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  • The Web is Talking to Itself

    The internet was built for people. Increasingly, it serves machines.

    From the beginning, the Internet was premised on one simple assumption: that people were using it. Then came the bots, the AI agents, the web crawlers.

    The Dead Internet Theory, a conspiracy that emerged on obscure message boards in the late 2010s, claimed that governments and technology companies had quietly replaced ordinary internet users with bots, leaving a web populated largely by artificial activity. It was almost immediately poohpoohed, of course. But it proved unexpectedly prescient.

     

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    This year, we have reached the turning point. Cloudflare, perhaps the most prominent connectivity cloud company globally, recently reported that automated requests now account for more than half of the activity passing through its network. More recently, Web security firms have documented rapid growth in AI agents. There’s now a giant uptick in fake followers on social media sites. Influencers themselves are sometimes entirely fake. Is this perhaps the future of the Internet then?

    Five years ago, such traffic barely existed. Today, thanks to AI, it is almost taking over!

    A user asks a question, receives a summary, compares products or books a reservation, and this is done without ever visiting the sites that supplied the underlying information. The work still depends on human intent, but the actual visit no longer does.

    For decades, digital publishers and e-commerce platforms relied on a straightforward chain: a visitor arrived, viewed advertisements or products and generated revenue. AI agents break that chain. They consume computing resources, bandwidth and content, yet generate neither ad impressions nor loyal readership. This shifts the bedrock of economics on which the Internet used to run.

     

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    Cloudflare, perhaps the most prominent connectivity cloud company globally, recently reported that automated requests now account for more than half of the activity passing through its network.
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    Expectedly, publishers have begun responding. Some have pursued litigation or licensing agreements with AI firms whose models rely on their reporting. Others have blocked AI crawlers altogether. Still others are experimenting with charging AI companies directly for access, accepting that future readers may arrive not as people but as software representing them (a generational shift in itself).

    The same forces are reshaping the supply of information.

    Search-engine optimization had already encouraged publishers to produce ever larger volumes of keyword-rich content. Generative AI has reduced the cost of doing so to almost nothing. AI can produce endless listicles, summaries, social-media posts and copy of every kind – simply for other AI to consume.

     

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    And what of us? The users for which this was all built? How can we trust the content that we consume online?

    The obvious answer of course, is to turn analog, reverting to physical dictionaries and encyclopedias for research. But that is only a part-solution, for an increasingly connected online world. Another answer might be to hunt for spaces that are largely inaccessible – to machines, of course, but also to humans. People increasingly trust closed-door spaces such as invitation-only Slack communities, private Discord servers, paid newsletters and group chats. This represents a striking reversal of the internet’s original logic that democracy and ease of access was the web’s greatest strength.

    This doesn’t mean of course, that the internet is really ‘dead’. Billions of people continue to read, argue, shop and create online every day.

    Every era of the internet has been defined by its dominant user. In the 1990s, it was the individual browsing webpages. In the 2000s, it was the search engine indexing them. In the 2010s, it was the social-media feed organizing attention. The next era may belong to software that reads, shops, negotiates and decides on our behalf.

    The internet was built on the belief that someone, somewhere, was looking at a screen. Its next phase will depend on a more difficult question: how to build a profitable web when, increasingly, something is looking instead.

  • Rooted in Place

    Perhaps one of the most exciting parts of planning a holiday is choosing where to stay — scrolling through photos, reading reviews, and deciding which place deserves your precious downtime (and your Instagram feed). But today’s discerning travellers, armed with disposable income and well-stamped passports, want more than just a room with a compelling view — they’re chasing stories. Travellers today want a narrative behind the hotel they’re staying at versus 1200-thread-count sheets. 

    Where you stay often becomes how you remember a place. A cold chain hotel could be anywhere in the world — but a 19th-century haveli with sun-dappled courtyards, or a hillside retreat made of local slate and pine? That’s where travel shifts from itinerary to immersion. As India’s travel culture matures, the idea of luxury is evolving. It’s no longer defined by size or splendour alone, but by a sense of story, sustainability, and rootedness. The country’s boutique hotels are at the centre of this quiet but powerful transformation.

     

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    In Rajasthan, heritage havelis — former merchant and royal homes in their heyday — are being restored to new life as boutique hotels. Properties are giving visitors the opportunity to enter history without giving up contemporary comfort. Here, hand-painted frescoes, jharokhas, and courtyards aren’t done for show — they are maintained with love, providing a genuine sense of place. The restoration of these havelis is a sentimental sustainable model infusing economic vitality into old buildings without sacrificing their cultural backbone.

     

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    At the Sawantwadi Palace Boutique Art Hotel, not only do the erstwhile prince and princess (Lakham Khem and Shraddha Lakham Sawant Bhonsle) run the hotel, they're also trained chefs spooning plate after delicious plate of traditional Konkani food, while simultaneously reviving the ancient card-playing art of ganjifa.
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    This change is not exclusive to palace towns. In the Himalayas, hotels such as The Grand Dragon Ladakh are redefining conscious luxury. The hotel combines local architectural styles with low-density development, embracing native materials such as slate, wood, and stone. The outcome? Spaces that resonate with the natural and cultural cadences of their surroundings, instead of disturbing them.

    Others hire local chefs and artisans, providing guests with not only a meal or a room, but an exchange of cultures. At the Sawantwadi Palace Boutique Art Hotel, not only do the erstwhile prince and princess (Lakham Khem and Shraddha Lakham Sawant Bhonsle) run the hotel, they’re also trained chefs spooning plate after delicious plate of traditional Konkani food, while simultaneously reviving the ancient card-playing art of ganjifa.

    The modern boutique hotel in India has also become a platform for local storytelling. The Kin in Mumbai replaces the standard reception desk with a concept store, selling curated art and crafts. With fresh flowers sourced from Dadar Market and the retro elevator it contributes to the story of the city it inhabits.

     

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    Sustainability, too, is more than a buzzword. Travellers today are not content with surface-level experiences. They’re seeking cultural resonance — whether it’s a cooking class with a Rabari woman, a nature walk to identify medicinal plants, or simply sipping tea on a haveli terrace where time lingers in sandstone carvings. It’s become less about excess, more about essence.

    In this new ‘blueprint’ for Indian hospitality, boutique hotels are portals into the soul of a place. With each check-in, luxury is being re-written — it is personal, sustainable, storied, and deeply, unmistakably local.

  • The Sky is the Limit

    Not long ago, artificial intelligence-powered robots was something out of sci-fi movies or tech journals. Today, it’s part of everyday life. It helps you unlock your phone with your face, reroutes your maps during traffic jams, flags fraud at your bank, and nudges you into watching just one more episode on Netflix.

    Now, it’s eyeing your dinner.

    In cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, food delivery giants like DoorDash are testing small AI-powered robots — think knee-high pods that roll along sidewalks and deliver meals with zero human contact. They’re packed with cameras, GPS, and real-time traffic data. The idea? Cut down last-mile costs, rely less on gig workers, and serve up something futuristic.

     

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    But anyone who’s been to Tokyo won’t find this surprising. Japan has long been ahead when it comes to blending tech with hospitality. Ramen shops with vending machine menus, lattes poured by robot arms, sushi zipping past on conveyor belts — all part of the norm. It’s efficient, it’s clean, and it works because the system around it does too.

    Now picture India.

    Delivery here isn’t a streamlined system. It’s controlled chaos — a world powered by jugaad, short-cuts, phone calls, and street-smart delivery guys who know exactly how to find your door, even when Google Maps gives up. It’s a human-driven operation that thrives in a landscape of broken lifts, unmarked buildings, narrow gullies, and peak-hour madness. 

     

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    In Gurugram, groceries are already being hotfooted by drone, helping to reshape last-mile logistics.
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    Could a robot handle that? Let’s tackle both sides of that question.

    First, there’s the question of infrastructure. Many Indian cities barely have sidewalks — and when they do, they’re often uneven, broken, or blocked by everything from carts to cows. In such a situation, a robot might find the streets easier to navigate than a human being (and emit less carbon while doing so). On the other hand, a delivery bot that cruises down Mumbai streets might get stuck, lost, or simply draw a curious crowd.

    Then there’s trust. Unlike in the U.S., where many consumers are used to dealing with automated kiosks and smart locks, India’s tech comfort zone is developing — especially when it comes to robots showing up at your gate with your biryani. This is where government regulations need to step in

    And then there’s something harder to measure — culture. In India, delivery isn’t just a transaction. It’s a tiny act of familiarity. Maybe it’s the delivery guy who knows your gate code or brings extra ketchup because you always ask. That’s not something a beeping box can replicate.

     

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    Does that mean AI has no place in Indian food delivery? Not at all. In fact, the march of the drone has already begun. Across parts of urban India, drones are already ferrying medicines, diagnostics, parcels and e-commerce shipments up and down. In Gurugram, groceries are already being hotfooted by drone, helping to reshape last-mile logistics. Plans are in the offing for Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune and Hyderabad to follow suit. This was only a matter of time; India’s online food delivery market is expected to swell to USD 27 billion by 2030.

    So is your paneer tikka safest in the hands of someone who knows how to dodge a pothole and charm a security guard, or in the arms of a drone soaring over the streets? The pavements may not be ready yet, but the future is already on its way.

  • A Note from Our Founder

    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
    Founder & Editorial Director
    The Moment

  • What Is India Listening To

    India is a country where a single playlist can get all states nodding along to the same song. Walk into a nightclub in Mumbai or a college fest in Kochi, and the odds are decent that at some point the DJ will reach for the latest Punjabi bop. What’s more, audiences will probably demand it.

    Even though Punjabi is the mother tongue of merely 2.74% of Indians, it has flooded the country’s playlists and Diljit Dosanjh is likely the reason why. He is the first Punjabi artist to play Coachella, and has collaborated with Sia and Camilo; such cross-pollination has helped knuckle Punjabi music into the global mainstream. Karan Aujla represents the next wave, matching hip hop to bhangra, reflecting the country’s global aspirations and growing confidence in the world. Western music had been seeping into India for decades; recently only though has regional music accepted it with quite so much elan.  Between them, the two have turned Punjabi music from a regional taste into one of India’s most successful exports.

     

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    Part of the appeal is portability. Bhangra is a bop! And Indians love to dance; rhythm crosses language barriers more easily than lyrics do. Long before streaming existed, Punjabi songs already travelled through weddings and diaspora networks in the US and the UK; infrastructure that no other regional tradition possessed in quite the same way.

    Punjabi pop’s success echoes the trajectory of K Pop, another regional industry that outgrew its borders. It is no accident that young, well-traveled, global Indians meet BTS and Diljit Dosanjh in the very same scroll.

    If Punjabi music conquered India’s public spaces, singer-songwriters such as Anuv Jain and King have taken its private ones. Some of the country’s most interesting acts are scattered around India, defying (as P Pop is) the dominance of Hindi music: a rapper from Shillong, an artist from Arunachal Pradesh who slides between English, Hindi and Nyishi in a single song, a Delhi collective that fuses Punjabi folk with metal. Clearly, Mumbai is no longer the heartbeat; the filaments of the music industry have spread, reflecting a growing urbanism away from the major metros. While alternative and indie acts were always part of college festivals and music festivals thanks to MTV and its local equivalent, Channel V, they’d never quite achieved mainstream success. For this, we must thank streaming services that have democratized the music landscape to some extent.

     

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    Karan Aujla represents the next wave, matching hip hop to bhangra, reflecting the country’s global aspirations and growing confidence in the world.
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    For decades Bollywood accounted for roughly four-fifths of all music consumption in India. Its dominance is waning slowly, its share of the pie slipping to around two-thirds, eaten into by non-filmi streaming platforms and artists. Still, some of this year’s biggest chartbusters came via the film Dhurandhar: The Revenge (released in the last weeks of 2025), a jingoistic mass entertainer that held up a mirror to a masculinist section of Indian society.

    The same streaming platforms that broke Bollywood’s monopoly on taste have also proved useful to ideologues. Alongside the love songs and wedding anthems has grown an ecosystem of ‘Hindutva pop’, a genre that does exactly what its name suggests i.e sings about Hindu identity and majoritarian politics reflecting this wider shift in Indian society. This is a genre that is no longer confined to small towns in traditional Central India; it racks up millions of views on Youtube and is even played at official government ceremonies.

     

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    Back at the party, the music plays on. Bollywood songs will remain fixtures of Indian celebration for years yet; cinema is too deeply stitched into the culture to vanish overnight. But the balance has tipped. Indian music increasingly resembles not a single canon curated in Mumbai, but a federation — Punjabi pop, acoustic singer-songwriters, regional rap, ideological anthems — all competing for the same thumb on the same scroll. The center has not disappeared. It has merely lost its monopoly on what the nation hears.

  • The Rise of the Two Internets

    There was a time when the internet felt endless.

    Ask a question, and Google gives you answers. Articles, opinions, forums, expert takes — all just a click away. It felt like a digital town square where knowledge moved freely, and anyone could join the conversation. But lately, something’s changed.

    The web is no longer the open library it once was. Search results are increasingly cluttered with AI-generated filler — content that sounds right, but says nothing. The same recycled summaries echo across hundreds of sites, while the real stuff — the thoughtful, original, deeply human stuff — slips further out of view.

     

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    So Where is it Now?

    It’s behind the paywall. In private communities. In newsletters you actually want to read. In Discord servers, closed forums, Patreon pages, and subscriber-only Substacks — places where people still talk like people, and curiosity still feels alive.

    And at the heart of this shift is Gen Z. They grew up on the open internet — Reddit rabbit holes, Tumblr threads, chaotic TikToks. But now, they’re curating their own corners of the web. Tired of misinformation, noise, and the flattening effect of algorithms, they’re turning to private spaces.

    It’s happening everywhere. In the US, niche creators are building micro-communities around everything from climate optimism to indie fragrance. In India, creators producing content in Tamil, Bengali, and Marathi are building powerful subscriber bases around hyper-local content. And in China, where gated platforms have long been the norm, ecosystems like WeChat offer a glimpse into what the rest of the world might look like next.

     

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    At the heart of this shift is Gen Z. They grew up on the open internet — Reddit rabbit holes, Tumblr threads, chaotic TikToks. But now, they’re curating their own corners of the web. Tired of misinformation, noise, and the flattening effect of algorithms, they’re turning to private spaces.
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    Take the writers who’ve started deliberately opting out of SEO altogether by skipping keyword optimization, ignoring Google-friendly headlines, sometimes even asking not to be indexed at all. It sounds counterintuitive until you see the logic: a smaller, more devoted readership that pays and shows up is worth more than a large, anonymous one that clicks and leaves. What they’re looking for isn’t reach, it’s return visits from committed readers.

    And yet, we know that an internet organized around paywalls and invite-only servers is also, by definition, a less accessible one. The open web’s promise was that knowledge shouldn’t depend on who you know or what you can afford; it was the great democratizer. Retreating into private spaces risks quietly recreating the very gatekeeping the internet was supposed to avoid. The trade-off is real: what’s gained in trust and depth may come at the expense of reach and equal access.

    Brands are catching on. The old SEO playbook is losing relevance. What matters now is not how many people you reach, but how deeply you connect. And over the next year, we’ll see more communities — not just audiences. More trust — not just traffic.

    The internet’s new frontier isn’t louder. It’s quieter, more intentional, more human. And it’s already here.

  • A Movement Without Borders

    On 20th July, a group of people made their way towards Union Square in Manhattan in the evening. They were placard-carrying members of the Indian diaspora, wishing to express their solidarity with the students protesting in New Delhi against the Indian education system. 

    Close to their meeting spot, stands a statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi that is 8 feet tall. It was installed in 1986. It makes one think — how common are Gandhi’s statues in the very visible world of global cities? Gandhi stands and sits in Johannesburg, Beijing, Hiroshima, London. Do protests that align with his political beliefs remain confined within national borders or do they have offshoots across the world? Why do Indian protests now have audiences and participants across continents?

    Diasporic protests by themselves are not a new phenomenon, but it is worth asking questions about the issue that triggered the protests in July 2026. That is because it reveals the aspirations of a subset of the Indian population, in this case, the youth of the country. Many of these are students and on the verge of entering the workforce. 

     

    New York came out in support of Indian students. | David Sathuluri

     

    This is a generation that still somehow managed to find reasons for laughing, although they were peddling in the grim business called dissent. The Gen-Z population (people born in the years between 1997-2012) has been labelled as a generation of ‘unserious’ people, yet who are not afraid of tackling serious issues, the likes of which include demanding accountability from the government. 

    But what about their friends and family who have now moved abroad? How do they respond to events in the mainland?

    The date for a peaceful walk from the Jantar Mantar to the parliament had been decided upon well in advance. People were asking for the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, for his lack of oversight on the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), which decides whether young students can qualify to study medicine, and become doctors in the future. When word spread in May 2026 that the question paper had been leaked, and the test would be conducted again, it left a tremendous impact on the lives of the aspirants. There were more than twenty aspirants who died by suicide.

    To voice their support for the movement, some people decided to fly to New Delhi from other parts of the country, and some from outside the country. For those who couldn’t travel, their current place of residence became the site of protest.

     

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    These protests also highlight the efficacy of those who can demonstrate support for the cause in lieu of being physically present at the site.
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    In New York City, on 20th July, that venue was Union Square — a protest initiated by Hindus for Human Rights, an organization based in Washington D.C. It was possibly a deliberate decision to have Gandhi in the backdrop as members of the Indian diaspora convened to speak about the situation unfolding in India. After all, Gandhi was known for preaching the ideals of non-violence during India’s fight for independence from British colonial rule.

    “The beauty of the current youth uprising in India is that it brings together those who love Gandhi, those who love Ambedkar, those who love Bhagat Singh,” says Sunita Vishwanath, the Executive Director of Hindus for Human Rights.” Rather than these historical figures forming lines of division between us, the protests have truly united us.”

    Unlike the protests in New Delhi and other Indian cities, people showed up in limited numbers. But what propels these individuals to align their timing with Indian protests, and show up when there is such a massive geographical divide between Indian cities and their locations? Vishwanath suggests that the diaspora never stopped following Indian news from close quarters, and that inspiration to join protests transcends borders. The compression of distance is also carried through fervent discussions on mediums such as Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp, through which people receive real time updates.

    These are individuals who have retained their Indian citizenship, or they have Indian roots which they feel strongly towards. After all, one of the catalysts of the movement, Abhijit Dipke, was residing in the US, when he decided to come up with a satirical page named the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP). 

    These protests also highlight the efficacy of those who can demonstrate support for the cause in lieu of being physically present at the site. This includes online work — creating educational content on the political history of India, reminding people of their constitutional rights, and for some people in the comment section, one can also find tips and tricks to protect themselves from the harmful effects of tear gas.

     

    The Internet has become a crucial tool for the dissemination of information to the diaspora. | David Sathuluri

     

    There is also a deep-seated curiosity about who is funding the protests. The answer might be people galvanizing support for the movement by sending food and supplies through quick commerce delivery apps such as BlinkIt. It’s coming from those people who are employed and have disposable income. Many millennials have also offered to arrange for flight and train tickets for those who wished to travel to the capital of India, but lacked the means to do so.

    Even as we reside in different parts of the world and the country, several gaps in understanding and communication have been bridged through social media. People are no longer relying on traditional media outlets in India for news, but are watching developments unfold on their phone screens. 

    Turning up for protests felt necessary because people care deeply for the homeland they (or their parents) once lived in; through these moments of solidarity, one finds a way back home. With the Indian diaspora scattered across various parts of the globe, and their need to express a connection with their erstwhile homes, the Indian protest could truly be considered to be a protest of the world.

  • The Vegan Paradox

    Once a quiet, personal choice, veganism today feels almost everywhere — showing up in oat milk lattes, plant-based meats, skincare labels, and climate conversations. In cities like New York or Berlin, going vegan is more than a diet. It’s a lifestyle, a statement, even a kind of soft activism.

    And yet, for all its global momentum, veganism hasn’t really taken off in India — a country that, on paper at least, seems perfectly primed for it. After all, a large portion of the population is vegetarian. Many communities avoid meat for religious reasons. India’s extraordinary range of locally-grown vegetables and fruit makes it much easier for our meals to be meat-free. Vegetarianism is so deeply embedded in certain Indian cultures that it is seen as the default; the other option being ‘non-vegetarian’, a term used nowhere else in the world.

    So why does it still feel like a fringe idea here?

     

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    A Culture That Already Made Its Choices

    In India, what’s on your plate is rarely just a matter of personal preference. Food is entangled with religion, geography, community and caste. You might be vegetarian because your family always was. Or eat meat, but only fish or chicken, depending on your beliefs. And even if you don’t think too much about your diet, chances are it’s shaped by where you come from. 

    That’s part of what makes veganism such a tricky fit here. Perhaps the biggest misconception is that India is largely vegetarian. It isn’t, although the subject is more nuanced. For instance, more than half of India eats meat, but may eschew pork or beef, based on religious preferences. Or they may choose vegetarianism on certain days of the week. 

    Indian vegetarianism is built on dairy — curd with your rice, ghee on your rotis, paneer instead of meat at weddings. Dahi, ghee, milk — these aren’t indulgences, they’re everyday essentials. Comfort food in India often begins with a dollop of white butter on hot parathas or ends with a glass of warm milk.

     

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    In a country where malnutrition is still a real issue for many, asking people to opt out of affordable, accessible food sources in favor of imported substitutes can come across as tone-deaf and elitist.
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    So when someone gives up dairy here, it is emotional — stepping away from what feels familiar, even sacred. In other countries, veganism has faced criticism for being a lifestyle of privilege — and in India, that critique hits harder.

    Almond milk costs four times as much as regular milk. Vegan cheese is something you spot at a gourmet store, not your local kirana. Meat substitutes, when available, are marketed to an urban, upper-middle-class crowd. Even oat milk — now trendy in cafés — is still seen as an expensive novelty, not a staple.

    Most Indians aren’t looking to swap out dairy; they’re just trying to put nutritious food on the table. In a country where malnutrition is still a real issue for many, asking people to opt out of affordable, accessible food sources in favour of imported substitutes can come across as tone-deaf and elitist.

    The Urban Illusion

    Sure, there are pockets where veganism is starting to find some ground. Walk through Bandra or Indiranagar and you might spot vegan cafés, tofu vendors, or Instagram influencers sharing smoothie bowls. Some are doing the hard work of promoting sustainability — but it’s still a small, elite crowd.

    For most people, the word ‘vegan’ still doesn’t mean much — or feels like something that belongs to a different world entirely. A foreign idea that doesn’t quite click with the way they eat, cook, or live.

     

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    So What Would an Indian Veganism Even Look Like?

    If veganism is to grow in India, it’ll have to look and taste completely different from the West.

    That means letting go of the almond-milk, the Beyond-Meat aesthetic and leaning into what’s already indigenous to the country: coconut, jackfruit, millets, banana stem — ingredients that are regional, affordable, and deeply rooted in traditional cooking.

    Because long before ‘plant-based’ became a buzzword, Indian food was already doing it — just without the labels. The challenge isn’t creating a new food culture. It’s reconnecting with the parts of our own that have always celebrated plants without the fuss.

    Right now, veganism in India is still mostly a trend, found in hashtags and pop-up menus more than everyday homes. But that could change. 

  • An Ode To…The NCPA

    Every evening, the NCPA springs to life.

    Fairy lights twined around the trees in its lawns, glint and glitter in the twilit gloom. A gentle wind from the nearby seashore ripples the leaves.

    A flurry of impeccably-attired ladies and gentlemen gather at the gates of its grand Jamshed Bhabha theatre, waiting to enter its vast marbled halls. Inside, there is warmth. The place rings with stories and music and laughter. Patrons with earthier concerns thicken the food counter, eager for the famous cold coffee and chutney sandwiches.

    But this is all a prelude; everybody is waiting for the bell to announce the entry of the Symphony Orchestra of India, and time is finely diced into minutes until the curtains open.

    There is always a gleam, a glister, about a night at the NCPA.

     

    The Tata Theater at the NCPA | in.pinterest.com

     

    But Mumbai’s NCPA isn’t merely the grand Jamshed Bhabha. It is after all, a belt of theaters wedged between the expensive Oberoi hotel, and a redoubt of tetrapods that open out into the Arabian sea. Each venue is distinct — the bowl of the Sunken Garden scooped out of the ground; the Experimental Theatre with its entirely reconfigurable interiors; the vast Tata amphitheater and its revolving stage; the aptly-named Little Theatre; the renowned music library, and so on.

    Although the NCPA boasts of a plurality of cultures – audiences often throng its halls for a Marathi play or a Hindustani classical concert  – it has come to be known as a bastion of Western classical music. Its Parsi chairman, Khushroo Suntook, almost papal in his responsibility towards classical music, instituted the Symphony Orchestra of India (India’s first and only professional symphony orchestra) in 2006. He brought in British-Parsi conductor Zane Dalal as its Associate Music Director and Kazakh violinist-conductor Marat Bisengaliev as its Music Director. (The institution itself was envisioned and built by Parsis J. R. D. Tata and Dr. Jamshed Bhabha.)

     

    “
    Although the NCPA boasts of a plurality of cultures – audiences often throng its halls for a Marathi play or a Hindustani classical concert – it has come to be known as a bastion of Western classical music.
    ”

     

    Nonetheless, in a country already rich with its own encyclopedic musical traditions, Western music would remain a largely separate world, seemingly unassimilable. Many considered it elitist, dull, and relegated it to the realm of the old fogy.

    Perhaps ten years ago, they wouldn’t have been wrong. At any Western classical music performance at the NCPA, the audience (and the patrons) used to be an ocean of elderly Parsis. (Parsis are a tiny community of Zoroastrians who migrated from Iran to India in the 8th C.) It was a running joke that if anyone wanted to finish the Parsis off in one go, the simplest way would be at a Western classical performance.

    Some background: Under colonial rule, a small, Anglophile slice of Parsis and Indian Christians were the Indians best positioned to take part in colonial cultural life: They took to this new form of music like fish to water, and carried forward that legacy past Independence. That a professional classical music scene exists in Mumbai at all owes a fair bit to the community that simply refused to let it go.

     

    The Symphony Orchestra of India performing at the Jamshed Bhabha Auditorium / Instagram

     

    The NCPA was never meant to be a shrine to one tradition alone. That it came to be known as the home for Western music says less about how it was founded and more about the community kept showing up, year after year, to keep that part of it alive.

    But here is the arithmetic that underpins everything. The 2011 census counted just 57,000 Parsis in India. A whole strand of Mumbai’s cultural life, including its patron networks, and audience members, rests on a community small enough to be called a tribe.

    Perhaps this is too dark a view. The NCPA’s SOI Music Academy is beginning to sculpt young talent, and is sending teachers into municipal-run schools as well. A stream of schoolchildren are choosing to learn the pianoforte, the cello, the violin, the viola, if nothing else than to facilitate entry into colleges abroad. Younger audience members too, are growing in number. Could this be the future? We can only hope.

     

  • How Memes Became the Message

    It all began with an offhand remark.

    In May, the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, called some unemployed young Indians “cockroaches.” Soon after, Abhijeet Dipke, a Dalit student living in Boston, posted a comment on Instagram: “What if all cockroaches come together?” 

    A gush of likes and comments followed Dipke’s comment. And this is how the  Cockroach Janta Party was born; it now has 26 million Instagram followers to date. Dipke and his roaches set down their first demand: the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, the education minister who they believed was accountable for a snarl of exam paper leaks. In the wake of this demand came protests by students, centered around Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, but soon spreading to other Indian cities.

     

    @arushioswal / Instagram

     

    But this protest has been like no other so far.

    Most importantly, the vanguard of the movement was led by a predominantly younger demographic. This was a generation born into social media. They didn’t adapt to it the way millennials or Gen X did — they’re native to it the way earlier generations were native to television. Untainted by the opinions of newspaper editors and news anchors, they chose to trust online influencers. And as a result, they folded dissent into internet culture. From subway surfer runs escaping police to GRWM memes, humor didn’t detract from the movement. Instead, it became an indelible part of it.

    Gen Z eschewed the faded old playbook of press releases, media cells and spokespeople, the old ways of previous generations. Instead, a carnivalesque protest erupted on screen as much as on ground.  

     

    “
    To add to the carnivalesque atmosphere: kids came to the protest dressed up as cockroaches, dinosaurs (reels set to the Jurassic Park theme), and an entire DC-Marvel multiverse of Batmans, Supermans, and Spider-Men, alongside no shortage of self-declared protest ‘baddies’.
    ”

     

    The cardio community showed up. Protesters shared reels of themselves fleeing to the Subway Surfers soundtrack — the game where you run from a cop. ‘Cardio day at Dadar, thank you Mumbai Police!’ read one post. Another reel showed a Strava account logging miles at the protest.

    The gym bros and the muscle mamas threw their weight behind it too — a poster reading ‘Free Protein for Stronger Bones’, was followed by an actual protein-powder giveaway at the protest. Meanwhile, the MMA community drilled lathi-charge evasion like it was just another day in the MMA ring.

    There were protest fit-checks and ‘GRWM for the protest’ videos. There were ‘What I eat in a day at the protests’ reels — ice cream, medium fries, chowmein, biscuits, papad, a fizzy orange drink, apparently. There was a whole genre recreating the Who Was Interested First meme, except with police and protesters standing in for the couple. Someone restaged Norway’s viral Viking Row, swapping ‘ro’ for ‘resign’.

    Facing police action, crowds burst into the national anthem, forcing police to stand at attention. Then they made reels about that too.

    To add to the carnivalesque atmosphere: kids came to the protest dressed up as cockroaches, dinosaurs (reels set to the Jurassic Park theme), and an entire DC-Marvel multiverse of Batmans, Supermans, and Spider-Men, alongside no shortage of self-declared protest ‘baddies’.

     

    @hey.siya_2.0 / Instagram

     

    For older generations, this felt like a seismic shift. Gen Z scythed through complicated times with grace and humor and meme after hilarious meme; they took an offhand remark and turned it into a rallying cry, knowing that satire cuts through faster than any op-ed can. Some online viewers found the humour jarring. But for the young people creating the videos, there was nothing contradictory about it at all. 

    Their brand of dissent cemented dark humor with pop culture, internet memes, political history, and brand advertising. Portraits of Ambedkar and Che sat beside Bollywood references and cosplay because, for this generation, history, politics, and pop culture were never separate registers to begin with. The personal is political, after all.

    Smartphones turned ordinary people into chroniclers of political upheaval, recording moments that might otherwise disappear. Plus, they got people to actually act, spreading fast because people share and remix them, and because social media algorithms reward that kind of engagement. Memes gathered meaning as they got passed from phone to phone; this became another way to support the movement.

    Watching it unfold felt like witnessing a movie with no filter and no script, playing out in real time — more absorbing even, because every frame here belonged to people with genuine stakes in the outcome. We weren’t merely spectators; we were pulled into the frame ourselves. 

    The cockroaches didn’t invent a new way to protest — they simply refused to perform dissent the traditional way. History will remember the slogans; this one will also remember the reels.