There are moments in a community’s journey when something begins to glow quietly beneath the surface — the sense that people deserve more joy, more belonging, more spaces where their hearts can rest without explanation. Bollywood Bliss, our newly funded initiative supported by the National Lottery Community Fund, is one of those moments. It feels less like a launch and more like a natural continuation of everything we have been building for years through Bollywood Chai Cafés and Bollywood Revisited, where colour, culture, music, and conversation created small pockets of healing for people who needed it most.
Now, this work evolves into an 18-month Festival of Art and Wellbeing — a programme shaped by the belief that creativity is not a luxury but a lifeline. It will hold space for movement, art, music, storytelling, traditional games, shared meals, shared memories, and shared laughter. These are not simply activities; they are gentle antidotes to loneliness and social isolation, two of the most persistent challenges facing our communities today.
And leading the first chapter of this journey is someone whose story sits beautifully within the SheInspires legacy: Sannah Adam. Sannah is not only a qualified wellbeing practitioner and fitness instructor — she is a two-time SheInspires Award winner, first recognised as a Young Achiever and later honoured as a Rising Star. Her work has always centred on uplifting others, helping them rediscover strength and confidence through movement. Who better, then, to help open and guide this new programme? Sana will lead our wellbeing and fitness sessions, bringing her skill, compassion, and lived understanding of what community support can really mean.
Bollywood Bliss builds on a truth we have always known intuitively: that art heals. Long before research told us that creative activity can reduce stress by 30%, regulate emotions, and strengthen mental wellbeing, communities like ours felt it instinctively. We understood that colour lifts the spirit, rhythm steadies the pulse, and sitting across a table from another human being — even to play a simple game of carrom or ludo — can soften the quiet edges of loneliness.
This year could not be a more fitting time to celebrate the power of art and cultural memory. As London unveiled the bronze statue of Shah Rukh Khan and Kajol in their iconic Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) pose to mark the film’s 30-year anniversary, the world was reminded again of Bollywood’s extraordinary ability to connect across time, geography, and generation. A sculpture in the middle of Leicester Square, honouring a film from 1995, stands as proof that Bollywood is not just entertainment — it is an emotional language, a form of communal memory that brings strangers together and gives people the courage to hope, to laugh, to feel.
If a single film can resonate through three decades, then a carefully held wellbeing programme inspired by the same cultural richness can resonate deeply within the lives of people who need connection today.
Bollywood Bliss is for everyone — women, men, older adults, young people, families. Loneliness has no demographic, and neither does healing. Over the next 18 months, people will come together to move, paint, play, breathe, and rebuild small but essential routines of joy. Our sessions at Premier House, and across the community, will invite people to arrive as they are and leave a little lighter.
We are deeply grateful to the National Lottery Community Fund for believing in this work and investing in the emotional health of our neighbourhoods. Their support allows this initiative to become more than a programme; it becomes a promise — that art, culture, and community will remain at the centre of how we support each other.
Bollywood Bliss is not just an event or a set of workshops. It is a reminder that joy is a form of strength. That culture can be medicine. That coming together, even briefly, can change the shape of a lonely week. And that healing often begins in unexpected places — a dance step, a splash of colour, a shared game, a familiar song, a warm cup of chai.
As we step into this new chapter, we welcome everyone to join us.
Because in the heart of community, surrounded by art and movement and memory, people begin to find themselves again.
