Dear Reader,
I was in a restaurant in New York, the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, talking with the owner of a small Jaipur-inspired café and bakery in Brooklyn. We spoke about the city that had inspired her space, the flavours and memories she wanted to bring into the neighborhood, and about her own visits to India over the years. Then she paused and asked me something I wasn’t expecting.
“Can I ask you,” she said. “What do Indians think about us here in the U.S.?”
I know I sat there quietly for a moment before answering. For as long as I could remember, it had been Indians wondering what the world thought of them. Here was someone asking the opposite. It stayed with me long after the conversation ended.
In fact, that conversation stayed with me through the rest of the week, a week spent meeting founders, journalists, academics, artists and readers across the United States. We spoke about everything from technology and business to books, cities, culture and the future. Yet time and again, our conversations found their way back to India.
What struck me was not just that people were interested in the country. It was how thoughtful their questions were. People wanted to understand the forces shaping India today, why they mattered and what they might mean for the rest of the world. I found myself answering remarkably similar questions in very different rooms, which made me realise just how widely that search for context was shared.
That café conversation was one version of a question I heard again and again in different forms. Another came from a finance professional who spent his days analyzing markets and his evenings writing a newsletter for South Asian professionals. As we talked about childhood summers with his grandparents in Mumbai, evenings on Marine Drive and the city he remembered growing up in, I realised how easy it is to carry an image of a place long after the place itself has moved on. Today’s India cannot be understood through those memories alone. It has evolved quickly, often in surprising ways, even for those of us who live here.
I also met people of Indian origin whose relationships with the country reflected very different lives. Some traveled back every year and spoke about it with the familiarity of someone who had never really left. Others admitted they had begun paying closer attention only recently, prompted by India’s growing presence in conversations about business, technology and culture. A few were simply curious about everyday life here that rarely makes international headlines. What united them was a desire to understand the country as it exists today through its people, ideas, creativity and contradictions rather than through headlines or inherited assumptions.
One conversation wasn’t about India at all. It was about whether someone living in the United States would make room in their daily reading for a publication that was based in India. She landed somewhere unexpected: that she had spent her life reading about the rest of the world from the West, at a time when India’s place in that world had grown too large to keep reading about it only from the outside. That told me more than any answer I could have given her. The Moment is our answer to that same imbalance.
By the end of the week, I found myself reflecting on what all of those conversations had in common. For a long time, India was often seen as a country the world looked at. Increasingly, it feels like a country the world is looking to. That shift is playing out across technology, entrepreneurship, entertainment, design and culture, and I suspect we’re only beginning to understand what it means.
That is the thinking behind The Moment. Our starting point is India, but our ambition is much broader: to understand the world from here. The stories that will define the coming decades will not belong to one country alone. Many will begin here, be shaped by what happens here, or reveal something important about the world through an Indian perspective. Those are the stories we intend to tell, with the context, judgement and craft they deserve.
Thank you for reading. I am grateful you are here at the beginning of this journey.
Until next time,
Priyam Sharma
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