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  • The Narrowing of Theatrical Cinema

    There is a particular kind of film that feels almost impossible to describe now. It was not ‘art house’ and it was not a ‘blockbuster’. It did not need a festival premiere to be taken seriously, and it did not need a spectacular budget to fill seats.

    Basu Chatterjee made films like that. Rajnigandha, Chitchor, Baton Baton Mein — these films were rooted in the textures of ordinary middle-class life. They were not parallel cinema in the way that Mrinal Sen or Ritwik Ghatak were parallel cinema. But they were not mainstream in the way the masala film was mainstream either. They occupied the space between, which in the 1970s and early 1980s was a genuine middle space, with an audience that already existed for it. Chatterjee did not have to manufacture that audience or explain himself to it. The audience was simply there, because cinema was one of the few shared cultural spaces that existed, and people came from all directions, including viewers who might otherwise have separated into distinct tastes. And this was true for cinema across the board.

     

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    This middle cinema was global. The Godfather was not a compromise between art and commerce. It was both, simultaneously. Annie Hall, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture and was also widely seen. In the UK, films like Four Weddings and a Funeral was both moved just as easily between critical acclaim and mass popularity. Good Will Hunting moved between critical conversation and mass viewership without anyone treating that as a paradox. These were not lucky accidents. They were products of a particular moment in which cinema held enough cultural authority that critics and audiences were still, broadly, addressing the same films.

    That moment seems to have passed. What replaced it is structurally different in ways that have made this middle cinema almost impossible to sustain.

     

    QUOTE: “A film that wins at Sundance and a film that opens at number one globally may be reviewed by entirely different sets of writers, discussed in entirely different corners of the internet, and watched by audiences with almost no overlap.”

     

    The first thing that changed was television. The original expansion of television pulled casual viewers away from cinemas. People who had gone to see whatever was showing, out of habit and for want of choice, now had an alternative. What remained in cinema audiences was more self-selected, which pushed studios toward films that justified the trip. Essentially, films that were events and spectacles became reasons to leave the house. This is the beginning of the blockbuster, the lesson studios drew from Jaws and Star Wars, which is that cinema should be an experience unavailable at home.

    That has only intensified as home entertainment evolved and grew. The case for going to a cinema is now almost entirely the case for immersive scale. You’re going for the big screen, the sound, and most importantly, the shared physical event.

     

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    However, what this sensibility didn’t accommodate was the mid-sized film, the film that is absorbing and well-made and emotionally honest, but does not require a particular kind of screen or scale to be itself. That film, in the recent past, has been quietly reclassified. It is now a platform film, a streaming film, and an awards-season film. It is a film you watch, but not quite a film you go to the cinema to see.

    The second thing that changed was fragmentation. When there were three television channels, a major broadcast, like a Sunday evening film or a national event, was genuinely shared across households. In the UK, this was visible even at the level of infrastructure, the ‘kettle surge,’ when electricity demand would spike as millions of viewers put the kettle on during the same commercial break. Shows like Eastenders and Coronation Street regularly drew audiences in the tens of millions, cutting across class and taste. Broadcasters even coordinated with power utilities to anticipate these surges.

    When there were a handful of major studios and a finite number of cinema screens, films competed for the same audiences in a way that required them to speak across differences. The masala film and the Chatterjee film and the parallel film were all fishing in the same pond. Their audiences overlapped because their audiences had to overlap; there were only so many ponds.

     

     

    In this sense, the streaming era has not expanded cinema, it has subdivided it. There are now effectively separate cinemas running in parallel — the theatrical blockbuster, the prestige platform drama, the festival film, and the genre film with its devoted communities, and the international film available to anyone with a subscription. Each of these has its own critics, its own awards circuits, and its own conversations. The conversations almost never meet. A film that wins at Sundance and a film that opens at number one globally may be reviewed by entirely different sets of writers, discussed in entirely different corners of the internet, and watched by audiences with almost no overlap. It is precisely this overlap that middle cinema depended on, and what fragmentation has removed.

    This is not censorship and it is not a decline in quality. It is the structural consequence of abundance. When everything is available, curation replaces the shared default. People move toward what already fits their sense of themselves, and the algorithm confirms that movement. The middle film, which depends on crossing those preferences, is less likely to be encountered at all. It does not disappear because no one wants it. It disappears because there is no longer a common space in which it can stand, where different kinds of audiences encounter the same film.

    The third thing that changed was how cultural prestige is produced and distributed. A film that won the approval of major critics in major newspapers was, by that fact, legible to a general audience as something worth seeing. The review was a form of translation, it moved a film from the space of professional evaluation into the space of ordinary decision-making. A Pauline Kael review or a Khalid Mohamed review was read by people who were not themselves critics, and it shaped what they chose to see, which meant that critical approval and popular viewership were directly connected.

     

    “
    The film that crossed between critical and popular spaces was a cultural object that different kinds of people could talk about together.
    ”
    : “The bridge is smaller partly because fewer people believe it should exist.”

     

    That transmission has broken down. Critical discourse now circulates largely within communities of people already oriented toward cinema as a serious pursuit. The general audience making decisions about what to watch is not reading reviews in the same way, if it is reading reviews at all. It is looking at aggregator scores, at social media responses, at what the people it follows are talking about. These are not the same inputs. A film can score excellently with critics and generate no momentum in the broader culture. A film can generate enormous social media energy and be treated with contempt by critics. The two systems of evaluation have separated, and without the transmission between them, the bridge has no foundations.

    For middle cinema, which depended on that transmission to move between critical approval and popular viewership, this separation is decisive. Its audiences still exist, but they are no longer encountering the same films together.

    What this means practically is that films occupying the middle have no natural amplifier. The blockbuster does not need critics; its marketing budget and its franchise recognition do the work. The art house film does not rely on mass audiences in the same way; its festival circuit and platform deals often sustain it. But the film that is genuinely good and genuinely accessible, the film that wants to reach a broad audience on the strength of its quality, has no structural support. It must either position itself as an event or position itself as prestige, and neither positioning quite fits it.

    It is worth being precise about what is lost. What is lost is not the films themselves. Films of the kind Chatterjee made are still created. The Holdovers, Past Lives, C’mon C’mon, and many more are films of human scale, rooted in feeling rather than franchise, legible to any attentive viewer. The loss is not their existence but their circulation. They do not move through the culture the way Rajnigandha moved through Indian culture in 1974.

     

     

    What is also lost is a certain kind of shared point of reference. The film that crossed between critical and popular spaces was a cultural object that different kinds of people could talk about together. It did not require specialist knowledge to engage with, but it rewarded attention. It gave people with different orientations toward cinema a common point of reference. That point of reference is increasingly rare, which means that conversations about cinema are increasingly conversations within already-formed communities rather than across them.

    And what is perhaps most subtly lost is the implicit argument that quality and accessibility are not opposites. The current arrangement makes that opposition feel structural. Films that are taken seriously seem to require effort to find. Films that are easy to find seem not to be taken seriously. This is not a law of nature. It is a consequence of how distribution, criticism, and audience formation happen to be organized right now. But when it becomes the background assumption, it shapes what filmmakers attempt, what studios fund, what audiences expect, and what critics attend to. The bridge is smaller partly because fewer people believe it should exist.

    The question of whether it can be rebuilt is not really a question about cinema. It is a question about whether shared cultural spaces can exist inside systems designed around personalization.

  • The Price of Waiting: How the World Turned Time into an Experience

    For most of urban history, waiting was the one thing everyone shared. Passengers stood in the same lines, commuters sat in the same rows of plastic chairs, and departure boards dictated the same uncertain rhythm for everyone. That uniformity is beginning to fracture.

    Today, waiting is no longer just something to get through. It is something increasingly shaped, designed, and, in many cases, sold. From airport lounges bundled with premium credit cards to metro systems introducing controlled waiting zones and amusement parks replacing queues with timed entry, the pause before movement is becoming a managed experience.

    What used to be a neutral stretch of time is now one of the clearest indicators of access, infrastructure, and intent. If you want to understand how movement works today, it helps to look at how the world waits.

    The new architecture of the pause

    The contemporary airport lounge didn’t begin as a cultural symbol. Early airline lounges were exclusive spaces designed for premium passengers, offering comfort, privacy, and status. Over time, they expanded and softened, becoming more widely accessible through credit cards, memberships, and loyalty programs. Today, it is one of the most recognizable interiors on the planet. Airlines and credit-card companies market it as an experience. Carriers like Emirates and Singapore Airlines design their lounges as extensions of their brand, with curated dining and quiet zones. At the same time, credit-card networks like American Express have expanded lounge access through their Centurion Lounges, positioning waiting itself as a premium benefit.

     

     

    With its comfortable seating, muted sound, controlled temperature, and a manufactured sense of calm, these spaces are designed to interrupt the chaos outside and offer a curated pocket of time. It’s almost as if it’s telling you to step briefly into a world where nothing demands your attention (except, of course, finding your gate).

    Homes and offices around the world now borrow the same visual vocabulary with curved sofas, diffused lamps, and warm neutrals. Airport lounge style has become one of the fastest-spreading interior trends globally. The idea is not to mimic an entire airport, but to recreate the emotional tone of one particular room within it. What it signals is control. People are not trying to fill waiting time, but to shape how it feels.

    Waiting as design

    Across cities, the blueprint of waiting is being rewritten. In metros and subways, platforms are becoming cleaner and better lit, with designated waiting zones, leaning rails, screens, and soundscapes designed to reduce stress. In train stations, modernization has taken the form of lounges, rest pods, charging kiosks, and temperature-controlled waiting areas. In airports, waiting is a choreography of experience from the moment you enter the terminal to the moment you reach your boarding gate.

    Even amusement parks have reimagined waiting. Disney’s Genie+ system and virtual queues at parks like Disneyland and Universal Studios stagger entry times and replace physical lines with timed access. Attractions now include interactive corridors and pre-show environments, turning the wait into part of the experience.

    India’s hybrid waiting culture

    India is one of the few places where two modes of waiting coexist so visibly. On railway platforms, waiting is communal. People sit in clusters, vendors weave through the crowds, and time moves with a kind of ambient rhythm. Yet, at the same stations, IRCTC executive lounges now offer curated silence, plush chairs, and filtered lighting. Metros in Delhi and Mumbai have introduced premium waiting zones, cleaner seating, and digital displays that provide real-time updates, reducing uncertainty and making waiting feel more predictable. This duality is as contradictory as it is revealing. It shows a society negotiating between older collective rhythms and newer aspirational ones.

    But access to these designed forms of waiting is uneven. Premium lounges, fast-track queues, and membership-based spaces are often gated by cost, status, or access to credit systems. What looks like a cultural shift is also a stratification of experience, where some people wait in curated calm, and others continue to wait in noise, heat, and uncertainty.

     

    “
    “Lounge-core” has become one of the fastest-spreading interior trends globally.
    ”

    The speed of digital adoption has accelerated this shift. In India, UPI transactions now exceed 22 billion a month, reflecting how quickly everyday exchanges are completed. As payments, ticketing, and navigation move onto mobile systems, many of the small, functional waits that once structured daily life begin to disappear. What remains is not the need to wait, but the experience of it, which is increasingly shaped, designed, and, in some cases, sold.

    The American contrast

    American waiting spaces reveal a different story. Train stations like Penn Station and Union Station are being renovated, but they still reflect the practical, often underfunded and utilitarian spirit of public infrastructure. New York’s subway system remains largely uncurated. Airports, however, tell a contrasting tale. They have become stages for atmosphere. Lounge networks expand. Architectural overhauls reimagine terminals as calm corridors of motion. The divergence shows how waiting reflects not just design choices, but broader priorities around public infrastructure, investment, and who these spaces are built for.

    When waiting becomes something you choose

    As waiting became designed, it became something people began to optimize rather than simply endure. People may not choose to wait, but they increasingly choose how they wait when given the option. The shift suggests that people may not choose to wait, but they increasingly choose how they wait when given the option. Membership cultures accelerated this with their credit cards, airline apps, metro passes, and digital wallets. All of them promise smoother transitions, quieter spaces, and cleaner pauses.
    It explains why airports now compete on ambience, why metro redesigns prioritize wayfinding (clear signage and navigation) and light, why homes adopt lounge aesthetics, and why hotel lobbies resemble living rooms. Modern retail is built around ‘dwell time’. Even hospitals, clinics, and banks now redesign their waiting spaces to manage the emotional texture of the pause.

     

     

    The shared global shift

    The most striking thing is how consistent this trend is across continents. Doha, Delhi, Singapore, Tokyo, New York, Lagos, Dubai, each does it differently, but the underlying instinct remains the same. The world is redesigning its pauses. Time, not speed, is becoming the competitive edge.

    In the coming years, the biggest questions about movement may be about not just how fast we travel, but also how we spend the time before we do. Climate, migration, digital payments, urban design, and work patterns will change how cities handle the moments between motion.

  • Pulp Friction

    At any railway station in India, there is a moment before the train arrives when the platform fills and people start looking for something to do with their hands. Some scroll, some pace, and some make their way to an AH Wheeler stand, a fixture of Indian stations since the 1870s, where stacks of newspapers sit alongside rows of slim, brightly covered paperbacks. The titles are lurid and the prices are low, rarely above Rs 150, often as little as Rs 30. The books are not in English. You will find Hindi titles across most of the country, Tamil if you’re travelling south, and Gujarati in the west. A coolie picks one up, a student bargains for two, and a taxi driver, waiting for a fare, folds his copy open at the spine. The train pulls in and the stack is a little shorter than it was before.

    This is pulp fiction in India. Not a genre exactly, though it has recurring ones within it, detective stories and family dramas above all, but something else. A structure that is cheap, widely available, and embedded in transit and in the texture of working life. To understand what that means, it helps to know what pulp actually is, and what it isn’t. An American reader might reach first for the Tarantino association, or picture the garish magazine covers of the 1920s and 30s. Those original ‘pulps’, printed on wood-pulp paper so cheap it yellowed and crumbled within a decade, are where the genre gets its name. Those, however, were primarily magazines. What followed them, from the 1940s onward, were mass-market paperbacks. They were pocket-sized, illustrated, and sold on wire spinner racks in drugstores and railway stations and supermarkets for the price of a pack of cigarettes. That format, disposable, democratic, and built for transit, is what India’s pocket books most resemble. The difference is that in America, that format seems to be dying a slow death. ReaderLink, the country’s last major independent mass-market paperback distributor, stopped carrying them at the end of 2025, after sales collapsed from 131 million units in 2004 to 21 million in 2024. The spinner racks are gone and the drugstores that held them are largely gone too.

     

     

    In India, the stacks are still there, albeit thinner than before.

    The American mass-market paperback had its own history of doing what Indian pulp has always done, reaching readers who were not being reached otherwise. During the Second World War, the US government produced over 1,300 specially printed Armed Services Editions, paperbound books small enough to fit in a uniform pocket, shipped to soldiers on every front. It didn’t matter that they were stapled and printed on cheap paper. They did the most important thing of all, they moved. Mickey Spillane sold 1.5 million copies of his pulp thrillers in the 1950s, Philip K Dick started his career in the pulp ghetto, as did Raymond Chandler too. The cover art was lurid, the prose was taut, and the audience was enormous and largely working class. What the format did was make reading a thing you did because it was cheap and available, not because it was aspirational.

    India’s pulp ecosystem has worked the same way, just at a greater scale and for a longer duration. Rajesh Kumar, the Tamil crime and science fiction writer, has produced over 1,500 novels and more than 2,000 short stories since 1968, an output so relentless that his son’s full-time job is digitising the backlog. His stories move through crime, conspiracy, and science fiction, written to be read quickly and passed on.

    Surender Mohan Pathak, the central figure in Hindi crime fiction, built a readership around recurring characters and long-running series that readers followed across decades. His Painsath Lakh Ki Dakaiti, first published in 1977, sold over 50,000 copies in its first run and has moved around 2.5 million since. Both authors have been invited to literary panels, both have seen their work adapted for screen. They were read at a scale most literary authors never reach, and still sat outside the category of literature.

     

     

    That gap, between scale of readership and degree of institutional legitimacy, is worth sitting with. Pulp in India has always circulated through informal channels. From small presses in Delhi and Meerut to book-stalls on platforms and at bus stands, readers pass copies hand to hand on long train journeys. Sales figures are sparse precisely because the infrastructure is informal. Which is why pulp authors were typically paid a flat advance rather than royalties, their livelihood decoupled from sales volume. When something isn’t taken seriously, its economic footprint tends to go unmeasured too.

    To understand pulp, you have to understand that price has always been the mechanism. At Rs 30 to Rs 150, pulp asks almost nothing of a reader who is on the fence. The opportunity cost is low enough to disappear. Reported profit margins once ran to 100%. But as technology grew, television eroded that, pulling sales down by an estimated 80% and squeezing margins to around 15%. Then, there was the 5% tax on pulp that didn’t help. And yet the format survived, because the readers it served had nowhere obvious to go. While literary fiction seems like an option, it costs more, is largely in English, and assumes a reader with time and education. Another place that the readers could have turned to would have been quick commercial fiction, think Chetan Bhagat or Durjoy Datta, but it sits at Rs 150 to Rs 300. While it shares pulp’s accessibility instincts, it targets a different kind of first-time reader, someone who is more urban and more English-comfortable. Pulp asks less than any of them.

     

    “
    (Pulp fiction writers) were read at a scale most literary authors never reach, and still sat outside the category of literature.
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    In the last decade, some of that informality has begun to formalise. Audible India produced Thriller Factory, a ten-episode dramatisation of works by Hindi pulp writer Ved Prakash Sharma, directed by Anurag Kashyap and starring Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Tabu, as serious a creative team as Indian audio fiction has seen. The Blaft Anthology brought Tamil pulp into English translation, making it available to readers outside the script entirely. HarperCollins took on Pathak and found that a readership large enough to sustain a nearly 300-novel career already existed, even if it had never been counted as part of the mainstream market.

    What all of this suggests is not that pulp is suddenly worthy of attention, but that it always was. The readership was never small. The infrastructure was simply invisible to the people who decide what counts. The American parallel is instructive here, if inverted. The US had a vast popular reading ecosystem built around cheap, accessible, and transit-friendly fiction, and it let that ecosystem erode. The spinner racks went first, then the independent distributors, then the newsstand culture that had sustained both. What’s left is a book market in which even paperbacks have become objects of taste, priced and positioned accordingly. That the mass-market format is now discussed in elegiac terms, as something that once democratised reading, is not incidental. It was democratic. And now, it is gone.

    India still has the stalls. The question, as small presses thin out and the physical sites of pulp distribution contract, is for how much longer, and what disappears with them when they go?

  • The Body Is the Score

    Over the past year, a particular image has begun to circulate with unusual consistency. Coverage of toned arms and strength training now appears not only in lifestyle writing but in business reporting, fashion analysis, and workplace commentary. Fitness is increasingly framed as seriousness rather than hobby, discussed less as something you do and more as a way of structuring adult life. The shift shows up in where these bodies appear and how they are described. They are less about taste and more about what they seem to prove.

    Bodies have always been read through the conditions around them. In societies where food was unreliable and physical labour was constant, softness tended to signal access to rest and resources rather than excess. In later periods, particularly as consumption became easier and restraint more visible, thinness came to be associated with self control and moral discipline. Athletic bodies were later tied to productivity, first through industrial labour and then through twentieth century nationalist projects that linked physical fitness to efficiency, readiness, and strength. What feels distinct now is not that one body type dominates, but how directly fitness operates as a legible signal across social and professional life.

     

    Image credit: mileycyrus/Instagram

     

    In 2026, fitness reads less as something personal and more as something public. Maintaining it depends on having time that can be rearranged, money that can be spent regularly, and days that look more or less the same. Strength training, supplements, recovery routines, wearables, and gym access all signal the same thing, that someone can afford to organise their life this way. The body carries that information without needing to explain itself.

    This also helps explain why fitness has begun to matter more than other forms of consumption. A luxury object could signal wealth once and then fade into the background. Fitness does not work like that. It has to be maintained and gaps show quickly. When routines slip or access disappears, the signal fades. What remains visible is not effort, but interruption.

    The structure of the market reflects this logic. The global fitness and wellness economy is now estimated at over 1.8 trillion dollars, built largely on subscriptions, repeat purchases, and long term programmes. Gyms, classes, supplements, training plans, and tracking tools all rely on the assumption that improvement is ongoing and that the work is never finished. Incompleteness is not a failure of the system. It is what keeps people engaged.

     

    “
    Fitness culture assumes time that can be moved around, money that can be spent repeatedly, and bodies that can recover on schedule. Those assumptions rule some people out before any choice is made.
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    Which is perhaps why body dysmorphia is not incidental to this economy. Bodies that fall outside the ideal are framed as unmanaged or lacking discipline, often without being named directly. These judgements move quietly through hiring decisions, dating preferences, media representation, and workplace norms. Stigma introduces risk, and risk encourages continued spending. The incentive is not only to gain status, but to avoid slipping out of it.

    The ability to participate, however, is uneven. Fitness culture assumes time that can be moved around, money that can be spent repeatedly, and bodies that can recover on schedule. Those assumptions rule some people out before any choice is made. The ideal body looks neutral, but it carries these conditions with it.

    These signals are taken seriously even when no one names them. Studies show that employers may not talk about bodies directly, but bodies that appear energetic, controlled, and available tend to be read more favourably. These readings shape opportunity, particularly in knowledge work where output is difficult to measure cleanly. Appearance slips into professionalism without being acknowledged, which makes bias easier to sustain.

    The costs show up elsewhere. Healthcare systems deal with eating disorders, overtraining injuries, hormonal disruption, and long term dissatisfaction. Mental health strain follows when bodies are constantly assessed and compared. These consequences are shared socially, while profit remains private. What individuals spend to maintain the signal is counted. What societies spend managing the fallout is not.

     

     

    The language surrounding fitness increasingly borrows from care and wellbeing. Rest is scheduled, recovery is tracked, softness is acceptable only when it is intentional and temporary. The body starts to feel less like something you live in and more like something you oversee. Discomfort becomes something to fix or optimise away, not something that asks where it came from.

    None of this requires fitness itself to be harmful. Physical training can offer strength, resilience, and community. What has changed is how thoroughly these practices have been absorbed into economic logic and repurposed as measures of worth. When bodies begin to stand in for effort and value, inequality becomes easier to see and easier to justify.

    Economics helps here because it helps this behaviour make sense. In a moment marked by unstable work and fragile status, the body becomes one of the few things that can still be made to look consistent. It is visible, cumulative, and hard to maintain without resources. Which is perhaps why what can often read as discipline is a reflection of the pressure to appear reliable, controlled, and worth backing.

    Seen this way, the fixation on fitness is less about health than about signalling stability in an uncertain economy. The body keeps the score, yes, but it also becomes the score, recording time, money, and compliance in a form that can be read instantly. Noticing this does not require judgement. It requires attention to what is being rewarded, and why this particular signal has become so useful now.

  • ID, Please: Are We Moving Towards an Adults-Only Social Media?

    When Facebook first launched in 2004, it started as a social media platform for college students only. If your email ID had a .edu suffix, it won you eligibility. By the time Facebook went global in 2006, it allowed anyone over the age of 13 with a valid email address to access the platform.

    Two decades later, as many countries debate bans on social media access for children under the age of 16, the question that arises is this: do these bans mean social media is an adults-only space now? And if it is, what implications does that have on today’s internet culture? 

    The bans reveal deeper truths about how we define adulthood. We self-censor when we see children around us, hoping to not make a negative impression on a young person still feeling their way around the world. Will a child-free social media then impact censorship and self-censorship? In 2024, X (formerly Twitter) amended its policy to allow users to post ‘consensually produced’ mature content, including nudity and pornography. That might have opened the door to Grok being asked to digitally undress people. While women are perhaps the greatest victims of this, children too became targets. Will an adult-only platform then further empower users to make such problematic requests? (In India perhaps, this is now a moot point, since all adult content has been banned by the Indian government from March 2026.)

     

     

    If social media needs to be governed by age restrictions, we must also then question all content about or featuring children that is posted on these platforms. 

    After all, the core reason for most bans is to keep children safe from being exposed to harmful content and abuse online. The other reason is to place limits on their screen times, which have been on the up and up. But does that line of decision-making then impinge on the rights of children below 16? The bans seem to gesture at that age-old parenting position: only we know what’s best for you.

    The other concerns are practical. If the only security measure to verify age online is to enter your birth date, that’s an easy step for children to manipulate; it’s no different than using fake IDs and hoping to get into a bar. Reportedly, kids in the UK and Australia have admitted to entering fake birth years and drawing fake moustaches to make accounts on the sly. This sort of cheating will likely have a negative influence on children who are still learning socio-cultural concepts of trust and honesty.

     

    “
    If social media needs to be governed by age restrictions, we must also then question all content about or featuring children that is posted on these platforms.
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    This restriction takes an interesting turn in patriarchal societies. In India, for instance, girls still face much greater social and cultural restrictions than boys. For many young girls, social media is the one democratized space where they can interact unrestricted with people who live outside of the social mores of their milieu. When such bans are enacted in India, it further empowers restrictive setups to keep girls and women off the internet altogether, all under the garb of doing it for ‘their safety’. Statistically, only 33.3% of women have ever reported using the internet in India, as opposed to 57.1% of men. With a large gender divide between urban and non-urban centers yet to be bridged, the ban may have more negatives than positives.

    On the other hand, shows like Adolescence very effectively depict the negative impact of children being influenced by the internet, especially in spaces that their parents are not actively monitoring. The show also touches on concepts of ‘the manosphere’, where adult men are the primary drivers of problematic content about being alpha males. While such content is harmful for children, these bans don’t quite consider the impact on other adults who might be equally malleable. Recent studies have shown that the adolescent phase of the brain lasts from the age of 9 to 32, which means that those even beyond the age of 16 might be susceptible to such harmful messaging. And so, while these bans imply trust in adult discernment, they also send out another message about adulthood to children: not all adults know better, but we’re the ones looking out for you.

     

     

    Yes, the world is watching with bated breath how these bans play out within the countries that have taken the first step, Australia being patient zero, in many ways. But when the onus continues to fall on the habits of users, rather than the growing ambit of the platforms and the need for them to take accountability on making the internet a safer place for all, it does bring into question who these bans are intended to serve.

    What they ultimately reveal is not just how we think about children online, but how much we overestimate adulthood itself.

  • When Shopping Became a Game

    Open Temu and you are not immediately asked to buy something. You are asked to spin a wheel, claim a reward, watch a countdown, and share a link. The interface feels closer to a casual game than a marketplace, where participation comes before intent and value is unlocked through progression.

    What looks like shopping is closer to training. The system does not persuade, it conditions your behaviour through participation. Temu’s rise is often explained through cheap prices and aggressive advertising, but that explanation misses what distinguishes the platform. It blurs the boundary between commerce and play, turning shopping into a system where rewards, urgency, and progression shape behaviour alongside price. What can look like novelty is better understood as a shift in how persuasion operates, embedded directly into interaction rather than delivered as a message.

    Gamification is not new, but here it is no longer a layer that separates it from other aspects of our lives. Now, it is the system. Discounts are earned through participation, progression unlocks value, and attention becomes the currency that precedes money.

     

     

     

    This works because games operate on a different logic than advertising. Traditional ads interrupt, they ask to be noticed, judged, and resisted. Games organise behaviour. Progress depends on returning, repeating, and completing actions, and over time those actions stop feeling like choices and start feeling like movement. And so when shopping is structured this way, the decision to buy feels like an end of that movement.

    Temu is not alone in this approach. TikTok Shop folds buying directly into scrolling, blending entertainment and commerce into the same gesture. Shein-style interfaces rely on countdowns, points, and reward ladders that keep users moving through the app. Even airline and delivery platforms now use progress bars, limited-time perks, and visual milestones to structure behaviour. While the specifics differ, the logic is the same. When participation comes first, conversion tends to follow.

    The mechanics are visible, often even obvious. But visibility does not make them neutral. The question is not whether users understand the system. It is whether understanding changes how they behave inside it.

     

    “
    "Traditional ads interrupt, they ask to be noticed, judged, and resisted. Games organise behaviour."
    ”

     

    There is also an economic logic at work. Gamified spaces rely on users spending time, attention, and effort before spending money. Each interaction generates data, reach, and momentum for the platform. The reward might be a small discount or bonus, but the value extracted compounds. Participation drives growth, and growth strengthens the system that keeps users moving through it.

    This helps explain why advertising now looks less like persuasion and more like environment. Platforms no longer rely primarily on telling stories or making claims. They shape the conditions in which decisions are made. When those conditions feel playful, resistance softens without needing to be confronted.

    Temu’s success points to a future where retail feels less like browsing and more like progression. The store becomes something to move through rather than something to consult, and buying becomes the outcome of participation rather than its starting point.

     

     

    This does not necessarily mean consumers are being tricked. The mechanics are visible. But visibility does not make them neutral. Design shapes behaviour whether or not users are conscious of it. When shopping is structured as a game, value shifts. It is no longer only about what you buy, but how you are encouraged to keep moving.

    What Temu ultimately shows is not that people prefer games to shopping, but that the two have become difficult to separate. In a crowded digital economy, the product is no longer just the item itself, but everything moves you toward it. Advertising has not disappeared, it has been absorbed into spaces that no longer need to ask.

  • Cricket as Diplomacy: The Indian Premier League’s Global Power

    It starts with a toss but ends with a cultural takeover. The Indian Premier League, now in its seventeenth year, has become more than just a sporting phenomenon. Over time, it’s India’s most potent soft power tool. What began as a domestic T20 tournament has evolved into a slick, high-gloss spectacle that shapes how the world sees India: fast, chaotic, competitive, and endlessly entertaining.

    At a time when national identity is increasingly built through pop culture and media, the IPL operates as a shorthand for modern India. It’s not just the cricket that draws global attention — it’s the Bollywood-backed team ownerships, international player rosters, drone-shot stadium cinematics, and theme music that sounds like it belongs in an action film trailer. For millions abroad, this is India at its most visible — a nation where entertainment and ambition collide in dazzling colour.

    The numbers reflect that reach. The IPL is one of the most-watched sporting leagues in the world, with streaming deals stretching across continents. For international brands — from Saudi tourism boards to global soft drink giants — IPL sponsorships are a way to tap into India’s massive consumer base while aligning with the league’s aspirational sheen.

     

    “
    If Hollywood was America’s soft power in the 20th century, the IPL may be India’s in the 21st. It packages sport, celebrity, nationalism, and commerce into a single, irresistible export.
    ”

     

    But the IPL’s soft power isn’t just external. It also reflects India’s self-image. In the league’s aesthetic, we see a country willing to negotiate tradition and hypermodernity — cricket whites have been replaced with neon kits, devotional chants have been repurposed as crowd anthems, and local dialects have been woven into high-production promos. The IPL champions hustle culture, regional pride, and pan-Indian unity — all on a three-hour broadcast.

    That said, this cultural diplomacy comes with contradictions. The tournament’s embrace of spectacle can overshadow deeper conversations around labour rights, gender parity in sport, and access to resources. And while Indian players are front and centre, the tournament is still often run with a corporate logic that flattens regional nuance into easily marketable archetypes.

     

    An Indian flag waving in the crowd at the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup | Image Credit: Raunaq Sachdev on Pexels

     

    Still, if Hollywood was America’s soft power in the 20th century, the IPL may be India’s in the 21st. It packages sport, celebrity, nationalism, and commerce into a single, irresistible export. And whether you’re watching from Chennai or Chicago, one thing’s clear — this isn’t just about cricket anymore. It’s about image. And India knows exactly how to play the game.

  • The Politics of a Flatbread

    When is a roti not just a roti?

    Rolled out every day in kitchens across the Indian subcontinent, the roti has traveled around the world. It moved with merchants, sailors, immigrants, and indentured labor — its shape gently shifting with every border it crossed. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, after the abolition of slavery, Britain sent over 1.3 million Indian indentured laborers to far-flung colonies — about 145,000 to Trinidad alone between 1845 and 1917. Alongside clothes and keepsakes, they carried recipes and muscle memory: the instinct to make something familiar in an unfamiliar land.

    In the Caribbean, that meant lentils — giving rise to dhalpuri, roti stuffed with split peas and blistered on a hot stove. In Singapore and Malaysia, Tamil Muslim immigrants stretched wheat dough into flaky roti prata.  In some ways, the roti becomes an edible testament of who migrates, how they adapt, and whose foodways get preserved or erased. Even Mexico’s tortilla, though corn-based, echoes roti’s logic of adaptability: a flatbread shaped by the land it’s made on. What this really shows is that roti’s evolution has always been tied to power — who moves, who adapts, and whose foodways get preserved or erased. What this really shows is the flatbread’s evolution has always been tied to power — who moves, who adapts, and whose foodways get preserved or erased.

     

    Sliced beef and vegetables on a tortilla | Image Credit: Los Muertos Crew on Pexels

     

    Today, Indian cuisine means different things in different kitchens in different parts of the world. In London, it may appear on a posh tasting menu; in Trinidad, in a lunchtime wrap sold by a street vendor; in Kuala Lumpur, on someone’s breakfast table. That Indian food has carved inroads into most countries is indisputable.

    Yet, in some Western dining spaces, while Indian flavors are reframed as modern or refined, there is often little acknowledgement of their history. British chef Tom Kerridge’s £28 butter chicken, for instance, became a talking point because of how casually it detached a dish rooted in Delhi dhabas from its cultural context. For many, the issue wasn’t the reinvention — it was the idea of presenting it at a luxury price point without any real nod to where it came from. 

    Of the few Michelin-recognized Indian restaurants in the world, many sit outside India — a reminder that global prestige often arrives only when Indian cuisine is filtered through Western institutions. For instance, the UK has multiple Michelin-starred Indian restaurants. Meanwhile, India itself has none; the Michelin Guide still doesn’t operate in the country.

     

    “
    Of the few Michelin-recognized Indian restaurants in the world, many sit outside India — a reminder that global prestige often arrives only when Indian cuisine is filtered through Western institutions.
    ”

     

    Not that borrowing is a one-way street. Indian chefs reinterpret French pâtisserie, Japanese matcha, and New York bagels, layering their own stories onto global cuisines. The question isn’t whether adaptation is allowed — it’s whether the origin story stays visible, and whether those who shaped a dish have a seat at the table.

    The flavors may be the same, but the reception rarely is. Upscale restaurants serving ‘elevated Indian street food’ often draw critical attention, while dhabas offering similar dishes are rarely spotlighted. Part of this is access — who can secure prime real estate, hire PR, or design spaces that match fine-dining expectations. Part of it is perception: dishes become more ‘approachable’ when plated minimally, spiced subtly, and narrated through a Western frame.

    The commercial landscape mirrors this. On supermarket shelves, boutique spice brands continue to favor polished packaging over conversations about sourcing and credit. The market for Indian packaged foods and spices has grown rapidly, with diaspora-led brands driving global curiosity. Those who control the narrative often control the profits, too.

     

    A serving of soft-shell tacos | Image Credit: ROMAN ODINTSOV on Pexels

     

    But these tensions exist within the diaspora as well. A Trinidadian dhalpuri won’t taste like a Punjabi roti, yet both carry the same emotional resonance for those who grew up eating them. Authenticity becomes a question of belonging rather than purity: who decides what counts, and what gets preserved?

    In the end, roti’s story isn’t about drawing hard lines between ‘authentic’ and ‘changed.’ It’s about recognizing that every flatbread — whether folded around curry in Trinidad, flipped in a Malaysian street stall, or plated in a New York bistro — carries the imprint of the hands that made it and the landscapes it travelled through. The challenge is making sure those hands and landscapes aren’t forgotten when the dish arrives at the table.

  • The Ragebait Economy: Why Brands Want You Slightly Angry

    On a weekday morning in New York, the subway car settles into its usual choreography. Headphones in. Eyes lowered. Everyone practises a small, private neutrality to get through the day. Then someone glances up and frowns. A poster, bold, smug, a little too pleased with itself, has broken the spell. Faces follow the gaze, a ripple of annoyance travels down the carriage, and for a moment strangers are united by a single, shared reaction.

    The ad has succeeded. Not because people liked it, but because they couldn’t ignore it.

    Ragebait used to belong to political campaigns or the murkier corners of the internet. Now it’s creeping into beauty ads, grooming brands, tech startups, sparkling-water companies, places that once sold pleasure or convenience. And that shift isn’t accidental. It’s a clue to the emotional climate of American public life, and to the new tactics brands are using to cut through a landscape thick with noise.

     

    The rise of irritation as strategy

    Provocation has become a design choice. Marketers may not call it ragebait, but the vocabulary is unmistakable: “disrupt the scroll,” “spark conversation,” “stop people in their tracks.” It’s the language of rupture, not persuasion.

    This approach works because irritation is more legible than charm. Charm takes effort; irritation is instant. Digital platforms long ago taught brands that strong emotions travel fastest, and anger, even mild anger, generates reactions. Reactions keep content circulating. 

     

    Provocation has become a design choice | Image Credit: Anthony Hortin on Unsplash

     

    Circulation becomes visibility. And visibility is the currency that every brand is scrambling for.

    What’s new is how this digital logic is spilling into the physical world. The subway has become a testing ground for emotional disruption. You’re captive. You’re overstimulated. Your guard is down. A provocative poster doesn’t feel playful. It feels like an intrusion. And that’s precisely why advertisers place it there.

     

    How public space absorbs online atmosphere

    Walk through any major American city and you can sense the shift. Once, public advertising aimed to entertain or inform. Now it often aims to interrupt. The mood mimics the internet — quick, reactive, slightly abrasive. Public space begins to feel less like a commons and more like a comment section.

    The effect is subtle but cumulative. Irritation becomes ambient. The day begins with a small jolt of friction rather than ease. Not enough to push anyone over the edge, but enough to raise the emotional temperature by a degree or two.

     

    “
    In a landscape where calm is scarce, irritation becomes oddly efficient. A shortcut to visibility. A cheap emotional spike. Brands aren’t creating the exhaustion; they’re capitalising on it.
    ”

     

    This isn’t about sensitivity. It’s about the atmosphere. When brands treat everyday life as raw material for agitation, the commute becomes a site of emotional extraction. The poster isn’t merely selling a product. It’s shaping the emotional texture of the morning.

     

    The cost to brand identity

    The strategy delivers attention, but attention is not loyalty. This is the quiet paradox of ragebait: a brand can win the moment and lose the meaning.

    If a company irritates you into remembering them, they become associated with irritation — not trust, not aspiration, not desire. Even if people don’t consciously reject the product, they mentally downgrade the brand. The emotional temperature sticks to the name.

    The long-term danger is erosion. Warmth disappears. Coherence dissolves. Consumers may recall the punchline but not the product. And gimmicks rarely scale. What provokes today becomes wallpaper tomorrow, and suddenly the brand has trained its audience to expect stunts rather than substance.

    Provocation is incredibly easy to copy and nearly impossible to own. When every brand starts raising its voice, no one stands out. The volume goes up, but the meaning drains out.

     

    A culture stretched thin

    It’s tempting to blame algorithms or generational habits, but the deeper cause is cultural fatigue. Americans are overwhelmed by the sheer velocity of stimuli — alerts, feeds, notifications, headlines, ads stitched onto every inch of public and private space.

    In a landscape where calm is scarce, irritation becomes oddly efficient. A shortcut to visibility. A cheap emotional spike. Brands aren’t creating the exhaustion; they’re capitalising on it. But desperation is not a strategy.

     

    Campaigns are being built on gentleness instead of aggression | Image Credit: Olena Kamenetska on Unsplash

     

    What comes after the provocation

    Every emotional cycle has a counter-cycle, and small signs of a cultural correction are emerging. People seek quieter retail spaces, restaurants with no screens, hotels that emphasise stillness, even “silent flights.” The desire is not only for escape but for clarity. Calm becomes a commodity.

    Some brands are already leaning into this shift. Campaigns built on gentleness instead of aggression. Long-form storytelling instead of short-term shock. A return to consistency rather than spectacle.

    The cultural pendulum is moving toward relief — brands that lower the temperature rather than raise it. Not purity, not nostalgia, but something subtler: the pleasure of not being yelled at by your own commute.

     

    What this moment reveals

    Ragebait advertising isn’t a trend so much as a symptom. It reveals something about the current American mood: overstimulated, emotionally thin-skinned from too much noise, and increasingly attuned to disruption as the default instead of the exception.

    When public ads adopt the tone of online conflict, the boundaries between physical and digital life blur. We start to inhabit the same emotional posture everywhere — reactive, watchful, slightly on edge.

    Subways have always been cultural barometers. They show you the city’s preoccupations long before the city can name them. Today they tell us something subtle but important: irritation has become ambient. Not explosive, not dramatic, just a faint, steady buzz.

    And if that buzz becomes the norm, it’s worth asking who benefits, who adapts, and what emotional costs we’ve quietly agreed to pay.

  • The New Loneliness Market

    Open any major platform and a certain pattern appears. A stranger studies quietly on TikTok Live, a creator walks through a supermarket with viewers trailing behind, meditation apps offer modes that resemble shared presence, and AI companions send morning greetings. Productivity tools now include virtual coworkers. These features look like entertainment or efficiency hacks, yet they are built to give people the sense that someone is nearby.

     

    A decade ago, loneliness felt like an interior mood. Now it shapes product decisions across the tech industry. Companies have realised that users return more reliably when something feels companionable. The numbers reflect this shift. Low-interaction livestreams on TikTok have grown steadily over the past two years, AI companion apps have pulled in tens of millions of users around the world, and long, quiet study videos on YouTube continue to draw consistent viewing. The engagement holds even when very little is happening.

     

    The reasons stretch beyond technology. Remote work reduced daily contact, and many shared spaces either changed or disappeared. Cafés raised prices, libraries shortened hours, and neighbourhood spots became harder to maintain. A global survey in 2023 by Meta and Gallup reported that around one in four adults experiences frequent loneliness. It tracks with what people describe in their own lives. As familiar rhythms faded, they began looking for softer forms of connection that could slip into unpredictable days.

     

    Someone’s presence in the background, even through a screen, can soften the day | Image Credit: Libby Penner on Unsplash

     

    AI accelerated the trend. Companion apps offer a feeling of steadiness without the weight of social performance. Conversations take place at a pace people can manage, which often makes them easier than real ones. The appeal here is quiet. Many users are not searching for romance or fantasy. They want acknowledgement that fits into the edges of a scattered routine.

     

    Livestreams and shared-task videos serve a different purpose. Someone’s presence, even through a screen, can create a backdrop that softens the day. Walking streams, cooking sessions, and silent study rooms are simple formats, yet they mimic the comfort of being around others who are also going about their lives. These spaces carry no pressure, which explains their endurance.

     

    “
    Many people are not seeking grand emotional narratives or deep conversation. They want a softer kind of company that can sit beside work, chores, or study, and the world does not offer that easily anymore.
    ”

     

    The behaviour is most visible among younger users, yet it crosses age groups. Many people feel stretched by erratic schedules, high expectations, and social environments that sometimes feel too demanding. A low-demand connection can feel reliable in a way traditional social life often does not. A livestream does not ask you to keep up. A digital companion stays even when you step away.

     

    Companies respond to what they see. Some now measure engagement in terms of presence rather than taps or clicks. A few surface creators who hold attention simply by showing up regularly. The idea is straightforward. People trust spaces that feel steady, and steadiness keeps them returning.

     

    There are concerns about how these habits develop. Platforms gain when users stay inside their ecosystems, so these environments can expand quietly. Hours drift by. A stream that starts as a background company sometimes takes up a larger share of the day than expected. Comfort and habit can merge without much notice.

     

    Observed among young users, the behaviour crosses age groups | Image Credit: Amanda Vick on Unsplash

     

    Even with the risks, it is clear that these tools fill a gap. Many people are not seeking grand emotional narratives or deep conversation. They want a softer kind of company that can sit beside work, chores, or study, and the world does not offer that easily anymore. Technology stepped into the space left behind by changes in work, housing, mobility, and community life.

     

    The loneliness market is less a verdict on people and more a reflection of the moment. It shows how individuals are rearranging their emotional routines when older forms of casual connection no longer appear without effort. Digital companionship, even when light, offers a sense of continuity that is hard to find elsewhere. The behaviour will shift as the world changes, yet the need that drives it feels durable. People want to move through their day with some feeling of closeness, even when that closeness takes a different shape from what they expected.