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Of all the kinds of stories we write as journalists, profiles are my favourite. Profiling a founder or a business leader is harder than it looks. If you are on good terms with the person, you often run the risk of writing a hagiography — leaving out their mistakes, failures, or unsavoury bits of their personality. On the flip side, when profiling a controversial figure, you can be tempted to focus overly on their negatives.
But what if the subject of your profile declines to meet you altogether?
This was the challenge with which I started writing my recent Long Story about Ullu, the now-banned streaming service that became synonymous with softcore entertainment. Earlier in 2025, my editor, Goutam Das, had suggested that I look at a story on Ullu and how it had dodged growing government scrutiny despite its sexually explicit offerings.
For context, that was the time when the Indian government was cracking down hard and fast on anyone and anything it deemed “obscene” — from standup comedians to the YouTube show India’s Got Latent. The entertainment industry was slipping deeper into self-censorship. In 2021, TV soap queen Ekta Kapoor had already erased all links with Ullu’s rival app ALTT (then known as Alt Balaji).
In all this, Ullu founder Vibhu Agarwal was seemingly unaffected, planning to publicly list his platform and even running a rival streaming service named Hari Om, for Hindu mythological shows. How was he pulling off this balancing act? That was Goutam’s question for me.
I pursued an interview with Vibhu Agarwal for several weeks. In April, his team agreed to a meeting at the company’s Mumbai office, only to cancel at the last minute, saying Agarwal was “travelling”. After that, it was crickets.
Was it worth profiling Ullu and Agarwal without the interview? I wasn’t sure, so we put the story on the back burner for a while. Then, suddenly in late July, the ministry of information and broadcasting banned the app, along with more than 20 others, including ALTT.
We now had a news peg for the story. But I also knew that I was unlikely to ever get that interview with Agarwal — more so now. I was going to have to do this story “from the outside”, meaning that without access to my subject, I had to piece together information from other sources that could give us a glimpse into Agarwal’s journey.
To do this, I had to rely on two kinds of sources — documents and people — for two different kinds of information.
First, the documents. Company filings with the ministry of corporate affairs (MCA) helped me understand just how big Vibhu Agarwal’s media businesses were. Apart from Ullu, which had been converted into a public company for an initial public offering, there were documents for Atrangii Network (owner of Atrangii and Hari Om streaming services) and Ullu99 (now called Woh Wali Film Pvt. Ltd). Then, there were companies associated with Agarwal’s family business of selling construction material, including TMT rebars and cement.
As anyone with any experience will tell you, obtaining company filings from the MCA is a massive pain, or perhaps an elaborate dance that involves dodging faulty web design and repeated server failures. After years of frustration, I now know the best time to get all the documents you need is late at night. So, I stayed up until 3am and got everything in one go.
These documents told one half of the story. They showed just how rapidly Ullu and its related media businesses had grown since 2020, especially during the pandemic years. Also, they showed that Agarwal’s family businesses were in a free fall, shrinking from tens of crores of rupees to a few lakhs in revenue in just under a decade. Clearly, Agarwal’s fortune lay in softcore web series, not in hardcore construction. It helped to highlight just how devastating the government’s ban would be for him.
Besides, there was an appendix to the ministry’s order banning Ullu, a copy of which my colleague Shouvik Das (Mint’s technology reporter) shared with the team. I looked into it to find out why the government suddenly disapproved of Ullu and its ilk. I’ve read many, many government orders and legal documents over the years, but nothing could have prepared me for this: A 90-page collection of meticulously documented screenshots from Ullu, ALTT, Desiflix, and other apps, all featuring people in various stages of undress getting frisky with each other. (Note to the ministry: Please include warnings next time!)
Next, I considered who to speak to about how Vibhu Agarwal works. This was tricky; Ullu was banned, and not everyone is comfortable publicly associating with work that treads the line between erotic and pornographic. Female actors, in particular, are always concerned about being typecast forever as adult entertainment stars.
Here, my colleague Sakshi Sadashiv came to my rescue. She connected me with a number of women who had worked on Ullu’s original shows. My Long Story features the story of one of them, Shyna Khatri, who told me in unflinching detail why she picked this line of work and why she decided to quit it too. Then, I texted my sources in the Mumbai film industry and was connected to writers and directors — nearly all of them men — who worked on Ullu originals for many years.
I was more nervous (than usual) about all these interviews. Each of these people held insights into the workings of Ullu, and I did not want to upset them by appearing judgmental about their work. I had already assumed no one would want to talk on the record. Now, we are allowed to quote anonymous sources as long as they are reliable and vetted, but a Long Story full of such unnamed anecdotes risks looking a lot more like gossip and not journalism.
I took great pains to ensure I focused our conversation on business and creative decision-making — how were the shows produced? What was the scripting process like? How was sexual intimacy choreographed? How involved was Vibhu Agarwal in all this?
The result: Everyone I spoke to agreed to be on the record! (In journalism lingo, that means they were comfortable being identified in the story.) That was a big win and made the story much richer.
What’s more, their stories helped me realize how respected Agarwal was in his professional circles, despite being a controversial public figure. This dichotomy became the heart of the Long Story. The government and public may disapprove of him for seemingly making access to erotica easy, but for the professionals he employed, he was invaluable.
There was another dichotomy I was able to highlight. The men who wrote, directed, and edited Ullu’s shows were grateful to Agarwal. But the women or ‘Ullu girls’ who were the face of these shows were treated as dispensable and thought of Ullu and its rival platforms as little more than a stepping stone in their journey to being creators, actors, and entertainers.
After all, what’s a good profile without some difficult contradictions?
