Inside the shakeup at Netflix India

Why read this story?

Editor's note: Srishti Arya probably didn’t see it coming. On a Thursday afternoon, on 20 May, the company announced that she was leaving Netflix India. What it didn’t say was that she had been fired.  The move shocked almost everyone, from colleagues to rivals to the company’s partners. As news of her exit spread inside the company, it was met with disbelief. After all, in a short span of three years Arya had become one of the two faces of Netflix’s India business, and the reason for the company’s increasing closeness with Bollywood. In the three years she spent at Netflix, the company released more than 35 original films, including Guilty, Ludo, Yeh Ballet, Serious Men and Pagglait. Around a month ago, this writer interviewed Arya and Netflix India vice-president of content Monika Shergill about the company’s performance here, and she didn’t let on if anything was amiss. And now she is out. In a town hall after Arya’s exit, Shergill, Arya’s reporting manager, addressed employees about the change. “Aspirations didn’t align,” she said, followed by the usual corporate messaging about restructuring …