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  • 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.

    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.

    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.

     

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    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.
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    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.

    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

    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.

    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 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.

     

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

  • How Translation Became the New Soft Power

    A decade ago, global entertainment followed a familiar pattern. A small group of countries produced most of the mainstream shows that traveled around the world, and most of those shows were in English. Translation existed, but it was secondary. For mainstream television and film distribution, subtitles were often treated as a courtesy and dubbing as an afterthought. Cultural influence moved outward from a narrow center, and everyone else adapted to it. This is how shows like Friends and Full House became household names across the world in the 1990s and early 2000s, building devoted subcultures far from the places they were made. 

    That arrangement held as long as distribution stayed limited and production budgets remained relatively manageable for broadcasters and studios. By the mid-2010s, both conditions started to collapse. In January 2016, Netflix expanded into more than 130 new countries in a single move, abruptly widening the potential reach of any show it carried. At the same time, the cost of producing flagship domestic originals rose sharply. Translation stepped into that pressure point, and the economics of global storytelling shifted around it.  

    Online platforms learned quickly that international titles offered a different kind of return. A series like Money Heist made this obvious. It began as a modestly performing Spanish show and was cancelled by its original broadcaster in 2017. Once Netflix acquired, translated, and pushed it across markets, it found large audiences in Europe, Latin America, and eventually Asia and the Middle East. By 2021, Netflix reported that more than 180 million households had watched the series globally. What mattered wasn’t that it became a hit everywhere at once. It was that language stopped limiting where a story could go.

     

    A still from Narcos | Image Credit: IMDb

     

    From a platform’s perspective, the logic was simple. Original shows were expensive and risky. International titles, once translated well, traveled cheaply and kept viewers engaged longer. Subtitles and dubbing stopped being support functions and became central to growth strategy. Netflix executives later confirmed this shift in scale, noting that in 2021 alone the company subtitled roughly seven million minutes of content and dubbed more than five million minutes globally. Naturally, translation budgets rose, dubbing pipelines expanded, and release schedules began to assume global circulation from day one. 

    Viewer behavior increasingly reflected this shift. A YouGov survey found that 72 percent of viewers in India were open to watching foreign-language content, while industry reports tracked rapid growth in dubbed-content consumption across streaming platforms. Estimates from the early 2020s projected India’s dubbed-content market to grow by over 60 percent as platforms expanded multilingual distribution.

     

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    Influence now travels through subtitlers, dubbing artists, and release schedules rather than diplomats. 
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    That shift changed how creators worked. As translation became reliable, the incentive to mimic Anglo-American storytelling weakened. Writers and directors from the Global South no longer needed to flatten their work to feel ‘exportable’. A Korean legal drama like Extraordinary Attorney Woo leaned heavily into local workplace hierarchies, social rhythms, and cultural cues and still became one of Netflix’s most-watched non-English series globally in 2022. Nollywood followed a similar pattern. Nigerian films did not need shared history or linguistic familiarity to build viewers abroad once subtitles and dubbing lowered the barrier to entry. 

    Distinctiveness became an asset rather than a risk. Translation allowed stories to carry their own cultural density without being rewritten for an imagined global norm. 

    Audiences adapted just as quickly. Once platforms began releasing high-quality subtitled and dubbed versions simultaneously, viewers started exploring work from regions they had rarely encountered before. This shift became unmistakable between 2019 and 2021. Parasite crossed $250 million at the global box office after winning the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award, while Squid Game reached more than 1.65 billion hours viewed in its first 28 days on Netflix, becoming the platform’s most-watched series at the time. What began as curiosity turned into habit. Anime had already demonstrated parts of this shift years earlier, building massive international fandoms through subtitled distribution long before global streaming platforms consolidated.

    Viewers learned how to watch across languages. They learned to follow emotion, pacing, and genre conventions without full cultural familiarity. Demand followed, and with it, higher expectations for translation quality.

     

    A still from Crash Landing on You | Image Credit: IMDb

     

    Platforms responded by investing in dedicated dubbing hubs in Madrid, Seoul, Mumbai, and Los Angeles. Translation became less about literal accuracy and more about tone. Humor, timing, and emotional cadence mattered because they kept people watching. A poorly dubbed show now risked losing audiences who had learned what good translation sounded like.

    These dynamics altered the creative map. Spanish thrillers began influencing crime writing beyond Spain. Korean dramas reshaped expectations around emotional arcs and character development. Anime’s visual language informed animation choices far outside Japan. 

    This unsettled older assumptions about cultural power. English-language entertainment still commands large audiences, but it no longer defines global taste on its own. 

    Translation is not neutral and it is certainly not perfect. Context is sometimes smoothed over and meaning is often shifted. Decisions about what to explain and what to leave implicitly shape how cultures are perceived. These debates matter and remain unresolved. Even so, platforms continue to expand translation budgets because the returns are clear. Netflix’s own engagement reports show non-English-language titles now account for a substantial share of total viewing hours across regions, particularly outside North America. International titles retain subscribers, and their value compounds over time.

    What emerges is a form of soft power that operates without official choreography. South Korea’s surge in global cultural visibility after Squid Game did not come from a state-led export campaign, but from audiences absorbing language, social hierarchies, food, games, and emotional codes through a translated series they chose to watch. Influence now travels through subtitlers, dubbing artists, and release schedules rather than diplomats. 

    Translation reshaped global storytelling because it reshaped the incentives underneath it. Platforms needed scale, creators needed freedom, and audiences wanted variety that did not feel engineered. When those needs aligned, translation became infrastructure rather than accessory.

    The result is a global media environment where stories circulate with fewer gatekeepers and fewer assumptions about whose voice travels best. Soft power now grows less from dominance than from availability. It grew because translation widened access and because viewers learned, willingly, to listen across languages.

    Or, as Bong Joon-ho said when his subtitled film stood on the Golden Globes’ stage in 2020, “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”

    The industry, it seems, spent a decade turning that insight into infrastructure.

  • Mumbai: The Ultimate City of Reinvention

    Core Memory, Colaba

    1992, outside the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Colaba. I wore an oversized Fresh Prince of Bel-Air T-shirt, Nirvana blasting through a ruby-red Walkman. At the curb, a vada pav stall hissed and smoked.

    My mother, knowing my stomach too well, said don’t; my father’s nod said otherwise. I bit in anyway: chilli, potato, butter, newspaper ink bleeding into my fingertips. We walked the frontage of the Taj while they watched me take the city in.

    Bombay, because that’s the city of my earliest memories, was intoxicating even then, a place where five-star hotels and pavement stalls shared the same stretch of sea-facing road, where a kid like me could taste both in a single bite.

    That night, paying for my bravado in chilli and butter, I knew this was a core memory. Not a judgment on my mother’s caution, a reminder that Bombay rewards small rebellions, the kind that stay with you long after the moment has passed.

    That was my first lesson in Bombay: you could step between worlds here, and no one asked you to choose.

     

     

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    The world was arriving, but on Bombay’s terms.
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    Enhanced by AI

    When the World Walked In

    In 1991, India’s economic reforms swung the doors open, and the city became the stage where the new world walked in. I was still in school then, old enough to notice that the city’s soundtrack was changing, that the hum of my childhood was giving way to something sharper, more outward-looking, and unmistakably global.

    Satellite TV antennas began appearing across terraces, and by 1992, MTV India had arrived, beaming global pop culture into homes that had, until recently, been tuned to grainy state broadcasts. Advertising shifted almost overnight. Pepsi and Coca-Cola were suddenly everywhere, and international brands like Levi’s began appearing in markets like Colaba Causeway.

    MTV played grunge, hip-hop, and Bollywood remixes into the same living rooms. It felt new, slightly chaotic, and impossible to ignore. 

    Music videos changed how people dressed. Foreign soaps introduced new accents and ways of speaking. Shops began stocking brands that felt, at the time, unmistakably global. But the city didn’t copy. It adapted. What arrived foreign didn’t stay that way for long.

    Liberalization wasn’t an abstract policy. You could see it in everyday life.

    Bombay began to resemble a new India: cable wires looping across terraces, film posters layered over political slogans, a city mid-transition but entirely sure of its direction.

    The world was arriving, but on Bombay’s terms.

    Once you’ve watched the city take in the world like that, you start to notice how often people here are changing direction, in what they wear, what they watch, and what they begin to want for themselves.

     

    The City on Screen

    Photographs taken by the late Danish Siddiqui

    Cinema has always shaped how Mumbai sees itself. Long before I understood policy or economics, I understood something about the city through its films. Growing up, it came to me through what I watched and heard, songs, scenes, fragments that travelled far beyond the screen.

    In Mumbai, what appears in film doesn’t stay contained for long. It slips quickly into popular culture, into the music people play, into everyday references, and into the way a film lingers in the city long after it leaves theatres.

    What people watched didn’t stay on screen for long. It showed up in how people dressed, spoke, and carried themselves.

    In Mumbai, films sit close to everyday life. They influence taste, language, and ambition in ways that are easy to spot if you’re paying attention.

    New films arrive every week, part of the 1,600 to 2,000 films India produces each year, more than any other country. The industry is valued at nearly ₹200 billion, or $2.4 billion, and sells more than 2.5 billion cinema tickets annually, far surpassing Hollywood. But its influence goes beyond box office numbers.

    From Leicester Square to Jackson Heights, the Indian diaspora has carried Bombay’s cinema into living rooms and local theatres across the world. A Mumbai film screens in Toronto, a wedding sequence is remixed in Nairobi, a premiere draws queues in Dubai. Over time, these stories travel back, shaped by the audiences who watched them.

    Take Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Still playing at Maratha Mandir decades later, it became more than a blockbuster. It became a habit. Generations kept returning, a sign that in a city defined by change, the theatre could offer something familiar.

    You could see the influence in small ways. A song picked up quickly. A style repeated across neighborhoods. A line from a film turning up in everyday conversation.

    Mumbai and its cinema have grown alongside each other. One reflects the city as it is. The other quietly shapes what it becomes.

     

     

     

    Imagination for Sale

    By the 1980s and 1990s, South Bombay’s agencies were working with global clients while speaking directly to Indian audiences. Campaigns moved easily between Hindi, Marathi, and Hinglish, and began shaping what people noticed, wanted, and recognized.

    Television entered almost every living room, bringing soap operas, music videos, and commercials into daily routine. What people watched at night showed up the next day in conversation, in clothing, and in what shops chose to stock. Indian films and television also travelled abroad, reaching Indian communities overseas and extending Bombay’s cultural reach.

    Advertising didn’t create ambition here. It gave the city a new language, one people could see and respond to.

    Mumbai’s energy came from its people: Koli fisherfolk, Gujarati traders, Parsi entrepreneurs, Maharashtrian merchants and mill workers, and waves of North and South Indian immigrants. Over time, business and culture grew together until it was hard to separate one from the other.

     

    “
    From Leicester Square to Jackson Heights, the Indian diaspora has carried Bombay’s cinema into living rooms and local theatres across the world.
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    The Many Lives of Mumbai

    Neighborhoods carry their own signals. In a members’ club in a northern suburb, film directors, screenwriters, and lyricists sit around in thick black Karan Johar–style glasses, part fashion, part shorthand for the world they belong to. In the same place, by day, a young woman works the front desk, managing members and conversations. By night, she heads to dance rehearsals, preparing for her stage debut in December.

    Across town in Kala Ghoda, Yazdani Bakery fills up each morning with bun maska and chai. The tables are worn, the pace is unhurried, and the same routines play out day after day. Some parts of the city change quickly. Others stay exactly as they are.

     

     

     

     

    Mumbai Dreaming

    What draws people to Mumbai is the feeling that you can begin again, even if you don’t fully know how.

    My flatmate trained as a behavioural economist in London, working with data sets and regression models. A few months ago, she was in Kashmir, between Dal Lake and Gulmarg, filming her first feature. That decision opened up a new way of living for her, and along the way, it set an entire chain of work in motion, from lyricists and composers to choreographers, managers, and full crews.

    And she isn’t alone. A former banker opens a restaurant. A copywriter starts a fashion label. A family-business heir picks up a camera and stays with it. People here allow themselves to try something else, and it rarely needs explaining.

    Cinema has always captured this about the city. Wake Up Sid got it right in its monsoons, its late nights, and the feeling of figuring things out as you go. It showed a version of Bombay that feels familiar if you’ve spent enough time here.

    The Coastal Road has begun to redraw parts of the city, changing how it moves and connects. Like everything before it, the city absorbs the change and keeps moving.

    Some things make sense only much later. You spend years understanding what you first felt instinctively. For me, that feeling began in Bombay, with that first bite. I’ve come back to the city because something in me was always drawn here, something I recognized long before I could explain it. Being here now, it feels less like a return and more like picking up a thread I never really left.

    Epilogue

    For Ipsitaa, Vishal, and Sayali, for their persistence, and for reminding us what this city makes possible.

  • The Quiet Revival of Indian Folk Art

    Warli figures appear in museum gift shops in Europe, on walls at international design fairs, and in branding campaigns meant to signal ‘authenticity’ to a global audience. Madhubani motifs surface in fashion collaborations abroad, stripped of text and context, translated into mere pattern. Pattachitra turns up in curated exhibitions on ‘traditional art’, far from the communities that practise it.

    Indian folk art has always traveled. What’s different now is the scale, the polish, and the prestige of the spaces it moves through. This recent resurgence has brought visibility, funding, and institutional attention to the art form. But the artists who created them are far less visible.

    Privileged people often describe what’s unfolding as a revival. In practice, it looks more like a redistribution of cultural value where visibility increases and control diminishes. Folk art enters international circuits as a premium aesthetic, while the people who have sustained it over generations remain largely absent from the spaces that now define its worth. 

    This imbalance becomes most visible outside India.

    From 2026 to 2028, a major collaboration between the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) and the Museum of Sacred Art (MOSA) in Belgium will bring Indian folk and tribal art to Europe through at least five exhibitions a year across seven countries, including Germany, France, Italy, and Hungary. Drawn from MOSA’s collection of over 1,500 works, the initiative is framed as a celebration of ‘authentic’ traditions. It reflects a growing appetite among European institutions for Indian folk art, positioned as cultural heritage with global relevance.

     

    An art stall display with Madhubani paintings | Image Credit: Nishant Aneja on Pexels

     

    Similar initiatives are unfolding elsewhere. In London, the Runjeet Singh Gallery is exhibiting a collection of Mithila paintings acquired directly from artists in the 1970s as part of Asian Art in London. Online, international folk art exhibitions organised by foundations working with Madhubani and tribal artists have begun reaching global audiences. Warli artists such as Mayur and Tushar Vayeda have been featured in exhibitions across Europe, Japan, and Australia.

    The work is travelling widely. The terms under which it travels are less clear.

    In global exhibitions and design showcases, Indian folk traditions are often framed through curatorial language that emphasises heritage, symbolism, and timelessness. The art is presented as collective and ancient rather than authored and contemporary. That framing makes the work legible to international audiences, but it also erases the conditions under which artists might assert rights, negotiate credit, or influence how their work is reproduced.

    Warli art offers a clear example. Developed by the Warli Adivasi community in Maharashtra, its visual language of stick figures, rituals, and everyday life has become a global shorthand for ‘indigenous India’. Designers and institutions often collaborate with Indian studios or illustrators to reinterpret the style for international markets. The original artists are rarely part of those transactions.

    When artists are included, it is often through NGOs or intermediaries who control access, pricing, and timelines. While the work moves, the credit often does not.

     

    “
    Folk art is no longer confined to tourist markets or state-sponsored exhibitions. It is being absorbed into the global premium economy, where cultural difference functions as distinction.
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    The same pattern repeats with Madhubani. Once painted on walls and floors in Mithila using natural pigments, the form is now reproduced across textiles, stationery, and décor for export markets. Attribution is frequently reduced to ‘inspired by’, a phrase that dissolves responsibility. Inspiration carries no obligation to compensate, credit, or consult.

    Artists are not unaware of this imbalance. “It’s not that people don’t want to work with us,” one Mithila painter told The Moment. “They just want us cheap. And quiet.”

    This is not a uniquely Indian story. First Nations Australian dot paintings circulate widely through international galleries and museum shops, even as the artists continue to contest how their work is licensed and reproduced. West African textile traditions like adire are globally popular as ‘tie-dye’, their origins flattened into trend. In the United States, Indigenous American motifs have long been absorbed into fashion and homeware under the banner of ‘Southwestern’ design, often without collaboration or consent.

    Across contexts, the pattern is familiar, communal art forms move easily through global markets, while the communities that sustain them remain peripheral to the value created.

    What makes the current moment distinct is the status of the platforms involved. Folk art is no longer confined to tourist markets or state-sponsored exhibitions. It is being absorbed into the global premium economy, where cultural difference functions as distinction. 

     

    An example of a Pichwai painting | Image Credit: oskar holm on Unsplash

     

    There are exceptions. Some organizations insist on naming artists, negotiating fair compensation, and sustaining long-term relationships rather than one-off commissions. Groups like Dastkar and artist-led collectives have pushed back against extractive models, while newer platforms are experimenting with licensing, profit-sharing, and direct representation. But these remain marginal within a system that continues to reward speed, scalability, and aesthetic flexibility over accountability.

    The problem is not the global visibility of Indian folk art. The problem is that the structures governing its circulation were never designed to include artists as agents.

    What we are calling a revival, then, is uneven by design. The forms travel, the value accrues, but the artists remain asked to perform without power. Until that imbalance is taken seriously, Indian folk art will continue to be admired abroad while its makers remain peripheral to its success.

    Folk art is moving faster than the systems meant to protect the people who make it. That gap, more than the revival itself, is perhaps the story of this moment.

  • When AI Starts Speaking in Vernacular

     Imagine a woman in a government hospital in Bhopal, or Chennai, or Patna, trying to access a medical scheme she is entitled to. The online medical portal and the information about the scheme both exist, but the interface assumes a formal, stylized version of Hindi she does not speak, or Tamil in a register that belongs to textbooks rather than the street she lives on. The system is technically functional, but for her, it is a wall. 

    This is not a story about access to technology. It is a story about whether technology, once accessed, understands you at all.

    Language, always a significant feature of AI, becomes crucial the moment it moves into healthcare, education, and public services. At that point, it helps to accelerate communication between two speakers of different languages. And yet, like the woman in Bhopal (or Chennai, or Patna), that interface does not really speak their language.

    This happens because AI is trained only on one slice of society’s communications – from textbooks to television, all of it written, not verbal. A model trained on dictionaries can translate the words, but a model trained on lived language and unscripted human experience understands what the words actually signify — useful when translating metaphors, for example. 

    At one level then, this is about linguistic irregularities. But the implications are far wider —  it becomes the means by which people are either recognized by the state or invisible to it. That gap, between words and meaning, between spoken and written language, is where millions of people fall through. It is the predictable outcome of building at speed, at scale, with the data that already exists in large quantities, which is to say the data produced by populations that were already online, in languages that were already dominant. That dominant language is of course, English. Any language model adapted from English carries its assumptions into every language database, its grammatical logic, its ways of organizing meaning, its blind spots.

     

    A model trained on lived languages can understand context | Image Credit: Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

     

    In India, the scale of the problem is especially enormous. With 22 official languages, and hundreds of dialects, linguistic exclusion is not a liminal problem; it is the default condition of most digital systems. The government’s Bhashini program, the National Language Translation Mission launched in 2022, is an attempt to change that. The program builds open datasets and translation tools that work directly with Indian languages rather than routing everything through English first. 

    Similarly, Sarvam AI, a Bengaluru-based company founded in 2023, AI4Bharat (built by IIT Chennai’s Research Lab) and BharatGen are building large language models trained from the ground up on Indian data, in Indian languages. 

    Karya pays rural Indian workers, many of them women in communities with limited economic opportunity, to generate and annotate language data in over fifty Indian languages. Workers own their data and receive royalties from its use. The datasets they build are the raw material from which models that understand their languages will eventually be trained.

    What Sarvam, Karya and Bhashini are building is not just a technical correction. It is an argument about whose starting point counts, and at what scale that argument matters. India has more people living outside English and standard Hindi than most countries have people. If the systems being built now the technology doesdo not account for that, they it will not fail quietly; they it will fail at population scale, in hospitals and classrooms and government offices, for decades.

    The same solutions are being looked at elsewhere, in different countries and different languages.

    In Latin America, LatamGPT, led by Chile’s National Centre for Artificial Intelligence, with support from governments, universities, and civil organizations across 15 countries, is building a model trained on Latin American data and contexts. The goal is to build systems that understand how language is spoken across a region where Spanish varies sharply by country and class, and where millions speak Indigenous languages, like Guaraní in Paraguay, Nahuatl in Mexico, Mapudungun among Mapuche communities in Chile and Argentina. 

     

    “
    When machines begin to understand how people actually speak, they don’t just talk differently. They also listen differently.
    ”

     

    In Africa, Masakhane, whose name means “we build together” in isiZulu, is a grassroots research community working to build open, community-owned datasets for African languages, driven by the principle that Africans should own the data that represents them.

    Much of the world’s linguistic richness is not archived neatly online. It exists in oral histories, street theatre, voice notes, road signs, and the particular way a sentence gets finished in a specific neighborhood of a specific city. Turning that into training data is slow and complicated, raising questions of consent and ownership that scraping the public internet does not. Models such as Masakhane and Karya treat those questions as central rather than incidental, which is why their work is slower and messier than the dominant model, and more accountable to the people whose language it represents.

    When machines learn to understand how people actually speak, they do not just talk differently; they also listen differently. A healthcare system (such as the Microsoft-powered ASHABot) that understands colloquial Marathi can hear what a patient is actually describing. An education platform that works in Bhojpuri or Gondi can reach children in the language they think in. A government portal that speaks the way people speak can be used by the woman in the office in Bhopal, who is entitled to what it offers and should not have to translate herself to claim it. 

    The question of which languages machines learn to understand is also the question of which people the future is being built for. That is not a technical question. 

  • Where Did All Our Third Places Go?

    Consider Shivaji Park. Every evening, elderly men walked its perimeter. Teenagers practised cricket with taped tennis balls. Women sat on the grass and talked. No tickets. No programming. No expectation that anyone needed to be doing something productive.

    Similar scenes existed elsewhere. In New York, urban activist Jane Jacobs wrote about Washington Square Park in the 1950s and 60s as a place people passed through, paused in, argued in, lingered in. In Seoul, neighbourhood parks and local jjimjilbangs functioned as everyday social infrastructure well before the city’s current emphasis on speed, efficiency, and twenty four-hour productivity. These spaces were not neutral or perfect, but they shared a defining feature: anyone could be there without explanation.

    That has become increasingly rare.

     

    Image Credit: Sami TÜRK on Pexels

     

    In 1989, American sociologist Ray Oldenburg gave these environments a name in The Great Good Place. He called them ‘third places’: informal, low-cost spaces outside home and work where people could gather without obligation. Oldenburg’s argument was not sentimental. What made third places work was not charm or design, but accessibility. They encouraged idleness. They allowed regulars without requiring paid memberships. They made room for people whose only reason for showing up was time.

    What has changed since then is not simply taste. It is structure.

    Most third places did not disappear overnight. They were slowly made inhospitable. In Mumbai, Irani cafés like Café Military and Café Ideal once functioned as all-day linger spaces, especially for people who had nowhere else to go between shifts or errands. Rising rents, shrinking margins, and redevelopment pressures have since pushed cafés toward faster turnover. Sitting too long now carries an implicit cost.

    In New York, public seating has been systematically reduced or redesigned. Benches are removed, divided, or made deliberately uncomfortable. Parks that once absorbed unstructured social life are increasingly surveilled, policed, or programmed. The goal is not gathering, but control. Space that does not circulate people efficiently or generate revenue is treated as a problem to be managed.

    This is not accidental. Cities over the last three decades have been redesigned around transit, productivity, and risk mitigation. Loitering becomes a security concern. Lingering becomes inefficiency. Free time, once an ordinary and necessary part of life, starts to read as indulgence.

     

    “
    So the question is not whether third places mattered. They did. The harder question is why we have become so comfortable designing cities that no longer tolerate them.
    ”

     

    The language follows the logic. ‘Third place’ now appears in real estate decks and brand strategy documents, used to describe co-working cafés, members’ clubs, or lifestyle lounges. These spaces promise community, but only through access. You can belong, but briefly. You can stay, but not for free. Presence is permitted only when it can be justified, monetized, or optimized.

    Functionally, this changes how social life feels.

    When cafés double as offices, sitting without a laptop becomes suspect. When libraries close or shrink, quiet public refuge disappears. When promenades are designed as backdrops for events and content, stillness feels out of place. The value of doing nothing together erodes, replaced by the expectation that time in public must produce something: work, networking, fitness.

    The pandemic accelerated this shift, but it did not invent it. Lockdowns disrupted social reflexes, and the return to public life came with new rules. Interaction felt safer when it was structured: a class, a workshop, a ticketed gathering. 

    What gets lost in this transition is difficult to measure, which is why it is easy to dismiss. It is not just space, but familiarity. The quiet recognition of seeing the same strangers every week. The trust that forms without conversation. These are social capacities that emerge slowly, and only in places where people are allowed to exist without performing usefulness.

     

    Image Credit: CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

     

    People sense this loss, even if they do not name it. That is why new, improvised versions keep appearing. Community fridges on street corners. Zine fairs in half-empty malls. Chai circles in parking lots. Skate crews occupying forgotten patches of city. These are not nostalgic recreations. They are workarounds, evidence that the desire for unstructured public life persists even as the conditions that once supported it are withdrawn.

    So the question is not whether third places mattered. They did. The harder question is why we have become so comfortable designing cities that no longer tolerate them.

    Not everything needs to be activated. Not every gathering needs a theme. Sometimes what is missing is not innovation, but permission: a place where you can sit, take up space, and not be asked what you are doing there.

  • The Cool Roof Revolution: How Cities Are Rediscovering Indigenous Methods to Combat Heat

    Step outside in most cities today and you’ll feel it immediately. The kind of heat that clings to walls, radiates from pavements, and turns your own home into an oven by noon. An urban summer is no longer just inconvenient, for most citizens it is unbearable. In many places, it’s becoming a structural problem, one that modern architecture and infrastructure were never designed to handle.

    As temperatures rise, cities have been looking for solutions. Air conditioning helps, but only if you can afford it, power it, and keep the grid from collapsing. So urban planners, architects and governments are being forced to ask a bigger question — what if the problem isn’t that we lack technology, but that we forgot how to build for heat in the first place?

    That question has led many of them back to the roof.

     

    A view of buildings in Yazd, Iran | Image Credit: Dad hotel on Unsplash

     

    In New York City, more than a million square feet of rooftops have been coated with reflective paint in recent years. The idea is simple. Lighter surfaces absorb less heat, which keeps buildings cooler and reduces the need for energy-intensive air conditioning. For residents without reliable cooling, that difference can be the line between discomfort and danger.

    But what’s most striking is how old this idea is.

    Long before ‘cool roofs’ entered climate policy documents, communities living with extreme heat had already figured out how to manage it. In parts of Rajasthan, lime-coated roofs reflected sunlight, keeping homes habitable through brutal summers. Across the Mediterranean, whitewashed buildings served the same function. These choices were practical responses to climate; only much later did we start viewing them as stylistic ones. Mud-brick construction in countries like Yemen and Mali insulates against extreme temperatures. Mashrabiya screens in Cairo filter sunlight while allowing ventilation. Stilted homes in parts of Southeast Asia lift living spaces above heat-trapping ground. None of these were designed with climate models in mind. They emerged from lived experience.

    This was the kind of design knowledge that was sidelined for decades. Contemporary construction favored speed, uniform materials, glass frontage, and darker surfaces that tended to trap heat. Cooling became something external machinery was expected to solve.

    Now, as those machines strain under rising temperatures, the older community logic is resurfacing. 

    Only recently has modern research begun to catch up. Studies now show that widespread use of reflective materials can lower ambient urban temperatures by up to two degrees Celsius, reduce cooling loads, and lessen health risks during heatwaves. What was once treated as informal knowledge is being validated in technical terms.

    In Tamil Nadu, state-led cool roof programmes have moved beyond small pilots. Hundreds of government schools have been retrofitted with heat-reflective coatings, not as an experiment, but as policy. In earlier pilots in Chennai and Perumbakkam, indoor temperatures dropped by as much as 3 to 8 degrees Celsius. Classrooms became bearable again, without additional electricity demand.

    In Ahmedabad, experimental cool roof projects in informal settlements have painted tin roofs with reflective coatings. The results are modest but meaningful, indoor temperatures fall, residents sleep better, and electricity use drops. No futuristic materials. No massive infrastructure overhaul.

    Just paint, applied with intent.

     

    “
    Studies now show that widespread use of reflective materials can lower ambient urban temperatures by up to two degrees Celsius, reduce cooling loads, and lessen health risks during heatwaves. What was once treated as informal knowledge is being validated in technical terms.
    ”

     

    The significance of this isn’t just technical. It marks a shift in which solutions are being valued. Instead of chasing expensive, high-tech fixes, governments are beginning to recognise that low-cost, passive interventions can make a measurable difference at scale.

    These old-school climate solutions are now gaining traction in some countries. In Tokyo, the resurfacing of uchimizu, sprinkling water on streets during peak heat, reflects a similar impulse to cool cities. In Mexico City, community-led lime washing programmes reduced heat absorption in dense neighbourhoods. In parts of the American Southwest, urban design guidelines are starting to acknowledge principles long embedded in Indigenous desert architecture including shade, reflectivity, and airflow matter.

    These approaches share a common trait. They work with the climate rather than against it.

     

     

    Cool roofs are also a feature of architecture in Santorini, Greece | Image Credit: iSAW Company on Unsplash

     

    There is an uncomfortable irony here. Many of these methods come from regions that were historically dismissed as ‘backward’ or ‘underdeveloped’. Their building practices were ignored in favour of globalized design norms, often from countries with colder climates, that assumed energy would always be cheap and plentiful.

    As that assumption collapses, cities are being forced to reconsider.

    These are not new ideas. They are responses shaped by necessity, refined over generations, and set aside too quickly. The solutions have been here all along. What’s changing is how we are looking at them.

  • 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, is more than just a sporting phenomenon. Over time, it’s become 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.

     

    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 Body Is the Score

    It’s 7am and the gym is full. The sound of dumbbells clanking against racks and the whir of treadmills fill the lavender-diffuser-scented air. This place, one would imagine, would be riddled with athletes this early in the morning. But it’s not. It’s full of consultants, founders, and analysts lifting in silence before work. Later, these same people will appear in office corridors, on LinkedIn profile photos, and in business coverage, where fitness is increasingly framed as a marker of a way of life.

    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.

     

    Image credit: mileycyrus/Instagram

     

    People have always read bodies through the conditions around them. In societies where food was unreliable and physical labor constant, softness signals access to rest and resources rather than excess. So, in old portraits, bigger bodies lounging signaled social class and hierarchy. 

    In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, physical fitness became tied to productivity, particularly in industrial economies and nationalist projects that linked strong bodies to efficiency, readiness, and strength. With time, consumption became easier and restraint more visible, so thinner frames came to be associated with self-control and moral discipline. Think about it, when you watch an old film, or even most cinema from the 90s, how many times did you see washboard abs? The way we perceive wellness and bodies is closely tied to economies and access. 

    That ideal has since shifted. The dominant language is no longer thinness, but 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, particularly in environments like knowledge work where output is harder to measure and visible discipline becomes a proxy for reliability, a shift reinforced by the expansion of the fitness and wellness industry and the evolution of body ideals documented in historical timelines.

     

    “
    Fitness is increasingly framed as seriousness rather than hobby, discussed less as something you do and more as a way of structuring adult life.
    ”

     

    In 2026, fitness globally reads less as something personal and more as something public. Maintaining it depends on having time that can be rearranged and money that can be spent regularly. Strength training, supplements, recovery routines, wearables, and gym access all signal the same thing. It indicates that someone can afford to organize their life in this way. The body becomes a commodity.  

    This shift has accelerated alongside the expansion of digital work and social media. As professional identity becomes harder to measure through output alone, visible signals, like the body, become proxies for discipline, consistency, and control. A fit body 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 to gyms, fitness apps, coaching programs, and recurring purchases like supplements and equipment. Gyms, classes, supplements, training plans, and tracking tools all rely on the assumption that improvement is ongoing and that the work is never finished. There is always another metric to improve, another phase to begin, another version of the body to work toward. Goals move just enough to remain achievable, but never final. So, the incompleteness is not a failure of the system, it is what keeps people engaged. 

     

     

    This logic shows up in how these systems are designed. Progress is tracked, but never completed. 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, often without being acknowledged. Research on attractiveness bias has repeatedly shown that people perceived as fitter or more conventionally attractive are often assumed to be more competent, disciplined, and reliable, even in professional settings where those qualities have not actually been demonstrated. A body that signals control is read as reliability. A body that does not, can be read as risk. Stigma introduces that risk, and risk encourages continued spending.

    The costs show up elsewhere. Healthcare systems in the US 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, and 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 be corrected or optimized. Rarely is it treated as an opportunity that prompts reflection on where these feelings are coming from.

     

    “
    Fitness is increasingly framed as seriousness rather than hobby, discussed less as something you do and more as a way of structuring adult life.
    ”

     

    None of this requires fitness itself to be harmful. Physical training offers strength, health, and community. What has changed is how thoroughly these practices have been absorbed into economic logic and repurposed as measures of worth. 

    Economics helps here because it helps this behavior 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.

    This does not mean that only those with resources have strong or capable bodies. Manual laborers often have greater physical endurance and strength. What is being rewarded here is not strength itself, but a particular kind of managed, aestheticised fitness that signals control within a certain class context.

    Seen this way, fitness is less a measure of health than a language of value. It translates time, money, and control into something instantly visible and often unmissable. The question is not whether bodies should be cared for, but why this particular form of care has become so legible, and so rewarded. And once we know that better, it’s easy to see why this particular signal has become so useful now