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  • The Problem With Museums

    Anyone with even the slightest inkling of the histories of the colonized world will recognize the klaxon call to decolonize the museum. It is a documented fact that many of South Asia’s historical artefacts have been pillaged by colonizers and are now languishing behind the glass fronts of Western museum cabinets.

    The heart of the problem lies in the fact that the collections, no matter how beautifully curated and preserved, can symbolize tremendous historic trauma, even in the way collections are described and catalogued.  What gets seen and what remains curtained in museum basements reinscribes imperialist visions. Quite often, these histories are inaccessible to their own communities.

    In fact, the very institution of the museum seems at odds with the idea of a post colonial world; the dawn of the museum came, in part, via colonialism after all. Many of its exhibits reached their European or North American homes through violence, or outright theft – it was quite common, for instance, that the British simply swiped artefacts from archaeological digs in India and across large parts of Africa. Some communities, such as the First Nations and the Maori, have been appalled at coming face to face with the physical remains of their ancestors, and treasure that they deem sacred.

     

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    So why then, knowing all this, are we still drawn to these bastions of imperial legacies?

    The obvious answer is that museums are still mantled in the aura of learning. As disseminators of cultural and anthropological histories, there is still something essentially valuable about them. Their ability to position objects beyond particular cultural identities, curate them within a broader lineage, and situate them within a wider, richer framework of relationships still feels crucial.

    Besides, as possessors of enormous purloined wealth, museums such as the British Museum still hold massive collections of artefacts that are beautifully preserved and presented for our consumption. Could we say the same of a smaller museum situated in a country whose resources have been plundered by the British? Debatable.

     

     

    What then, might be the way to reconcile the two?

    One way of course, is restitution. US museums have been more forthcoming with their permissions – for example, the American Museum of Natural History has returned a large collection of Māori and Moriori ancestral returns to New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Meanwhile, much UK heritage legislation appears to have been inked with the specific purpose of preventing the return of priceless items taken during colonialism. For instance, the British Museum Act of 1963 bars all repatriation without exception, only allowing for a temporary transfer of objects to other institutions.

    While Government machinery sluggishly inches forward, a host of individuals have begun sleuthing and advocating for the return of these artefacts to their ancestral homes.

     

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    A few examples. As part of the research team of Recover, Restore, and Decolonize, Dr Dolly Kikon and Dr Arkotong Longkumer are working to repatriate ancestral Naga remains from the Pitt Rivers Museum. The activist group, India Pride Project, has long been campaigning for the return of Indian artefacts plundered during (and after) colonialism. Jarat Chopra, the great-great-great-grandson of the former ruler of the southern Punjab, has been petitioning to get back a sword that his ancestor Diwan Mulraj Chopra surrendered to General William Whish. Slok Gyawali of the Nepal Pride Project and Sanjay Adhikari were instrumental in the return of sacred statues to Kathmandu.

    Another way might be to plough funds into existing or new institutions in previously colonized countries, perhaps through a public-private initiative. For example, the Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar, Senegal opened its gates in 2018, with capacity for about 18,000 objects, alongside a clear demand for some of that space to be filled by items currently housed in European museums.

    For museums situated in the Western world, access should be free to all (as it is at the British Museum) and at the very least, the curators of exhibits should represent the communities whose artefacts they are curating.

    Most important of all though, museums needs must position themselves as learning communities, not impenetrable centres of self-validating authority. If they do not, museums run the risk of becoming culturally irrelevant artefacts.

  • The Chef And The Critic

    Every meal at a restaurant begins the same way. The waiter sets the plate down with a flourish. You ready your cutlery, lay your napkin on your lap, and reach out to spoon the food onto your plate. Suddenly, there’s a flash, and then another, as your dining companion takes photo after photo for their Yelp or Tripadvisor review. The food grows cold. But the verdict? Already ready.

    Reams have been written about food and travel influencers and reviewers; chefs, restaurateurs and hoteliers have freely bandied their opinions, online and off. A nuanced, well-thought-out judgement by a fully informed reviewer, they opine, is rare. On the other hand, critics of this critique believe that these online reviewers have a real role to play in a democratized media environment. On balance, social media is a force for the better, they believe.

     

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    Does the same hold true for platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor? These are platforms built from the ground up on mass public opinion; their entire operation is premised on the fact that the aggregated public has a voice that is more useful than any lone one, including that of a trained, paid critic.

    But even they don’t seem to trust every opinion. TripAdvisor regularly weeds out nearly 10 per cent of the reviews on its own website, citing paid placements, reputation manipulation, and reviews with no firsthand basis as the cause. Yelp operates in largely the same way, elbowing reviewers away from fraud and coerced opinions by suppressing reviews that the site believes do not come from an actual visit, to the point of splitting opinions into ‘recommended’ and ‘not recommended’ sections

     

     

    Quite famously, Anthony Bourdain, opined that the Yelp Elite reviewer was the lowest creature, the most loathsome of all. “There’s really no worse, or lower human being than an elite Yelper,” he said. “They’re universally loathed by chefs everywhere. They are the very picture of entitled, negative energy. They’re bad for chefs, they’re bad for restaurants. You know, you open a restaurant, you struggle for a year to put together the money, you work your heart out, and then 10 minutes after opening, some miserable b-stard is tweeting or Yelping, ‘Worst. Dinner. Ever.’
    It’s like, dude. That ain’t right. Nah, no sympathy there. And I think you’d have a very hard time finding a chef who has anything nice to say about elite Yelpers. It’s a contradiction of terms. It’s like jumbo shrimp. How can you be elite and a Yelper?”

    On the other hand, he believed Instagram and Twitter to largely be a force of good, a “fully democratic bathroom wall” on which reviewers etched their points of view, and viewers were welcome to believe or reject them.

    Whether Yelp agreed with this devastating critique or not (they didn’t) wasn’t the point. The point is that democratization might not always be the answer – bad ratings on Yelp can impact revenues, not necessarily of fancy restaurants or big chains, but certainly that of the lone neighborhood mom-and-pop eatery.

     

    Anthony Bourdain set off a torrid discourse about Elite Yelp reviewers | in.pinterest.com

     

    And this age-old kerfuffle stems from a bigger question. That is, who holds the right to judge someone else’s work?

    Is might not always right? Is the collective voice not better than that of the individual? Who then, is a reliable reviewer? Should the onus lie only on the trained critic, sipping expensive wine in rarefied restaurants? Shouldn’t every voice carry an equal weight? Multiple reviews simply meant a platform (or influencer) had tremendous reach; it didn’t necessarily mean that the critique was right. All opinions therefore, were not equally valid, unless they were trained opinions. While the platforms weed out undesirable critiques, perhaps the solution is to credential each reviewer so readers can assume some context behind each review. The judge can therefore be judged.

    This doesn’t mean the crowd-sourced reviews are worthless. Word of mouth still holds tremendous weight in the hospitality industry, and certainly far more than that of any elite restaurant critic. This is the power of the public in its purest form. But it’s equally important to remember that volume doesn’t immediately equal authority. Sometimes, volume is just volume.

  • A Custodian of Treasure

  • Is Ube The New Matcha?

    Just before August 2026 arrived, one of India’s most popular home-grown café franchises, Cafe Coffee Day, dropped hints about going purple. On their social media handle, they shared pictures of purple coconuts, zebras, jalebis and even traffic lights! A big colorful addition to their menu cards—but before purple, the urban centres of India have already undergone a green wave, with people becoming eager to find the best cup of matcha in town. Matcha had the internet divided last year, and we might even consider it to be the predecessor to the purple colored substance that might soon be taking over Indian cafés– ube.
    So what is the new purple culinary craze that the country might just be waking up to?
    Ube, or the purple yam, has been a staple ingredient in Filipino cuisine as it is native to the Philippines. Its rich violet pigment lends its colors to a large number of dishes, but its inclusion in dessert recipes of various kinds is what made it start traveling the world. With its harvest season in spring, food stores across North America and Europe offer ube-based drinks as a seasonal feature over the spring and summer seasons, much like pumpkin-spiced drinks are popular during fall. Pumpkin-spice might not become a trend in India owing to its tropical climate and the notable absence of an autumn, but ube is certainly more versatile.
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    For the last few years, the largest Starbucks Reserve store in Chicago has been offering drinks that are topped with ube-flavored cold foams during the summers. Other popular chains like Costa, Pret, and Black Sheep Coffee also have ube on their menu. In India, the coffee franchise from Greece, Coffee Island which launched multiple stores across the country last year, introduced ube to their drinks. In Kolkata, Scarlet Café has started offering Ube milkshakes, and iced coffees with ube flavors. In Hyderabad, outlets such as Big Star Cafe and Bagel Brigade have been catching up with the trend. Turns out, the color of the drink itself goes a long way in catching the attention of the consumer.
    Looking at North America, another arena that might play a hand in the popularity of ube, are the Asian grocery stores — where ube flavored ice creams are a raging hit. Ube is used for flavoring mochi ice creams, and many brands — including Trader Joe’s — offer a version of the sweet but earthy flavored, purple ube ice cream. A popular and earlier version of an Ube dessert served on the streets of Manila, is called sorbetes, which is made by combining purple yams, and the milk sourced from carabaos, a species of water buffaloes indigenous to the Philippines. The other classic dessert is called the ube halaya — which is a creamy yam-based jam. While many ube-flavored edibles are sold as packaged products, it is also sold as a fresh ingredient in local stores run by migrants.
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    Its rich violet pigment lends its colors to a large number of dishes, but its inclusion in dessert recipes of various kinds is what made it start traveling the world.
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    A preliminary round of research suggests that Indians are no strangers to the growth of these tubers. Locally, they go by different names: ratalu, kand, neeli kachalu or konfal, while scientifically they go by dioscorea alata. As many as eight years ago, a man from Thiruvananthapuram managed to harvest a bunch of purple yam that weighed 82 kilograms! The Malayalam name for the vegetable is mulkkizhangu, but it is now rarely cultivated in the state of Kerala, although its surrounding areas have a rich history of cultivating this plant. These yams have been used for cooking savory dishes, and other curries. They are typically used for making chaats, sabzis and also for making paranthas that use kand as a stuffing. However, it seems that its usefulness in desserts has remained uncharted territory.
    Ube’s rise to popularity could be compared to the omnipresent nature of matcha based drinks in Indian cafés, but what it also meant for its country of origin, Japan. The rising demand for matcha led to a shortage of the supplies, with stores in Uji, the matcha capital of Japan witnessing massive footfalls, and shelves full of matcha powder tins being swept clean within minutes of shops opening their doors to customers in the morning. Noticing a sustained interest in this green-tea powder, the Indian state of Assam took the initiative of growing matcha in their own backyard, as Japan has been struggling to keep pace with soaring global demand for matcha.
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    While the demand for ube is on the rise, there seems to be a problem with the supply chains in the Philippines too. In 2025, nearly 1.7 million kilograms of ube products were exported globally by the country, and nearly half of that amount was received by the United States of America alone. This has put a strain on the country’s agricultural landscape, as the amount of purple yams grown in the country has dropped from 15 million kilograms to 14 million, in a span of five years, according to the New York Times.
    In recent years, other countries in the region, such as China and Vietnam, have decided to consolidate their efforts to ramp up the growth of purple yams on their soil. Given the fact that Assam has taken the initiative to grow matcha in India itself, what could possibly be stopping farmers in India from tapping into the production of purple yams, especially when many parts of the country provide conditions that are conducive to their growth? To see it take on shapes and forms that have been in the making in other parts of the world? The 21st century has largely projected to be the Asian century, with Asian influences overtaking the world. We have several reasons to believe that this projection is true—as we hop from one colorful global food trend to the next — all to be traced back to the culturally rich and diverse countries of Asia.

  • The New Economics of Indian Shopping

    For decades, Indian fashion retail lived in separate worlds. There were market stalls, standalone neighborhood shops and local tailors, where prices were often negotiable. There was a scatter of indie, homegrown stores selling boho chic styles. Somewhat more recently, an explosion of malls has altered the country’s retail-scape.

    That’s changing though. Over the last decade, a wave of value-fashion retail has swept through Indian cities, offering affordable prices but with all the spit and polish of an upmarket shopping experience: shiny lights, glass-plated windows, air conditioning, constantly-renewing fresh stock, trendy garments, and a guarantee of quality. It’s now one of the fastest-growing corners of Indian consumer business, and it’s shifting not just what people wear, but where and why they choose to buy it. Budget brands like Trends and Zudio are now offering goods at the same price point as the bazaar, but with a vastly fancier shopping experience.

     

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    Tata’s Zudio has become the market leader, selling 350 million garments last year alone, with a ceiling price of ₹999 on anything in the store. Reliance, through Isha Ambani’s Reliance Trends and its broader Reliance Retail arm, is pushing just as hard, alongside Dubai-based Landmark Group’s Max Fashion. Vishaal Mega Mart and Tata’s upmarket chain Westside round out the value end, while platforms like Meesho, Flipkart, Nykaa Fashion’s Likha label, and homegrown ethnic-wear players such as Indya are chasing the same mid-income shopper online.

    The change has been immense and rapid. Zudio ballooned from seven stores in 2018 to 765 in 2025. Meanwhile, in the same time period, Westside merely doubled its store count.

    Clearly then, purchasing power has grown steadily over the past 25 years, and the shoppers who were previously priced out of branded fashion, are now a crucial market. They are aspirational customers, yet value-conscious; and they’ve simply transferred their wallets from the local mom-and-pop shop to posh-looking stores.

     

     

    Fashion, for a growing number of young, aspirational shoppers, has become closer to routine grocery shopping — pick up a few trendy pieces on impulse because the low cost and easy returns remove the anxiety of buying wrong.

    Research done by Deloitte India also gestures to something else. Around 30 percent of people who were polled said that the in-store experience drew them to the offline shopping space. This isn’t just about the ambience (although that was a factor) but also logistics i.e. the availability of a proper fitting room. Therein lies the appeal of stores like Zudio: it isn’t just about the price, it’s equally about how the stores and their sales staff make the shopper feel.

    Another driver? The rapid turnover of inventory, the very marker of fast fashion, that is urging customers to the store every few weeks.

    Perhaps the biggest shift comes to us via Tier-II and Tier-III cities. Rising disposable incomes, expanding highway infrastructure, and greater digital connectivity are encouraging brands to open stores along regional transport corridors rather than fight for expensive real estate in metros such as Mumbai.

     

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    But who will pay the bill for this flood of convenience and affordability?

    The mom-and-pop neighborhood stores of course, whose custom is dwindling. Even stores such as Pantaloons, Max, and Lifestyle (the middle tier of organized retail) are being squeezed. And as is the way of all fast fashion, the environmental toll is immense. India’s textile sector is now the third-largest contributor to the country’s dry municipal solid waste, trailing only plastics and paper, with barely a quarter of that waste getting recycled. While some brands are folding sustainability into their supply chains, large-scale change remains a distant prospect.

    For now, though, style and savings are winning out over sustainability — especially in India’s smaller towns, where much of the country is only just climbing onto the fast-fashion bandwagon.

  • The Weight of Plenty

    For generations in India, a full-figured person was automatically perceived as someone with privilege, someone who could afford to eat well. Curves were ‘in’, while being thin signaled that you didn’t have enough.

    Cut to contemporary India, where that perception is shifting.

    Recent National Family Health Survey numbers tell us that one in sixteen Indian women, and one in twenty-five men is obese. A quarter of young Indian women and just over a fifth of young men, now weigh more than what is considered a normal range. The trend line, across five rounds of the survey since 1992, points steadily upward.

     

     

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    From an Indian perspective, this makes eminent sense; as certain sections of society grow wealthier, their weight correspondingly rises. The oddness comes when you compare India to Western countries. In many other countries, the data reveals that the more money a household has, the fitter its members tend to be. This is consistently true in the United States, Britain, Germany, and wealthier parts of Asia such as South Korea. But when economists have split that data by gender, an odd asymmetry shows up. Wealthy women are reliably thinner than poor women. Wealthy men, though, are not much different from poor men — plenty of both are overweight. The conventional explanation is that in rich countries, heaviness has become, in effect, a marker of scarcity: too little money for good food, too little time for the gym, too little flexibility in a low-wage schedule to plan meals or exercise.

    Swelling incomes in urban India increasingly equal greater convenience: the ability to buy a car, using a delivery app instead of stepping to the neighborhood corner store, a fridge stocked with rich, heavy food, and access to multiple household staff. In the country, therefore, having purchasing power equals the power of not having to move.

     

     

    This greater convenience is paired with the transformation of the urban Indian diet, where traditional home-cooked meals are giving way to colas and burgers thanks to burgeoning fast food chains.

    Meanwhile, the culture that surrounds the body has been rewriting itself just as quickly. That old grammar, in which plumpness read as good fortune, is being overwritten by a newer one, imported largely through globalization, in which fitness has become the visible proof of means — visible proof that a person has the time and money to stay in shape. Ultra wealthy people such as Yash Birla and Ramona Narang now show off their muscles and their fitness regimes, on Instagram. Indian films, once happy to cast healthier-figured actresses, now cast very slim actresses and hyper muscular men.

     

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    That inversion of meaning reveals something. In a wealthier country, where a larger majority of citizens are affluent, thinness has become embedded as a cultural marker of privilege, since it is achieved through gyms, trainers, and carefully curated diets that only money and leisure can buy.

    In India, affluence is newer, and for the moment it is expressing itself as the opposite: not the discipline to eat less, but the freedom, finally, to eat more, and to eat in the effortless, sedentary Western style that convenience has made possible before the cultural backlash to it has fully arrived. The rich world’s thinness gap and India’s weight gap may turn out to be two chapters of the same story, simply read at different points in time — one where a population has already absorbed the anxieties of plenty, and one that is still, for the first time, getting used to having enough.

    None of this is necessarily a matter of individual willpower. It is the result of infrastructure, food, work and culture changing faster than our bodies can adapt—a transformation that is playing out across entire nations.

  • Reimagining The Museum

    There was a time when visiting Indian museums was a drag.

    Many were dimly lit. The signboards were barely legible, and even the most basic presentation of art or antiquities wasn’t cohesive. The complaint was that India never had a proper museum-going culture. But were the museums worth going to?

    “The big challenge was not just to draw people in, but also engage them so they come again and bring friends along,” says Sabyasachi Mukherjee, director of Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS), formerly the Prince of Wales Museum. After all, cultural spaces need large numbers of visitors for their survival and to assert their cultural significance.

     

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    For years, museums tried to make themselves more accessible. 

    A decade ago, as digital technology grew more affordable, they began introducing interactive elements. CSMVS was one of the pioneers. In the early 2000s, viewers could read more about an artwork, or even zoom in to see an object’s details on digital kiosks. Some stations offered quizzes and simple games.

    But it wasn’t enough. They still had students and rural tourists coming in, but the urban locals stayed away, buying expensive tickets to visit museums and exhibitions abroad, but not in their own cities. 

    The big change came about five years ago. The Van Gogh 360° exhibition traveled across cities. People complained that the digital presentation was not at par with a similar show abroad; nevertheless, they still queued up for it. People were hungry for such experiences, and happy to pay the (relatively high) price of the ticket. Art spaces took note.

    The pandemic accelerated the shift. Covid-19 made even the old-schoolers realize that it was time to engage and interact with audiences to help draw in the crowds and, importantly, to gain repeat viewers. Equally significant, museums had to give the digital generation something that was Gram-worthy and had a gripping story. A static work on a wall would not cut it anymore.

     

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    As the corporations and collectors behind these places vied to establish a social legacy, art programs became more dynamic, immersive, interactive and interesting.
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    Digital technology and social media changed museum and gallery programming, but so did the influx of several private museums designed as immersive spaces. They opened with giant screens, 360-degree projections, online archives and art lessons. As the corporations and collectors behind these places vied to establish a social legacy, art programs became more dynamic, immersive, interactive and interesting. The private spaces pushed more, perhaps thanks to better funding and more autonomy.

    The Museum of Art & Photography (MAP) in Bengaluru and Goa’s Serendipity Arts Festival floated the idea of art dates. Art is an easy conversation starter, after all. The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) also has a special ‘dine-in with your favourite work of art’ feature on its roster. Its weekend music gigs — pop, rock, indie, fusion — are big hits with Gen-Z.

    Just last month, Nature Morte hosted an ‘Artcade Night’. A game designer created games that complemented the Dear Tiger exhibition by contemporary artist Zimbiri. It was sold out in a couple of days.

    On the other end is Sarmaya. They invite Arabic calligraphers and coin collectors to hold workshops and talks. They also have ‘networking over art’ events. 

    These spaces are also building communities of like-minded people, of all those who turn up every week for Art Night Thursdays in Mumbai or Defence Colony art evenings in Delhi.

     

    Mumbai’s Paradox Museum provides a deeply immersive experience. | in.pinterest.com

     

    And this may be the biggest change. Museums and galleries are no longer simply places to look at things. They are becoming places to meet people, learn something new, spend an evening, discover a new artist or simply have a conversation. Art is becoming part of a social life.

    It took India some time, but we finally understood that heritage isn’t just preservation; it’s participation.

    Because when people participate in heritage and art, they appreciate its value, which, in turn, promotes its upkeep and builds a robust infrastructure. A museum needs more than a collection. It needs an audience that cares about the collection.

    We finally have well-lit displays, legible labels and, perhaps most importantly, the beginnings of a museum-going, gallery-hopping culture. The museum is no longer somewhere you have to go. It is somewhere you might actually want to.

  • Intelligence Is The New ‘Influencer’

    For a decade, influence ran on a simple equation: bigger audience, more belief. Follower count was credibility. If a million people were watching someone, they were worth listening to.

    That equation is breaking. Trust is moving — away from scale, toward proximity; away from polish, toward honesty; toward people who feel like us, not people performing for us. The influencer economy isn’t dying. But the assumption that bigger means more believable, certainly is.

    Humans learn by copying, and one of our oldest shortcuts is prestige bias: since judging real skill is hard, we look for indirect cues instead — who’s admired, who’s copied, who’s deferred to — and copy that person. Prestige stands in for competence. This competence is no longer a ‘brand’, it’s real, lived experience.

     

     

    Social media used to manufacture prestige. Now it audits it. Comment sections, side-by-sides, and review threads give audiences something they never had at scale: a cheap way to check if a claim is actually true.

    Today, most users on the ‘Gram can sniff sponsored content a mile off. Is the influencer losing their influence? Perhaps.

    Instead, people are pivoting towards relatable, everyday content creators. The historian deep-diving into colonial-era Delhi. The foodie gobbling his way around Mumbai. The museologist researching textiles. The paleontologist gabbing about dinosaurs. The neurologist teaching their audience how to stave off dementia. Sommeliers explaining the nuances of a sparkling wine. Krish Ashok, a ‘techie’, draws science into his food reels; he has 1.4 million followers on Instagram. Eleanor Barnett of the account HistoryEats is a researcher and food historian – she has 42.5K followers. These are people who never wanted a “personal brand” but know something real and are willing to explain it on camera. Their currency is niche, specific expertise, not charisma, and they are the new online experts. People trust them because they come bearing deep, researched, specific knowledge. Intelligence is becoming the new ‘influence.’

     

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    Instead, people are pivoting towards relatable, everyday content creators. The historian deep-diving into colonial-era Delhi. The foodie gobbling his way around Mumbai. The museologist researching textiles.
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    The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer makes this explicit. Most consumers now name relatable, everyday creators — not perfectly-polished, face-filtered celebrities — as their most credible, authentic source on brands. This is part of a wider retreat into smaller, familiar circles of trust, away from ‘influencers’ to ‘content creators’.

    The second shift? People are no longer online only to be entertained or to be sold a particular product; they’re going to Instagram to learn something. It’s no wonder then that many users prefer viewing niche, educational creators rather than entertaining ones.

    And they’re being found through search, not discovery feeds. Nearly half of US consumers now use TikTok as a search engine — a number that’s jumped sharply in two years — and a real chunk say they’d trust ChatGPT over Google for some queries.

     

     

    None of this is entirely new. Edelman’s own study back in 2005 explained that “trust shifts from authorities to peers.” This isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s the swing of the pendulum, accelerated and made visible by platforms built for it. The word ‘trust’ here is key; in the age of AI influencers and fake engagement, who can viewers even believe anymore?

    What is new is verification speed. People don’t just prefer peers over authorities in theory anymore — they can check a claim in seconds.

    That could be what is finally deflating the influencer bubble. Not that audiences have stopped wanting people to follow, admire or imitate. Prestige bias is too deeply embedded in our psyche to vanish overnight. But it is no longer enough.

    The creators who thrive in the next phase of the internet may not be those with the biggest platforms, the most polished feeds or the most lucrative brand partnerships. The new measure of influence may be surprisingly old-fashioned: knowing what you are talking about.

  • The Queens of the Board

    Chess is one of the rare competitive arenas in which men and women play under exactly the same physical conditions — no height advantage, no difference in muscle mass, no question of endurance. There are sixty-four squares and, theoretically, an equal opportunity to master them. And yet women remain dramatically underrepresented at the highest levels.

    India offers an intriguing counterpoint — because India is not simply a country that plays chess. It is the country that gave the world chess in the first place, and it is now producing a generation of women who are beginning to claim that inheritance for themselves. Koneru Humpy, Harika Dronavalli, R Vaishali and Divya Deshmukh are all elite players, their steepling achievements driving them to international fame as Chess Grandmasters.

    In 2025, something startling occurred. The 19-year-old Deshmukh battled the 38-year-old Humpy over the chessboard in the final of the FIDE Women’s World Cup. The symbolism was unmistakable. Not only were two Indian women facing each other in a global final, they were doing it over a game that was invented in their own country.

     

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    The game India gave away

    For of course, India has always been chess’ first home. If you unspool it back to its earliest avatar, you’ll likely end up at chaturanga, a game that emerged in India around the sixth century. The name was a reference to the four divisions of an Indian army — infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots — which eventually became the pawn, knight, bishop and rook of modern chess. Chaturange trundled onwards to Persia (today’s Iran), where it was christened with the name shatranj, before (eventually) moving on to Europe.

    Certainly, the game was changed as it moved onwards in the world, but its geometries remained the same. A warlike board game that could be marshalled as easily by male as well as female players.

     

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    India has always been chess’ first home. If you unspool it back to its earliest avatar, you’ll likely end up at chaturanga, a game that emerged in India around the sixth century.
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    Humpy became India’s first female grandmaster and one of the strongest women players in the world. Harika Dronavalli established herself among the elite. Vaishali followed, becoming one of India’s newest women grandmasters. Then came Deshmukh, Vantika Agrawal, Savitha Shri B, Padmini Rout, Nandhidhaa PV, Bhakti Kulkarni and Tania Sachdev. The list of names grew and grew.

    The Beth Harmon problem

    In 2020, something changed. Netflix put on a show about a fictional young chess prodigy – The Queen’s Gambit – an orphan who floats up the world of chess competitions. The twist in the tail? The orphan was a girl, Beth Harmon.

    After the show aired, online searches for ‘how to play chess’ soared. The series was watched by sixty-two million households in its first twenty-eight days. Most significantly, Harmon is shown to be the smartest person, easily slicing her way past (male) opponents.

    Yet, at the same time, The Queen’s Gambit exposed the distance between representation and reality. Judit Polgár, the Hungarian grandmaster who became the only woman ever to enter the world’s top ten, pointed out that her own experience revealed that her male opponents were considerably less gracious than those on the show.

    What makes a chess queen?

    Similarly, even in India, two truths co-exist. The pool of talent has widened, thanks to digital access to the game, and increasing school tournaments. State and national academies now foster more young girls entering competitive circuits.

    And yet the women’s chess boom in the country is not always representative of its grassroots reality. Don’t be fooled by the scroll of female names; India’s own Gender Equality in Chess Index has highlighted gaps in female participation, resources, representation and institutional support, with calls for stronger grassroots programs, better funding and coaching for women, more women coaches, and greater female representation in chess administration. India has 91 Grandmasters and more than 120 International Masters, yet a mere handful of these are women.

     

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    The 19-year-old Deshmukh battled the 38-year-old Humpy over the chessboard in the final of the FIDE Women's World Cup. The symbolism was unmistakable.
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    The first task, therefore, is not to find more prodigies. It is to widen the funnel — school chess clubs treated as ordinary rather than extracurricular, accessible tournaments outside the major cities, affordable coaching, and families who see women’s chess as a legitimate pursuit.

    At the same time, women need greater access to strong competition. Humpy has made this point herself — women’s chess has become significantly more professional, but women-only tournaments can limit young players’ opportunities to compete against the strongest men (for no lack of intelligence). Separate tournaments have their own indubitable advantages but those spaces might soon become claustrophobic.

     

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    A different kind of inheritance

    India’s relationship with chess has come full circle. A game that began, in one of its earliest forms, as a representation of an army has travelled through kingdoms and empires, across continents and languages, into computers and phones — and back to the country that first imagined it. Humpy helped establish that Indian women could build professional lives around a game their own civilization had invented. Deshmukh and Vaishali are now showing what happens when that possibility becomes normal.

    The most important transformation may not be the number of medals Indian women win. It may be the number of girls who see a chessboard and don’t see an obstacle; they see an opportunity.

  • What Is India Watching?

    Imagine, if you will, an evening in a Bengaluru household. A daughter scrolls through a Korean thriller in the bedroom; her brother is three episodes into a Japanese anime series on his phone; her mother has a Malayalam crime drama paused in the kitchen; the television in the living room is blaring the latest Bollywood blockbuster for her dad. The entire family used to gather around one big television screen; once an evening ritual, it has now shattered into as many screens as there are family members.

    For a country as polyphonic as India, Bollywood has long had an outsize sway over its cinema screens. No more. Star-spangled films now perform unevenly at the box office, and the reason is not, as teeth-gnashing producers sometimes grumble, piracy or poor marketing.

     

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    Covid-19 changed many things about India, not least amongst them, the country’s viewing habits. Knuckled into watching OTT films and shows, Indians discovered Korean dramas, Spanish thrillers, German mysteries and Japanese anime.

    Streaming platforms, sensing captive audiences, invested in dubbing and subtitles at a scale that made the original language nearly irrelevant. What began as a lockdown habit has since congealed into a watching preference.

    English, once the language through which Indians accessed global culture became merely one option among many. A new Hindi film release competes not against last month’s Hindi release but against Squid Game, The Devil Wears Prada 2, a Marathi romcom or a Malayalam supernatural thriller.

    This in no way means that star power has ebbed completely. A jingoistic, big-budget macho film Dhurandhar: The Revenge, starring Ranveer Singh and Akshaye Khanna, raked in collections of ₹1,850 crore worldwide, no mean feat. Perhaps unsurprisingly, younger male viewers predominated.

    However, it was the only Bollywood film that even came close to such numbers.

     

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    Once confined to pirated downloads and online forums, anime has become one of the country's fastest-growing fandoms, and not in the cities one would expect.
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    Amazon Prime Video’s Made in India: A Titan Story and Netflix’s India’s Got Latent both drew enormous audiences this year even as regional cinema — Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati — found viewers well beyond its home states.

    The most surprising of all is the rise of anime, which offers the clearest evidence of the new geography of Indian taste. Once confined to pirated downloads and online forums, it has become one of the country’s fastest-growing fandoms, and not in the cities one would expect. Nagpur ran its own anime convention before many larger cities attempted one. Japanese films now open in towns that had never screened Japanese animation before. Comic conventions once devoted to superheroes now reserve entire halls for manga. Ramen shops and Naruto backpacks have followed.

    These too, have been Indianized. Fans are adding an Indian taste to anime characters through art and AI reels. This is globalization created by fan clubs and convention organizers, rather than handed down by any big budget Bollywood studio.

     

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    Back in the fragmented living room, the threshold for spectacle has risen along with everything else; it must now be earned, not merely advertised.

    What Indians watch has become, in other words, a rough census of what they will no longer tolerate: a familiar face standing in for a good story, a single industry standing in for the world. In a country long defined by the boundaries of language and geography, the algorithm has found a shared taste that owes nothing to either.