Aryan Raj Sayani

Jai Hind

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

Captain Smit Machchhar is a HERO.

In the face of the gravest danger and despite being seriously injured, he showed immense courage and an unwavering resolve to protect the lives of others.

His valour helped save hundreds of lives and avert a great tragedy.

India is proud of Captain Machchhar.

Praying for his speedy recovery, renewed strength and good health.

[Aryan Raj Sayani @AryanSayani]

@Ankiii_i Hi

[Jeffrey Katzenberg @jeffreykWNDR]

The World is Changing: AI For Creativity

By Jeffrey Katzenberg

A few months ago, I sat in my office in Silicon Valley and watched as a tech founder showed me something extraordinary. On the screen was a fully realized, beautifully lit, well-composed animated scene. It was stunning and it made me feel exactly what I felt in 1986 watching Luxo Jr. That was the first time I watched a computer-animated 3D character take a breath and seem, against all reason, to have life. It left me in awe.

Later that day, I received a text from an artist I've known for thirty years, 350 miles to the south, in the city where I spent most of my career. After seeing a similar video, she texted: "Is this the end of us?" My answer was, "Certainly not.”

I have spent the better part of the last decade in Silicon Valley, but the heart of my career has been in Hollywood. Being deeply connected to both worlds means I have deep loyalties to each and a responsibility to speak honestly to both.

In 2023, I said that these new AI tools would cut the time and cost of producing world-class animation by as much as ninety percent within three years. Some colleagues were alarmed, many were furious.

There is growing fear and resistance surrounding AI within the creative community. I deeply understand it, because I've spent countless hours walking through animation studios watching gifted artists bent over their desks, rebuilding a single second of film for the tenth time because the ninth version wasn't quite right. I've sat in screening rooms where four years of people's labor played out in minutes, and I knew the name of every person that had spent countless hours bringing those images to life. The creative process is a calling, there's really no other way to describe it. From the outside some see resistance. From the inside, it is love.

People do not fight this hard for things they don't care about. The pushback coming out of Hollywood represents the collective effort of people who are deeply passionate about their craft.

Is History Repeating Itself?

The history here is more complicated than either side may realize. In 1906, the most famous composer in America, John Philip Sousa, published an essay titled “The Menace of Mechanical Music." He warned that the phonograph would become "a substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul."

Sousa's fight was not really about the machine, it was about money. The machines were playing his compositions, and the men who built them weren't paying him a cent. His campaign helped create the Copyright Act of 1909. He did not stop the technology. He changed the terms under which it could use his work.
A hundred years ago, sound came to the movies. We remember it now as a miracle, and it was. What we forget is who paid for it. Before sound, tens of thousands of musicians made their living in the orchestra pits of movie houses, scoring every film live, every night, in towns all over the world. When the soundtrack arrived, the work of one composer and one orchestra was recorded for a film that went into thousands of theaters. The union fought back with everything it had, taking out newspaper ads across the country warning against the menace of "canned music," one of them showing a mechanical man tearing the strings out of a harp while an angel wept.

They were not fools, and they were not Luddites. They were right. Those pit jobs did not come back. And yet (this is the part we have to be brave enough to admit), sound gave us the movie musical, the modern score, sfx, sound design, audio engineering, and an art form vastly larger than the one it disrupted. And it helped keep Hollywood in the forefront of world entertainment for the rest of the century and into the next. The loss was real. And yet the art form expanded.

This is a story that has been told over and over again. To resist technology is to risk irrelevance. Just look at Kodak or Blockbuster. To embrace technology is to open doors of new possibility. Just consider Apple and Netflix.

What I Learned From Walt Disney

In the mid-1980s, I was tapped to lead Disney's animation division at a moment when the studio was at an inflection point. Animation wasn't just another business unit. It was the soul of the company, a medium revered because of Walt's genius and his passion. But the production system was cumbersome and unforgiving. A single movie was 125,000 individual hand-drawn and painted cels, photographed one frame at a time. Every revision carried a cost measured in months. These degrees of difficulty shaped the kinds of stories we could tell.

We found our way forward in an unexpected place: Walt himself. The Disney archives held astonishing recordings of Walt explaining his creative process. His own writings. His notes and storyboards. Work product captured at every stage of his process. This was truly a gift. Listening, reading, sitting with the work itself, we heard him talk about character, about emotion, about how an audience feels when a character truly comes alive. He talked about making bold choices and refining a scene until it genuinely moved people. We didn't hear a word about pencils or paintbrushes. In fact, Walt was famous for being a technologist, forever hunting for state-of-the-art tools, often inventing them himself to achieve the images he saw in his head. But he never defined animation by the tools. He defined it by whether the audience believed the character. His principles were timeless. The tools were not.

That realization changed everything. We co-developed the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) with a young Northern California company called Pixar, replacing hand-painted cels with CGI. In The Little Mermaid, the final scene shimmered with a dimensionality and light that the old process simply couldn't achieve. In Beauty and the Beast, the ballroom sequence moved with a cinematic sweep that placed the audience inside the emotion of the moment. In Aladdin, the Cave of Wonders felt vast and alive, and the Magic Carpet became an intricate, compelling character all its own. In The Lion King, the stampede carried a scale and intensity that raised the emotional stakes beyond anything we'd done before. Technology didn't diminish the craft, it expanded the canvas. It gave artists more room to create.

A decade later, the canvas expanded again. When Disney released Pixar's Toy Story, it wasn't simply a technical milestone. It was proof that a fully computer-animated film could carry real emotional weight, that it could make audiences laugh, cry, and believe. At DreamWorks, we made the difficult decision to sunset hand-drawn animation and become a fully computer-animated studio. It was the right thing to do, but it was not without pain. It cost talented people their place in an industry where they had worked their whole lives. Some made the leap to the new tools and did the finest work of their careers. Some never did.

Tools are never the point. The instruments change with every generation. What endures is taste and imagination. The magical ability to make an audience feel. One of the greatest storytellers of our generation, George Lucas, succinctly captured the eternal essence of this issue: “It’s not the how, it’s the why.”

A Distinction With a Difference

I asked one of the leading AI models a question that has been challenging me for months. What is the difference between reasoning and creating? Its answer changed how I think about almost everything happening in this industry. It said . . .

Reasoning and creating are two distinct cognitive modes, though they also work together. Reasoning is fundamentally evaluative and analytical. It operates on what already exists: facts, premises, evidence. It moves toward a conclusion that was in a sense already implied by the input. Reasoning is constrained by logic and truth. Its goal is to arrive somewhere correct, not to invent somewhere new.

Creating is fundamentally generative. It produces something that didn't exist before. And crucially, there's no single right answer waiting to be found. A blank page has infinite valid responses. Creation involves choices that can't be fully justified by logic alone. Taste, intuition and vision fill the gap where deduction runs out.

Reasoning is what Silicon Valley has been perfecting. Creating is what Hollywood has been practicing for more than a century. AI today operates almost entirely on the reasoning side of the line. It can deduce, evaluate, optimize, and pattern-match brilliantly. And while it can create, there is a real distinction to being creative. What it doesn’t yet have is those things that make us human: empathy, devotion, serendipity, the kind of creativity that comes from a person trying to say something only they could say. When the bot generates a piece of art, it is not trying to communicate anything. It is statistics, not soul; it is emulating things that have been done. By contrast, human creativity isn’t about repeating patterns of zeros and ones; it is about doing something new.

One day, AI may close this gap. Three years ago, the leaders building AI would have called what they are achieving today, improbable, if not impossible. Impossible is no longer improbable.

Today, the line between reasoning and creating is real. Even the leading technologists acknowledge we are not there yet. There is no scientific path to crossing this divide that anyone in the field can articulate today. Understanding that gap is where we will find common ground.

A Path Forward

In 2016, I closed one chapter in Hollywood with the sale of DreamWorks and opened another in Northern California, co-founding WndrCo. We’ve backed more than 50 founders building the next generation of technology and watched how breakthroughs in Silicon Valley emerge, first as experiments, then as platforms, and finally as infrastructure that reshapes entire industries. It's worth remembering that the last great revolution in animation also came from the north. Pixar was a Northern California company, forged not in the conventions of the Hollywood studio system, but in the technological breakthroughs of Silicon Valley. I've spent years on both sides of this bridge. For sure, I don’t have all the answers (take Quibi, for one!). But, from my past and present vantage points of my long career, here is what I see . . .

Brilliant people in Northern California building this technology have made something extraordinary. They have earned the right for the rest of us to be, if not believers, at least optimistic that what comes next will be remarkable. But they have not made an artist. The tools are powerful, but they are not what makes a story matter. That knowledge lives 350 miles to the south, inside people whose life's work has informed the very models you are building. The right path forward includes them by design, with credit, with consent, and with compensation. Build this with the storytellers. Not on top of them. Taste is not something that can be synthesized, it is uniquely human.

At the same time, Hollywood needs to accept that AI is not going away. The energy they are spending trying to make it disappear is energy they are not spending deciding the terms on which it will exist. And the terms are everything. The north needs something from it that they cannot build and cannot buy: creativity. The kind that takes a blank page and conjures a single right answer where there was none and has held audiences for a century. Without it, the most powerful reasoning engine ever invented will still be missing the only thing that makes a story worth telling.

The artists who learn to wield these new instruments will do things the engineers never dreamed of. They always have. Edison invented the motion picture but made terrible movies. It took Chaplin, Lloyd, Keaton and so many others to make movies emotional. Now, the canvas is about to expand yet again. We should decide now that we intend to paint on it.

There are so many valuable lessons in history. This has happened many times before, and it was never settled by the technology. It was settled by the terms. Sousa did not stop the phonograph; he helped write the law that made sure composers got paid. And two years ago, when the writers and the actors walked out, they were fighting for the very things Sousa was fighting for in 1906. Consent, compensation, the basic recognition that human creative work has a price that must be paid. The terms of that fight are still being negotiated, but the principle is older than any of us.

The tools-versus-no-tools argument is a trap. First, we must all agree that there should be terms. Then we can have the crucial debate about what fairness requires.

What I Learned From Steve Jobs

Years ago, Steve Jobs said, "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough. It's technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing." He was describing a device. But he could just as easily have been describing this tale of two cities.

What I See Coming Soon

As the barriers and the costs come down, more films will get made, not fewer. Studios will get to take more risks. There will be more seats at the table, and very soon entirely new forms of storytelling. In the 1980s, animation was dismissed as a niche corner of the business. Today it is one of the most beloved and profitable forms of storytelling in the world. In live action, filmmakers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and Peter Jackson embraced new visual tools not as shortcuts, but as instruments, and expanded cinema in the process. Every time storytelling has met a genuine technological shift, from synchronized sound to color to computer animation, it has redefined the boundaries of the medium and grown larger in the process.

Assuredly, I don’t have all the answers, but I am confident that the creative opportunities will expand yet again. How we come through this is a choice. The north has the new tools. The south has the creative soul. The best future will draw on the best of both worlds.

[KhushbuSundar @khushsundar]

Dear Madam @GiorgiaMeloni
I regret that we have a LOP in the Parliament like this man in white who thinks insulting a woman is fine and its his birthright too. He thinks joking and demeaning the dignity of a woman is absolutely ok because he is privileged. I, as an INDIAN, with folded hands apologize to you for this misogynistic human behavior.
You have been a great friend of our H'ble PM Shri @narendramodi ji and our nation.
Look forward to welcoming you with love and respect soon. 🙏

[Aryan Raj Sayani @AryanSayani]

@murthy_vitwit @vitwit_ @kathanika_xyz Wish you the very best of luck, Murthy! I hope you achieve everything you started this journey for. Wishing you great success and all the very best for the future. You are already successful because you've chosen to serve a greater purpose. 🇮🇳

[Chetan Bhagat @chetan_bhagat]

Unlike 2011, social media and Instagram is massive today. You go to protest, you being there makes for great content for your account, you post about it, you get clout and people who see your post want the same and follow you. Boom - extreme virality! Not easy to stop now!

[rajamouli ss @ssrajamouli]

Visited the Lumière Museum and the screening room where Eega and RRR was screened to a full house in Lyon, France.

Thierry Frémaux, the director of the Institut Lumière and the Cannes Film Festival, was gracious enough to introduce me. Then he said he had planned a surprise and walked me through the very street where cinema was born. I was already emotional for everything that was happening around me.
And there is this wall full of plaques. Names of legends like Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, Quentin Tarantino, Francis Ford Coppola… and then I noticed a plate covered with a red cloth. My mind went blank.
I don’t even know what to say for the honour of having my name permanently placed on the Mur des Cinéastes, along with the greats.

Only gratitude. Deeply, deeply humbled. 🙏

Thank you @InstitutLumiere for a memory I will carry for a lifetime.

[Aryan Raj Sayani @AryanSayani]

@HelloVyom But the people writing codes, deploying and working on all those companies or services are indians from ground level to c level executives. It is a matter of time for those guys to realise they need to do something on their own and they have the biggest market here.

[Aryan Raj Sayani @AryanSayani]

@TheDeshBhakt @DrSJaishankar @araghchi Another narrative that fits his perspective. 👍 GREAT

[S.Jayashankar @jaypanicker]

PM is traveling abroad to secure investments and ensure energy security in this period of economic gloom due to various global wars. It is one thing to know that, as a contender of PM post over the last 16 years, you don't have the intellectual capacity to understand this. However, I am intrigued to see your irritation towards promoting a reputed Indian brand (Parle). Is it because you don't want Indian brands to be showcased on the global stage? Or are you disgruntled by your intelligence (or lack of it), which has kept you puzzled over why melody is chocolaty?

[Aryan Raj Sayani @AryanSayani]

Bronze isn't failure. It's proof you were good enough to be in the fight. 🇮🇳🏸
2022 — we rewrote history.
2026 — we reminded them we're still here.
The work continues. Always does.
#TeamIndia #ThomasCup #Badminton 🇮🇳

[The Khel India @TheKhelIndia]

The Indian Team had self designed jersey for the Thomas Cup 2026 Campaign 🇮🇳🎽

"We designed the Thomas Cup jersey on our own. We printed our own shirts. HS Prannoy came up with the idea that we will wear shirts written Thomas Cup on it which will have one star. We designed two T-shirts - white and black."

"We bought it, we sent it for printing, and whatever few T-shirts we were able to sell, we donated the money to charity."

- Satwik to India Today in an interview

[Rajdeep Sardesai @sardesairajdeep]

IMPORTANT Data point:
49 constituencies in West Bengal had winning margins lower than number of electors deleted in SiR
26 won by BJP, 21 by TMC, 2 by Cong
Average victory margin of BJP in 207 seats was an impressive 27,805 ,
Note: total of 90 lakh names deleted during electoral rolls. Over 34 lakh appeals pending before tribunals which is a sizeable number.
Net net: SIR may have affected marginal seats BUT did NOT influence final verdict in WB. It was HIGH ANTI INCUMBENCY in several regions that cost TMC after 15 years in power .
More details here: https://t.co/R44Xdn3STH

[anand mahindra @anandmahindra]

The results of the recent state elections have been dramatic by any measure.

But for me, this image will remain the most unforgettable outcome of the elections.

More than 166,000 votes were cast between the two leading candidates in this constituency in Tamil Nadu.

And history was changed by just one vote.

This image should be shown in every school in the country & perhaps around the world.

So that every child understands that when they grow up, the greatest power they may possess is the Power of One.

The power of their one vote.

[Mr Sinha @Mrsinha]

Listen carefully to what Maulana Hasan Ali Rajani, VP of the All India Shia Personal Law Board says.

He clearly states: grief is understandable, but exporting protests into other countries is wrong. Shias follow Ayatollah Sistani of Iraq, not Iran. Loyalty must be to one’s own nation.

You won’t see this going viral amongst common Muslims because it disrupts a convenient narrative.

[Narendra Modi @narendramodi]

India’s cricketing talent shines!

Proud of our U-19 team for bringing home the World Cup. The team has played very well through the tournament, showcasing exceptional skill. This win will inspire several young sportspersons too. Best wishes to the players for their upcoming endeavours.

[DK @DineshKarthik]

That was an unreal WPL FINALS

RCB were just too good throughout the tournament

Feel for DC , 4 finals on the trot , that's an amazing achievement in itself and they've found a long term leader in JEMI.

But more importantly this is a win for WOMENS cricket. The standards have gone through the roof .

Power hitting
Fielding
Variations in bowling

Every facet of the game has improved since the inception and that's been my biggest takeaway watching this season.

Highest score ever breached by a team chasing in a Final across mens and womens (IPL n WPL) tells you everything you need to know and sums up this season beautifully

More power to you girls

Awesome season

Well tried @DelhiCapitals
Well done @RCBTweets

❤️❤️❤️

[Ram Gopal Varma @RGVzoomin]

CENSOR BOARD is OUTDATED

Not in the context of just @Actor_Vijay ‘s #JanaNayagan ‘s censor issues but in an overall manner, it is truly foolish to think that the censor board is still relevant today

It has long outlived it’s purpose, but it’s being kept alive out of laziness to debate it’s relevance now , and it is the film industry as a whole which is mainly responsible for this

We live in a time where a 12-year old with a phone can watch a terrorist execution filmed on a GoPro, a 9-year-old can stumble upon hardcore porn, and a bored retiree can binge extremist propaganda, indulge in conspiracy theories , from anywhere in the world, uncut, uncensored, algorithmically pushed. All of it is available instantly, anonymously, and without a gatekeeper.

At the same time, everybody in every wake of society speak in abusive language from new channels to YouTubers and from other apps ..If you quote that age old belief that cinema is a powerful medium , don’t ignore the fact that the social media has far more reach than cinema .and it is full of political venom, communal poison, character assassinations, live, uncensored shouting matches in the name of debates.

And in this reality, for the honourable censor board to believe that cutting a word in a film, trimming a shot, or blurring a cigarette will “protect society.” is a Joke

The censor board was born in an era of scarcity when images were rare, access was limited, and the state controlled the media . Cinema halls were crowd points. Newspapers had editors. Television had schedules. Control made sense then.
But today, any form of a control is impossible because no one can no longer decide what people should or should not see

In such times as now, censorship doesn’t prevent exposure… it only insults the viewers .
We are supposed to have smartness to decide who should rule us but not what we want to see or hear ???

What the censor board actually does now is not protection, but only theatrics . It’s a ritual of authority in Oscar worthy performances where scissors replace thinking, and moral pretence moves around in a disguise called responsibility.

The same society that freely scrolls through graphic violence on social media suddenly becomes “concerned” when a filmmaker shows something in a theatre

This hypocrisy is dangerous

Censorship assumes people are children forever as if they aren’t even aware what all things children have access to?

Cinema is not meant to be a classroom where lessons are taught . They are mirrors , view points , expressions and opinions meant to entertain
The job of the authorities is not to edit or cut them out, but to trust citizens enough to decide for themselves ,which is the main point of freedom of speech and expression, guaranteed under the constitution

If the argument is “think of the children or adults who are like children “it takes very less intelligence to understand that they cannot be protected by blunt scissors wielded by committees ,whose own personal tastes pass off as public morality also not to forget their bias and agendas .

Age classification makes sense. Warnings of the content makes sense. Censorship does not.

Continuing to defend the relevance of the censor board today is like insisting on a watchman for a building whose walls have already been broken and everyone can see what’s inside

The world has already moved on to so many platforms which are unfiltered and unsupervised and so the painful question is whether the authorities have the courage to admit that they are obsolete, and more than that, whether we as a film industry collectively have the will to question them on the same
So instead of raising this topic once in a while over a particular film , the fight should be with that particular system of thinking which created the censor board

[Javed Beigh @JavedBeigh]

UMAR KHALID IS DANGEROUS MAN. HE DESERVES TO REMAIN IN JAIL:

This is what SYED UMAR KHALID has said on record on KASHMIR:

"Basically I am against the occupation of Kashmir by the Indian state and I make it very apparent that I am not from Kashmir, but I believe that what is happening in Kashmir is an Indian occupation of Kashmir".

SYED UMAR KHALID is an Upper Caste Muslim radical ISLAMIST with close family ties to a religious extremist organization called Jamaat-i-Islami Hind (JIH).

His father, SYED Qasim Rasool Ilyas, founder of "Welfare Party of India" served as a senior member of the banned Islamic Terrorist organization - SIMI (Student's Islamic Movement of India) which started as the student wing of JIH.

SIMI and JIH are both Islamic supremacist organizations that view Non-Muslims as Sub-Humans, and both have articulated the objective of Islamizing India and establishing Shariah rule therein.

It is also important to note that Kashmir Valley's anti-Hindu separatist terrorist campaign backed by Pakistan was run ideologically by the same Jamaat-i-Islami, whose ideology SYED Umar Khalid secretly follows and his father SYED Qasim Rasool Ilyas openly follows.

It is the ideology of Jamaat-e-Islami that inspired Kashmiri terrorists to kill and rape Kashmiri Hindu Pandits in 1990 and force them to leave Kashmir Valley. It is also the same ideology of Jamaat-e-Islami that inspired my father’s generation of Kashmiris to hold Pakistani guns for the creation of an intolerant and extremist Islamic Caliphate in Kashmir Valley. It is also the same ideology of Jamaat-e-Islami that looks down upon Kashmir's Sufi Muslim traditions and practices.

Also, it must not be forgotten that Islamic radicalism in BANGLADESH is also driven by the toxic radical ideology of the same Jamaat-e-Islami that destroyed Kashmir Valley. It is the ideology of Jamaat-e-Islami that guides Bengali Muslims of Bangladesh to torment, rape and kill Bengali Hindu minority of Bangladesh.

Last, but not the least, SYED UMAR KHALID has been on record with his treasonery comments on KASHMIR VALLEY.

As an Indian Kashmiri Muslim, I welcome the decision of the Hon'ble Supreme Court of India in denying bail to SYED UMAR KHALID.

Jai Hind Jai Bharat 🇮🇳🙏

[Aryan Raj Sayani @AryanSayani]

@VIcelus @R167hjud @MumukshuSavitri It was never about white people dude, it's completely about the British who literally killed people for their personal satisfaction. Look at the records of genocides in British rule in India. They were just sick and racist.