From Ranchi to the Green Room: Ankkit Poddar's Unscripted Route to Cinema

Ankkit Poddar did not walk into film production. He arrived at it, slowly, after a decade of building things that had nothing to do with cameras or scripts.

Growing up in Ranchi, in a middle-class household, Poddar learned early that circumstances are never fixed. “Life is not constant; it is full of variables,” he says. “If you remain a constant in a variable world, the world will eventually move ahead of you.” That single conviction would go on to define a career that refuses to sit still.

His early years followed a conventional, high-achieving arc: consulting at Deloitte, corporate banking at Citi. Both gave him what he calls an “incredible foundation,” discipline, analytical rigour, the ability to perform under pressure. But somewhere in those boardrooms, a quieter question began to surface. “I was becoming very good at building someone else’s vision, while increasingly wanting to build something of my own,” he reflects. “If I continue on this path for another ten years, will I be proud of the life I have built, or simply of the positions I have held?”

There was no single dramatic exit. Instead, there was a gradual pull toward ownership, toward moving from being employed to creating employment. Poddar moved into venture-backed startups, then into a healthcare venture in the ABA and autism care space, an industry he entered not for the business model, but for the human beings behind it. “I am an emotional person, and I tend to understand people before I understand numbers,” he says. “The hunger is not simply to build a profitable business. It is to generate value.”

It is a philosophy he traces, in part, to an unexpected source: acting. Trained as an actor, Poddar believes the craft sharpened something in him long before he became a producer. “Acting teaches you to observe people, understand emotions, recognise what someone may be feeling without them saying it,” he explains. That sensitivity, he says, has shaped every venture he has built since, including his instinct to look past spreadsheets and ask a different question of every business: “Can this business create value that continues to matter even when I’m not in the room?”

Somewhere alongside the ventures, mentoring became its own calling. Over more than a decade, Poddar has worked with thousands of students and young professionals, including sessions at institutions like XLRI, IIM Bangalore, IIM Indore, IIM Kozhikode etc. He describes it almost like an act of restoration. “If you tie a horse to a post for long enough, eventually you can remove the rope, but the horse may continue to behave as though it is still tied,” he says. “Human beings can be like that.” Many people, he believes, carry an invisible restriction long after the real one is gone, an old verdict about who they are or what they’re allowed to want. “A large part of what I want to do through mentoring is help people remove that imaginary noose.”

That same restlessness eventually led him to entertainment, and to Celestia Pictures. For Poddar, the shift from admiring the industry to building within it was less a leap than an accumulation. “Production gives me the opportunity to create the stories, bring together the talent and build the larger world through which those emotions can reach an audience,” he says. Choosing to stand on both sides of the camera, as actor and producer, he insists, was never accidental. “That combination gives me joy, satisfaction, authority and control over the creative journey.”

Naturally, the pivot raised eyebrows. Moving from structured, conventional careers into the uncertainty of film production invites doubt, and Poddar knows it. But he has made peace with whose opinions he lets in. “I have learned not to outsource my confidence to other people’s opinions,” he says simply.

Ask him what storytelling means to him beyond the business of it, and the answer turns almost philosophical. “Cinema is perhaps the only medium through which you can take millions of different people, sitting in completely different circumstances, and make them experience a range of emotions through the same story,” he says. “People may forget what you said, but they rarely forget what you made them feel.” It is, fittingly, the same instinct behind the name of his production house. “Celestia reflects that philosophy for me: bringing stories into the light.”

If there is a thread running through banking, healthcare, mentorship and now cinema, it is Poddar’s refusal to be defined by a single industry. “Don’t find your place in the world. Create your place in the world,” he says, a line he returns to often. His own career, he admits, would look disconnected on paper. To him, it reads as one continuous pursuit.

He is particularly certain of what he wants his story to mean for someone from a town like his own. “If a boy from Ranchi can dream beyond the boundaries of where he came from, reinvent himself multiple times and build a life across completely different worlds, then you can do it too,” he says. “There is an Ankkit inside every individual, the version of themselves that is more ambitious, more courageous and more capable than the limitations they currently believe in.”