When actor Varun Dhawan and his wife Natasha Dalal finally set out to return to Mumbai by sea on Republic Day, two days after they tied the knot in an Alibaug property, the moment was a cynosure of millions of eyes.

It was the first time that the two were going to be seen in public after their intimate wedding at a hotel in the coastal town. Millions were waiting to take a glimpse of the couple.
When the buggy carrying the Sui Dhaaga star and his wife started inching closer towards the waiting paparazzi, among them was 21-year-old Sneh Zala, already planning his shot. It was going to be tricky. He had to capture this before rushing to the other end of the bridge to get a good spot so that he could get a shot of the couple entering the waiting speed boat.
Zala did what he always does — he zipped out his mobile phone and recorded a 12-second video of the white buggy, with a six-second view of the actor, dressed in all pink, and his wife in mint green, perched on the cart. As soon as he shot this, he ran to bag a spot for his next shot, but not before hitting send on that video.
Within a minute, his boss, photographer Manav Manglani, got the video on WhatsApp. Uploaded within minutes, that video became one of the first shots of the newly-wedded couple in public and, on Instagram alone, fetched Manglani over 2.27 lakh views and more than 13,000 likes.

In the home of the world’s largest film industry, supplying you your daily Bollywood fix is an ever-serious business. From countless Instagram handles posting celebrity updates with furious frequency to numerous YouTube channels churning out videos to websites analysing every move that celebrities make, filmy news is a 24x7 cycle, 365 days of the year. Be it capturing actors as they leave their gyms after a work-out or gate-crashing their private dinners to catching them as they walk in and out of the airport, the scrutiny is unrelenting.
Paparazzi photographers hire tens of photographers, spread across the city, tracking different suburbs, constantly riding bikes through ‘celebrity hotspots’, videographers follow suit, fanned across the city, willing to spend hours waiting for a seconds-long glimpse of the star. Some photographers memorise number plates of stars-while on prowl, they look for these number plates. As soon the car is spotted, it tells them their prey is near. Amidst this, quenching this collective appetite for celebrity news are an ever-growing tribe of photographers and videographers, many of whom are walking out of precarious, low-paying odd jobs to become part of the paparazzi. From selfie-seekers and mechanics to bartenders and drivers, youngsters, mostly men, are flocking the profession, ditching professional cameras and, instead, arming themselves with mobile phones.

Like 21-year-old Zala.
Four years ago, and fresh out of school, he was just an unabashed Deepika Padukone fan who attended events featuring her for just a glimpse of the actress.
“At one such event, I noticed the paparazzi and realised that I wanted to do that,” says Zala. Still in junior college, all he had was a mobile phone. “So, I met Manav [Manglani] sir and asked him if I could shoot for him. I shot for a month and he liked my work enough to keep me.”
The path might have been unconventional but the results have been as rewarding, if not more. Four years into the profession, Zala’s work is appreciated publicly by celebrities and he has a cool 67,000 followers on Instagram hooked to his celebrity updates, even as he continues to work under Manglani.
But there is one factor that is making it possible for young men like Zala to confidently strut around in an industry where an expensive, professional digital single-lens reflex camera (DSLR) camera was considered a gate-pass: mobile phones.
With the content increasingly being viewed on phone screens, agencies and photographers like Manglani are realising that a mobile phone is helping them put out content faster than ever before, to satiate the scrolling-and-tapping needs of millions.
But the lightning pace is not the only reason why phone-trotting paparazzi are growing in Mumbai.

A growing tribe
Zala’s growth is a sign of a mobile-phone enabled newfound democratisation in the industry, adds Manglani. “The only training you need when shooting with phones is having steady hands and being able to record while walking backwards,” he says, adding that photography training is “of no use” to this mobile paparazzi.
Such democratisation, then, is also benefiting not just the smitten, like Zala, but also those are desperately seeking a livelihood.
Like 21-year-old Rajesh Patil (name changed), a bartender-turned-telecom salesman-turned paparazzo, who came to this field, who was lured by the promise of better money and respect. Faced with his mother’s ill health and father’s troubles with alcoholism, he had to drop out after Class 10 and seek work.
Having waited for over an hour outside the office of Dharma Productions in Khar, Patil is trying to sneak in a quick home-made lunch of chapattis and peas, balancing the box on his knees as he sits on a bike, parked opposite the office. “I was ready to do anything that came my way,” he says. “I was getting Rs 12,000 in this job, three thousand more than what I got as a bartender and I didn’t have the luxury to choose. I was desperate.” Just then, a car enters the building premises and Patil has to abandon his lunch. He looks at the number plate-it is actress Kiara Advani's car.
After 15 minutes, Patil has finally got a 45-second long video of Advani, posing for the cameras. Within minutes, his video will be online-titled 'Kiara Advani raise temperature in athleisure look as meeting in Dharma Office' (sic).
If it wasn’t for a mobile phone, Patil would have still been doing odd jobs. “I wouldn’t have been in this field if it needed me to have a professional camera,” he says, pointing to the economics of the trade. “A camera costs nearly a lakh of rupees, and I don’t have such money. Even if I borrow the camera from my phone, I risk damaging it and having to pay up for it,” he says.

Reinventing the profession
Be it Patil, Zala or Manglani, nearly everyone in the industry agrees that the mobile phone has been ushering in a silent revolution in the way the city’s paparazzi works.
At the heart of the profession is timing and the realisation that you can miss a shot by seconds or end up waiting hours for a very fleeting glimpse of the celebrity.
You abandon your spot near the celebrity’s car, after waiting for her two-hour long lunch to get over. That’s when the actor suddenly leaves and you’ve missed your shot. You wait outside a celebrity’s home for a party to get over till the wee hours of the morning, but the celebrity is no mood to entertain you and drives away in a flash. You hear of this actor, known for her ‘gym looks’, being spotted in a gym and rush there only to realise that she’s left just a minute ago.
This doesn’t end with capturing celebrities. “The entire business of uploading content on social media platforms is driven by timing. The algorithms favour those who upload the content first — the quicker you are in uploading it, the more chances you have of going viral,” says Manglani, who now has over four million followers across different platforms.
Shooting with a camera means that the photographer or videographer has to then transfer the content to their phone and then send to their bosses’ heavy files over, often, patchy internet connections. “With a phone, you can send a file and then go back to shooting more content while it gets transferred and it's all done within a minute or two,” says Manglani. “All this is to save those two minutes we have over those who shoot with cameras,” Patil confirms.
But beyond that, the paparazzi now also has to compete with the stars themselves. So conscious of their images and their outreach, most stars like to publish their own content rather than allow paparazzi photographers to capture them. From announcing baby names to publishing the first photographs of a much-anticipated wedding, celebrities are doing it all themselves, on their own feeds.
“While we were waiting outside the venue where [Varun] Dhawan and Natasha were getting married, we saw that he had already published a portrait of them minutes before. Why would anyone then want to see our photos instead?” says Zala.
That’s where mobile phones offer an exciting variation and allow for ‘edgier’ and ‘more real’ content to be produced.
42-year-old Anil Tiwari, one of the most senior paparazzi photographers in Mumbai, agrees. Tiwari, 13 years ago, got lucky when he switched over from being a driver to a photographer overnight. A media owner gave him a camera and asked him to shoot events every night and Tiwari slowly graduated. “I had to learn how the camera works and had to pick up the skills and the technical knowledge about different cameras,” he says.
Tiwari says a lot more are following his example and switching professions, but almost none with a camera. “The camera is disappearing. In a few years, we won’t need the camera at all,” he says. “All the youngsters who are coming to the field from different professions only need their mobile phones, nothing else.”

Photographs by Raju Shinde, Produced by Mansi Bhasin