. Yatin Godse built the Drupal version, and he has been our technical backbone from inception.
The first article on the website went up in April 2016. It asks why Dhoni questioned a journalist. The ones after it that month cover Sunil Gavaskar, Harsha Bhogle being dropped from the IPL, a kairi panhe recipe, the Airtel 4G girl and the first Marathi web series.
We grew up as a text business, predominantly on Facebook. The explainers lasted best. Pieces on the meaning of Vande Mataram, Shivaji’s cradle song, BC and AD, and Kabir’s dohe are still being found years later.
We made animated explainers for YouTube along the way, but we never became a video business. We should have moved to video years earlier. 2.1 is us starting that now.