cms.the-moment.io

Blog

  • The Age of the Pet Parent

    A pet-friendly resort advertising gourmet canine menus. A bakery preparing breed-specific birthday cakes. A young couple planning their weekend around daycare timings for their cat.

    Twenty years ago, these scenes would have seemed extraordinary in India. Today, they are entirely commonplace.

    India’s pet-care market has more than doubled in value since 2019, touching roughly $3.6 billion in 2024. But the numbers only reveal one part of the story. Pets are no longer dismissed as mere animals — they are increasingly treated as family members and, in many households, surrogate children.

    This is an enormous turn of events for a country in which pets played a very limited role. Dogs were seen as guardians of the gate, cats were useful as rat catchers, and that was that.

    Contemporary urban India could not look more different. The country’s pet population has grown from around 26 million animals in 2019 to more than 32 million in 2024. Pet ownership remains low compared with Western markets, but its character has changed dramatically: pets now travel with their family, are stars of family photographs, are often the family password (as the popular Instagram meme goes), eat special diets, and curl up in bed beside their family members every night. 

    Much of this is linked to broader demographic change — later marriages, fewer or no children as part of a DINK (dual income no kids) household and perhaps higher salaries. Pets often fill emotional roles once held by traditional family structures. This has given rise to the DINKWAD household (double income, no kids, with a dog) and a new kind of consumer: financially secure, time-poor, and deeply invested in their pet’s wellbeing.

    We know that the foundations of India’s pet boom predate Covid-19, but the pandemic accelerated it sharply. Lockdowns confined millions to their homes, cut off from social networks and navigating prolonged uncertainty. Companion animals offered structure and emotional support through the disruption, and adoption rates rose sharply across urban India, often turning casual ownership into familial bonds.

    As lockdowns ended, those behaviors largely continued — translating into higher spending on nutrition, healthcare, travel and lifestyle services. What began as a response to an extraordinary moment became a lasting shift in consumer behavior.

     

    “
    Pet food remains the largest category, but basic kibble is giving way to premium nutrition, specialized diets and functional wellness products, as owners scrutinize ingredient lists and health outcomes as much as they do for their own diets.
    ”

     

    Spending patterns show the transformation most clearly. Pet food remains the largest category, with basic kibble giving way to premium nutrition, specialized diets and functional wellness products, as owners scrutinize ingredient lists and health outcomes as much as they do for their own diets. 

    But the shift extends well beyond food. Grooming, once an occasional luxury, is becoming routine, with pet spas spreading across major cities. As a result, some dogs are better groomed than their humans! Preventive healthcare is expanding, and pet insurance — still nascent in India — is attracting interest as vet costs rise. Even celebrations have become commercial, with pet bakeries selling birthday cakes and festivals catering exclusively to companion animals. 

    India’s pet industry has moved through distinct phases: first products (food, accessories, retail), then digital commerce, which broadened access and brought pet care into the mainstream.

     

    www.pexels.com

     

    A third phase is now emerging, focused less on what owners buy and more on how they care for their pets. Grooming, daycare, boarding, training and veterinary services are among the fastest-growing segments, reflecting a new reality: owners are willing to spend, but constrained by time. The challenge is no longer finding food or toys — it’s finding trusted caregivers. The industry’s centre of gravity is shifting from one-off transactions toward ongoing relationships built on trust.

    Perhaps the strongest validation comes from outside the pet industry itself. Some of India’s largest consumer companies have entered the category in recent years. FMCG groups are investing in pet nutrition, global corporations expanding via acquisitions, and domestic conglomerates launching dedicated pet-care brands. Major players in the pet industry are ramping up their efforts to enter the space. Nestlé purchased the Indian pet-food company Purina Petcare. Meanwhile, Emami, an Indian consumer-goods conglomerate, has introduced Ayurvedic pet medicines. According to market-research firm Euromonitor International, India’s pet-food sector currently holds a value of $480 million and is projected to expand to $1.2 billion by 2025. 

    Pets are now regularly covered by national newspapers, television and digital publications, with pet-focused startups increasingly appearing on business competition shows, reaching audiences well beyond traditional pet-owner circles. Advertising tells a similar story: brands with no connection to the pet industry — telecom companies, banks, e-commerce platforms — now feature pets regularly, because they evoke trust, warmth and family. 

    Urban infrastructure is beginning to catch up with changing attitudes. Pet-friendly cafés, resorts and hotels are increasingly common, and dedicated pet events and adoption fairs now draw large crowds. Workplaces are adapting too — several companies have introduced pet-friendly policies, including bereavement leave for employees mourning the loss of an animal companion, a perk that would once have seemed entirely eccentric. 

    The digital economy has amplified all of this. Pet accounts are a thriving category on Instagram and YouTube, often out-engaging traditional influencers, with thousands of Indian pet creators documenting daily routines, training journeys and travel. Multiple travel accounts now point the way to pet-friendly restaurants and hotels (a swelling number).

     

    “
    Pet accounts are a thriving category on Instagram and YouTube, often out-engaging traditional influencers, with thousands of Indian pet creators documenting daily routines, training journeys and travel — a mirror of changing lifestyles and a valuable channel for brands.
    ”

     

    The growth story isn’t without complications. India remains home to one of the world’s largest populations of free-roaming indie dogs, and the contrast between premium pet spas and underfunded animal welfare systems raises real questions about inequality and responsibility. 

    Pet ownership itself is concentrated in urban, affluent households, with access to quality healthcare and services still uneven across the country. Infrastructure lags too, and despite rising adoption rates, pedigree breeds are still far higher in demand. 

     

    www.pexels.com/

     

    The easiest way to understand India’s pet-care industry is through market forecasts — a $3.6 billion sector that could double again within a few years. But the more significant story lies beyond the numbers.

    Pet care is not merely a larger consumer market, but a new cultural reality — one in which companion animals are treated not as possessions, but as members of the household. And as that idea spreads, the future of India’s pet industry will be shaped less by products on shelves than by the changing relationships between people and the animals they choose to bring into their lives.

  • Returning to Our Roots

    Away from the bedlam of Mumbai’s trafficked streets lies a tiny pocket of peace. This is the Edenic Aarey Forest, buffer to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, and home to a variety of wildlife and a rich mosaic of independent indigenous groups. These ethnic minorities are amongst Mumbai’s first residents; the city grew itself around them. But up until now, they have largely been written out of the annals of the city’s history.

    Some heritage groups are working to change that. GoHalluHallu (the name translates to ‘walk softly’, in Marathi) is handing all the power back to the city’s tribal residents — fossicking through the forest for foraged produce with Vanitatai, a forest resident; learning the ways of traditional Warli art with Dinesh.

    Meanwhile, within the teal forests of Uttarakhand, Village Ways, a social initiative, have empowered the local people of the land to set up their own homestays and trekking operations.

    But let’s shift the narrative further afield.

    Steam rises from a geothermal valley in Rotorua just after sunrise. The air smells faintly of minerals. A Māori guide stands at the edge of a pool that has been bubbling for longer than any recorded history. He doesn’t point to the steam or recount a legend on demand. He begins with something simpler — the name of the valley, the river it connects to, the lineage it carries, the responsibility it asks of people who walk through it. Before you realise it, the landscape is no longer scenery. It is a teacher.

    What is happening in all these places is slow but inevitable. Around the world, Indigenous communities are beginning to decide how visitors encounter their land, their stories, and their knowledge. Travel used to mediate those things through brochures, guidebooks, and outsiders’ interpretations. Now, in more places each year, communities are setting the terms themselves. 

     

    www.pexels.com

     

    Over the past decade, Indigenous-led tourism has gained ground in places as varied as the Arctic, Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, the Amazon, and communities across Asia and the Pacific. While each story is shaped by its own history, culture, and landscape, they are all twined together by a common thread: local communities are taking the lead in deciding how their homelands, traditions, and knowledge are presented to visitors.

    Consider the Sámi in northern Scandinavia. Their tours are often small by design. A herder might explain how reindeer behaviour signals seasonal change or how migration routes have shifted with warming temperatures. The focus is on reading the land, not entertaining visitors. In Canada, some First Nations groups, such as the Takaya Group, run canoe journeys and cultural stays that fund language revitalization or community programs. 

    In the Amazon, certain river routes are now managed by the tribes who have always lived along them. Visitors learn why parts of the forest must stay untouched, or why certain trees matter more for the long-term health of the ecosystem than they do for photography.

     

    “
    Mainstream tourism often moves quickly. It repeats the same script from Bali to Barcelona: highlights, photo points, curated authenticity
    ”

     

    Three forces conspired to bring this about. The first was climatic: as the climate crisis looms larger, knowledge accumulated over centuries of close observation has acquired a new market value, one that models and satellites cannot easily replicate. The second was a shift in what travelers actually want. Global tourism has produced a strong backlash: visitors are hungry for something that feels, however loosely defined, ‘authentic’. The third owed less to consumer taste than to law and politics. Decades of litigation, treaty negotiation and activism have handed many Indigenous communities greater control over their own land and the stories told about it. Tourism became one of the few spaces where these threads could meet. Not as an extraction, but as an exchange.

    Indigenous-led travel asks visitors to slow down. It asks them to learn something about how a place thinks. It shifts the focus from “what can I see here?” to “what responsibilities does this landscape carry, and how did people learn them over centuries?”

    This isn’t a romantic return to tradition. It is a different way of being a guest. When a Sámi guide explains weather patterns or a Māori guide traces whakapapa through a valley, the knowledge is not being performed. It is being offered with context and care. The traveller becomes part of a conversation rather than a spectator.

     

    unsplash.com

     

    Mainstream tourism often moves quickly. It repeats the same script from Bali to Barcelona: highlights, photo points, curated authenticity. Even sustainability programs frequently centre convenience for visitors.

    Indigenous-led travel moves differently. It listens first. It builds around consent, not access. It emphasises land over itinerary. And because communities decide what can be shared and what stays within, the boundary between public and sacred remains intact.

     

    “
    In the last decade, Indigenous-led travel has become more visible across regions that rarely appear in the same story: the Arctic, Aotearoa New Zealand, parts of Canada, the Amazon, and communities across Asia and the Pacific.
    ”

     

    In Canada, the federal government has established an Indigenous Tourism Destination Fund, arguing that Indigenous tourism advances both economic development and reconciliation. Recent investments have focused on Indigenous-owned visitor experiences and community-led tourism enterprises 

    The numbers add up too. The New Zealand Government recently reported that Māori tourism businesses contributed NZ$1.2 billion to the economy in 2023, up from NZ$975 million in 2018. There were 3,595 Māori tourism businesses, employing more than 15,000 people.

    The rise of Indigenous-led travel is part of a larger rebalancing in global culture. The world is beginning to understand that land is not neutral. It holds memory, responsibility, and history. And the people best positioned to interpret it are the communities that have never forgotten these things.

    Travel is changing because travelers are changing. Many want context, not just access. Continuity, not just novelty. Encounters that feel grounded in care rather than consumption. Indigenous communities are offering that, but on their own terms.

    As climate change accelerates and questions of belonging, identity, and land rights become more urgent, this form of travel may become one of the clearest ways the world learns from Indigenous knowledge rather than merely visiting it. The future of travel may not be defined by new destinations, but by who we allow to guide us through the places we think we already know.

    If tourism is a global conversation, this is the moment the microphone shifts.

  • How Soft Games Became a New Form of Emotional Ritual

    At first glance, it looks simple: you’re fishing off a quiet dock, decorating a tiny cottage, planting pumpkins that will bloom tomorrow. There’s no timer ticking, no leaderboard to climb. Yet millions of people log into worlds like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, and Cozy Grove every single day.

    What began as a niche pastime has quietly become one of gaming’s biggest cultural shifts. The genre now has a name — cozy gaming, and a following that cuts across age and gender. In one informal survey of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, out of 700 players, 92% of them said they played every day, describing it as a small ritual that helped give their days shape when everything else felt uncertain. Across the U.S., the gender balance in gaming is now nearly even with 46% of players being women. Yet the public perception of gaming still skews male, largely because mobile and cozy games, where women form a quiet majority have rarely been recognized as their own thriving subculture.

    Cozy games sit at that intersection: calm, creative, and quietly universal, attracting players who aren’t chasing victory but a soothing sense of rhythm. Unlike traditional titles built around progress and performance, these games are built around care. You fish, you decorate, you cook, you water plants. You tend to small digital worlds that grow on their own time. 

     

    Animal Crossing is amongst the most popular cozy games today

     

    That manageable calm has made cozy gaming more than just entertainment. It’s become an emotional ritual for a generation navigating burnout, climate dread, and economic uncertainty. An example? That elusive millennial dream, running your own bookshop, can finally be achieved without all the heartbreak of actual bookkeeping. “Stock your tiny bookshop with different books and items, set up shop in scenic locations, and run your cosy second-hand bookshop while getting to know the locals,” explains the website for Tiny Bookshop. How to resist?

    Besides, the pandemic rocketed rents for a swathe of younger people, nudging them to move in with their families; is it any wonder that they are turning to virtual homes, setting them up exactly as they wish? In Homescapes, for instance, you play as Austin the butler, the most benign of any online character, as he slowly furnishes his wealthy family’s mansion. Not only does this offer a level of control that users might not possess in reality, it’s also (let’s be honest) far easier to paint a virtual wall than wallpaper a real one.

     

    “
    Unlike traditional titles built around progress and performance, these games are built around care. You fish, you decorate, you cook, you water plants.
    ”

     

    But this isn’t just about soothing stress, it’s much bigger than that. Cozy gaming harks back to a much older lineage of ‘healing’ practices, from Japanese iyashikei anime to bonsai tending and miniature-making. The screen may have changed, but the impulse stays the same: to bring order to an unruly universe, to nurture something.

    This shift is also reshaping the very definition of who a gamer supposedly is. Men are just as drawn to the quiet collectability of Cozy Grove or Unpacking as women are to the meditative loops of Stardew Valley. These games don’t make you lose points for slowing down. Instead, they reward you for it.

     

    Playing Stardew Valley / Photo credit: in.pinterest.com

     

    Online communities have found cozy titles to be a more expressive place, like ‘The Gaymers’, a queer-led collective within gaming culture. It is in these pastel, low-stakes worlds that players can experiment with fashion, design, and even gender expression, exploring sides of themselves they might not be able to reveal offline. Besides, those with disabilities might find the gentler pacing of such games more forgiving.

    The numbers echo the cultural mood. Mobile gaming now makes up nearly half of global gaming revenue — about $92 billion in 2024. And this particular genre is worth an estimated $973 million, and projected to grow 6.5% annually through 2032.

    Still, the best way to understand cozy gaming isn’t through market reports but through ritual. Every game in this genre revolves around small acts of repetition: you unpack, you tidy, you clean, you slice. Over time, those loops form a steady rhythm that real life lacks. These games offer predictability within progress, and permission to rest when needed.

    In a culture that constantly gamifies productivity — tracking steps, sleep, and work — cozy gaming flips the script. It’s gaming without the grind. It’s digital space as an emotional space. In that sense, the rise of soft games isn’t about escape; it’s about recalibration.

  • Sister Act

    Mumbai and New York sit on opposite sides of the planet, but both are technicolor cities, pulsing with life and dreams. 

    Like Mumbai, New York City is choked with cars and crowds, with hopeful-eyed travelers arriving bag in hand, hungering for the stars. Both cities don’t sleep. And perhaps most crucially, at their hearts, both cities are also marked by their diversity and cosmopolitanism, both moulded by the immigrants who now call the land their home.

    And like Mumbai, New York City owes its existence to something far less romantic  — both were bargaining chips in deals made by the British empire.

    Bombay fell into English hands around 1661, thanks to a bizarre marriage settlement; the city was part of the dowry of Portugal’s Princess Catherine of Braganza when she wed England’s Charles II (the man scarcely even knew where the city was). The East India Company eventually took them over, built up ports and institutions, opened the city up to immigrants around the world, and wove English into the city’s governance and commerce. Centuries on, Mumbai still holds that cosmopolitanism to its heart (a few rocky moments notwithstanding).

     

     

    New York’s origin was an even more transactional exchange. In 1667, England and the Dutch Republic signed the Treaty of Breda, and the Dutch walked away from New Amsterdam — then a modest trading settlement on Manhattan — in return for Run Island in present-day Indonesia, at the time the world’s only source of nutmeg. The English rebranded the settlement New York, and English took over from Dutch as the language spoken in courts, markets, and boardrooms.

    Nobody sitting at either negotiating table could have guessed that these two acquisitions would grow into the stately monarchs that they are today. And yet that’s exactly what happened. Mumbai and New York City both grew into fabled entrepots of commerce, and early adopters of ‘globalization’, well before the term gained currency in the contemporary world.

     

    Photo credit: in.pinterest.com

     

    No wonder that both cities live curiously similar (yet rather dissonant) rhythms. Every morning, young Bandra professionals march their laptops into yet another cafe serving the latest artisanal coffee. At Churchgate railway station, a clot of commuters hustle in and out, streaming into waiting buses and black-and-yellow taxis. Just outside the city’s stately Gothic and Art Deco structures sit the street stalls, dispensing everything from sliced watermelon to sugarcane juice. For those without time to tarry and money to spare, the street vendors of the city have always held court.

     

     

    Half a world away, in New York, the city is heading to bagel shops or grabbing its first matcha latte before the day fully dawns. Instead of local trains, New Yorkers pack into the MTA, earbuds in, sharpening their wits for the day.

    By lunchtime, the contrasts sharpen. In Mumbai, the dabbawalas orchestrate a seamless ballet of home-cooked meals delivered straight to office desks, while co-workers congregate at the lunch table, trying each others’ lunches, and clucking and chattering about their day. In New York, the lunches feel different: a pastrami sandwich from Katz’s Deli, a hurried bowl of salad from Chopt, a rushed bite at a food truck, a sad desk lunch.

     

    “
    In New York City, the slate winters, smooth with ice, the Rockefeller Christmas tree hung about with lights, and girdled by gawping admirers.
    ”

     

    And then as the gloaming turns to nightfall, in New York, coffee dates turn to jazz nights, cocktail glasses clink and the Brooklyn Bridge lights up like a necklace. Back in Mumbai, the city’s Irani cafes brim with customers sipping their chai, Marine Drive glows golden in the sunset, a stream of Punjabi pop briefly pierces the evening air thanks to a passing taxi.

    Both cities are defined by their weather. In Mumbai, the gusting monsoon, rain-slicked streets, the wind sending a great pane of water over the city, the jackhammer relentlessness of a steady rainy day. In New York City, the slate winters, smooth with ice, the Rockefeller Christmas tree hung about with lights, and girdled by gawping admirers.

    Mumbai and New York — both queens in their own spheres, both throbbing with life and energy, both holders of dreams. Different skins, same restless soul. Both cities forget how to be still — they hum through midnight, roar through morning, and wear their exhaustion like a second skin, beautiful and unrelenting.

  • What’s Up with Whatsapp Pay?

    Before Meta handed WhatsApp to Kunal Shah, it spent years trying to decode a puzzle in one of its most crucial markets.

    India has WhatsApp’s largest user base. More than 500 million Indians use the app to coordinate family gatherings, organize weddings, negotiate business deals, share homework assignments, forward political opinions and maintain social ties across cities and continents. In many parts of the country, WhatsApp is less a messaging platform than a layer of digital infrastructure woven into everyday life.

    So when WhatsApp Pay officially launched in India in November 2020, it seemed poised for market domination.

    The logic was straightforward. If people were already spending hours a day on WhatsApp, why would they leave the app to make payments? The future appeared obvious: messaging and commercial transactions would converge in a single interface. India, with its booming digital economy and rapidly growing adoption of the Unified Payments Interface (UPI), seemed like a market ripe for picking.

    Instead, WhatsApp Pay became one of the most surprising disappointments in India’s fintech story. Years later, the service remains a marginal player. While UPI transactions have exploded into the billions each month, WhatsApp Pay has captured only a tiny fraction of the market. PhonePe and Google Pay dominate the landscape. 

    The failure offers a revealing lesson about technology, trust and consumer behaviour. It also helps explain why Meta’s recent decision to appoint CRED founder Kunal Shah to lead WhatsApp could prove far more significant than a routine executive reshuffle.

     

     

    At first glance, WhatsApp Pay’s struggles seem counterintuitive. Technology companies often assume that distribution is the hardest problem to solve. WhatsApp already had distribution on a scale most startups could only dream of. Hundreds of millions of Indians opened the app multiple times a day. But perhaps that was part of the problem. 

    In India, the most successful financial products tend to create a sense of formality. Whether it is a traditional bank branch, an ATM receipt or a digital payment app, users want cues that signal seriousness and security. PhonePe and Google Pay built interfaces around those expectations. 

    WhatsApp, on the other hand, was designed for conversation rather than commerce. The same chat window used to send jokes, family photographs and voice notes suddenly became a place where users were expected to transfer money. Paradoxically, WhatsApp’s greatest strength — its intimacy — became its greatest weakness. 

    Timing did not help.

    Around the same period that WhatsApp Pay was being tested and rolled out, India became consumed by the media frenzy surrounding the death of actor Sushant Singh Rajput. Television channels repeatedly broadcast leaked WhatsApp conversations connected to individuals involved in the case, turning private chats into public spectacle.

     

    Image credit: www.pexels.com

     

    Of course, there is no evidence that the controversy directly harmed WhatsApp Pay. But trust is rarely shaped by a single event. At a moment when Meta wanted users to view WhatsApp as a secure financial platform, many Indians were watching private messages become national headlines.

    Then there was the issue of friction.

    Conventional Silicon Valley wisdom holds that reducing friction is always desirable. Yet behavioural psychology suggests otherwise. Financial products often benefit from small rituals that reinforce trust. Authentication screens, PIN confirmations and transaction alerts may appear mundane and even annoying, but they reassure users that their money is being handled carefully. WhatsApp Pay attempted to make payments feel seamless. Paradoxically, sending money started to feel almost too easy.

    Meanwhile, competitors were aggressively rewarding users for changing habits. Cashback offers, scratch cards and merchant partnerships transformed routine transactions into miniature games. Google Pay and PhonePe invested heavily in these incentives. WhatsApp Pay largely did not.

    That is where Kunal Shah enters the story.

    Until recently, Shah was best known within India’s startup ecosystem. His entrepreneurial journey began with FreeCharge, the mobile recharge platform he co-founded in 2010, but grew to become an expert on consumer behaviour, incentives and trust. This would eventually shape CRED, the fintech company he founded in 2018.

    On paper, CRED’s premise appeared unusual. The platform initially focused on rewarding users for paying credit-card bills on time. Yet CRED was never really about bill payments. It was an experiment in behavioural design. Shah understood that financial decisions are often driven by emotion as much as utility, and transformed routine financial behaviour into something aspirational. 

    Whether one loves or hates CRED, the company demonstrated something important: Shah had an unusual ability to understand how people form habits and assign meaning to products. Those skills may be exactly what WhatsApp needs.

     

    Image credit: www.pexels.com

     

    Meta’s appointment of Shah comes as the company seeks to transform WhatsApp into something larger than a messaging platform.  Meta has not publicly detailed why it chose him for the role. In announcing the appointment, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg praised Shah’s ‘builder mentality’ and ‘global perspective’. Kunal Shah’s appointment suggests Meta finally understands that the next stage of WhatsApp’s evolution may not be a technological problem at all. It may be a behavioural one.

     

    “
    Meta's appointment of Shah comes as the company seeks to transform WhatsApp into something larger than a messaging platform.
    ”

     

     

    Years after WhatsApp Pay’s disappointing debut in India, Meta appears to be betting that the man who built a career decoding incentives and human psychology can succeed where product features alone could not.

    WhatsApp remains India’s digital drawing room. Whether it can become India’s wallet is still an open question. For the first time in years, however, Meta seems to have hired someone whose entire career has been spent studying exactly that problem.

  • The Mottled Dawn

  • More Than a Photo Op

    We’re seeing them everywhere. Videos and photographs of Christopher Nolan, Matt Damon, and Timothée Chalamet dressed up in suits, and having cutting chai and bun maska in Mumbai’s iconic Olympia Coffee House. 

    This was no casual chai stop. Instead, it was a pre-planned part of the publicity for the freshly-released film Odyssey. Universal Pictures India shared the moment on their Instagram page, captioning it “Quick tea stop before ‘The Odyssey’ Mumbai Premiere. A big night awaits, but chai comes first.” This, predictably enough, went viral in Mumbai. Even just a decade ago, such Hollywood promotions in India were rare. Is this a sign of the changing times? 

    But before you make up your mind, let’s review all the evidence. The incontrovertible fact is that there has been a sudden rocketing in South Asian representation across the entertainment board. That’s why we suddenly see Alia Bhatt posing on the red carpet in Cannes; Maitreyi Ramakrishnan (of the Netflix show Never Have I Ever) cast in the Legally Blonde prequel Elle, and Sarita Choudhury cast as Carrie’s best friend in And Just Like That, the Sex and the City sequel. 

    And here’s another piece of evidence: a whole host of streaming platforms – Amazon Prime, Netflix, Disney-Hotstar and SonyLIV – are giving away free memberships in India via Airtel.

    So does this mean that India is now being recognised as a significant theatrical market? Does India now wield soft power that it never had before? Or is it all just tokenism for views and clicks?

     

    “
    The incontrovertible fact is that there has been a sudden rocketing in South Asian representation across the entertainment board.
    ”

     

    India’s presence in Hollywood films has rarely gone beyond a supporting role. There are exceptions of course, Priyanka Chopra being the biggest one. Bridgerton (Season 2, 2022) introduced the Sharma sisters, a rare moment where South Asian characters were given central roles in a period drama. Kumail Nanjiani has been nominated for everything from an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award, to the Emmy Awards. But by and large, India and Indians existed as colorful caricature or as a sidekick. 

     

     

    If you reduce a culture to backdrop often enough, its own people may start seeing it as something to outgrow rather than embrace. This shaped more than outsiders’ perceptions of us — it began to shape our own.

    On the other hand, Hollywood has always absorbed and sought out whatever cultures are commercially useful. Italian-American culture, stylish Japanese aesthetics, Latin music, Korean entertainment, and now increasingly India too appears to be part of the conversation. 

    But real representation asks harder questions. Who’s writing the stories? Who’s directing them? Who’s behind the camera, in the boardroom, in the editorial meeting? It also asks what stories are being told and which ones are being left out. 

     

    “
    If you reduce a culture to backdrop often enough, its own people may start seeing it as something to outgrow rather than embrace. This shaped more than outsiders' perceptions of us — it began to shape our own.
    ”

     

    Undeniably, global institutions increasingly feel compelled to engage with India directly. Hollywood stars come to Mumbai. Luxury brands launch campaigns around Indian consumers. Streaming platforms compete aggressively for Indian audiences. International productions cast South Asian actors not as exceptions but as commercially sensible choices. These are signs that India is becoming harder to treat as peripheral. 

    The more important question is whether this visibility evolves into authorship. Soft power is meaningful not just when three Hollywood stars pop into a Mumbai restaurant, but when Indian creators increasingly shape the stories, images, and narratives that the rest of the world consumes. That’s the true transition from being a market to being a cultural force.

     

     

    So are the Olympia Coffee House photographs evidence of soft power or tokenism?

    Probably both.

    The tokenism exists because India matters. If India were irrelevant, nobody would bother performing cultural familiarity in the first place. But the existence of tokenism also reveals the limits of the current moment. Chai with movie stars makes for a compelling photograph; it does not necessarily signal a deeper engagement with Indian realities.

    And that may be the real shift underway. India is no longer simply being looked at. It is becoming too large—economically, culturally, and demographically—to be ignored. The challenge now is ensuring that visibility translates into influence, and that influence into the power to tell its own stories rather than merely appear in someone else’s.

  • Stepping it Up

    In the desert city of Jodhpur, architect A Mridul and his team are restoring the early-18th C Mahamandir stepwell. It is 150 feet deep and sits at the heart of an old Jaipuri neighborhood. Thousands of miles away, in Portugal’s beach town Melides, a circular structure resembling these ancient stepwells, has been making the news. It is the work of Egyptian architect Tarek Shamma, who designed it as a space for gathering and retreat, in the home of fashion designer Christian Louboutin. 

    Both India and the West have developed a fresh interest in these water reservoirs built hundreds of years ago. Their ingenious architecture spotlights them as a crucial climate crisis solution.  These bavdis or vav, as they are called, store rainwater all year round. The steps, running up and down all around the water, make it possible for people to reach the source even when water recedes during the summer. Made with locally-available stone and lime, stepwells are the original ‘cooling centers’ or ‘climate centers’. The water and the built-in sheltered balconies provide respite from scorching heat. 

    It’s why state governments, local communities and NGOs are restoring these ancient structures that have been ignored for far too long. Many of them had been reduced to dumping yards, explains Mahendra Singh Tanwar, convenor of Jodhpur’s INTACH (Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage) chapter. The not-for-profit organization has initiated several stepwell restoration projects in the city over the last two decades.

    And the restored stepwells are now brimming with water. Hospitality and tour companies are promoting these as tourism and event hotspots. From music performances to poetry readings, these stepwells are buzzing with people again. Jodhpur has included a few of these in its city tours, and has a dedicated stepwell walk too, facilitated by INTACH. “Tourism and events help fund the upkeep of the conserved stepwells, which, in turn, generate employment for the locals,” says Tanwar. “It’s a great incentive for communities to take ownership of these structures and not let them fall into ruin again,” adds Tanwar.

     

    in.pinterest.com

     

    The international design world is taking notice too. Italy-based CC Tapis launched a line of rugs inspired by stepwells two years ago. Then there is the monumental Vessel at Hudson Yards, in New York City. The $150-million public monument designed by Thomas Heatherwick was structurally inspired by stepwells too. Stefano Ricci recently shot his Spring/Summer 2026 campaign at the Panna Meena stepwell in Jaipur. “The inverted pyramid geometry and optical illusion of stepwells fascinate designers,” explains Mridul.

    Stepwells in India are not just in Rajasthan. They are also found in Punjab, Haryana, UP, Maharashtra, and Telangana, and those are being restored too. These too have always functioned as social sites where people gathered, especially women when they came here to fetch water. Pujas and cultural festivals were held here too. 

     

    “
    Perhaps the most difficult aspect for many international audiences to grasp is that these reservoirs once supplied drinking water.
    ”

     

    Even historically, these structures were the combined responsibility of the administration and the people. While the elaborately carved ones were commissioned by kings, queens and rich traders, the smaller and humbler-looking ones were funded by different communities by pooling together contributions from multiple people.

    “The social use of these structures makes these water reservoirs unique among other such ancient water storage solutions around the world,” says Mridul, who has worked on many stepwell conservation projects in Jodhpur. He has also built the Birkha Bawari inside the private Umaid Heritage Housing Township in Jodhpur. Completed in 2009, this 21st-century stepwell spans 224 metres in length and can hold over 17.5 million litres of water to supply the housing complex. It was built with red sandstone and traditional masonry techniques without any cement or concrete.

    Perhaps the most difficult aspect for many international audiences to grasp is that these reservoirs once supplied drinking water. “People are often surprised that communities consumed stored, untreated water,” says Mridul, who has presented his work on stepwell conservation at universities including Harvard and MIT. “But they did. The layers of stone acted as natural filters.”

     

    “
    Made with locally available stone and lime, stepwells are the original ‘cooling centers’. The water and the sheltered balconies provided respite from scorching heat.
    ”

     

    As cities around the world search for ways to adapt to rising temperatures, water scarcity and increasingly erratic rainfall, stepwells offer a reminder that sustainable solutions do not always need to be invented from scratch. Sometimes they are hidden in plain sight, carved deep into the earth centuries ago, waiting to be rediscovered.

  • Say Cheese!

    There’s no denying India’s love for dairy. Ghee, butter, milky mithai, buttermilk, yogurt – the evidence is everywhere. But what about Indian cheese?

    Paneer of course is indelibly twined with Indian cooking, but in fact the country is home to multiple iterations of cheese: Ladakh’s chhurpi, traditionally made from yak milk, chewy, dense and smoky; of course the Parsi community’s voluptuous topli (basket) paneer, served in a pool of salt water; crumbly, smoke-sluiced Bengali Bandel discs; Jammu’s kalari cheese, supple and stretchy, usually eaten pan fried.

    This makes eminent sense since India is the world’s largest producer of milk, accounting for nearly a quarter of global production. Yet, for decades, the only pan-Indian staple was processed Amul cheese, its salty, gooey texture a beloved accompaniment for everything from pizzas to dosa stuffing. 

    But the tide is turning, and a new generation of artisanal cheesemakers is helping Indians rediscover the country’s dairy traditions while building a market for high-quality, locally-made cheeses. In the process, they are also earning recognition on some of the world’s biggest stages.

    In fact, the rise of artisanal cheesemaking began in the 1970s, with cheeses such as Gouda and mozzarella. Their products found local audiences but rarely travelled beyond the regions where they were made.

    The past five years, however, have brought a noticeable shift. Pandemic-era disruptions elbowed consumers, retailers and restaurants to look closer to home for ingredients; the fromageries levelled up, and consumers began to empty their pockets.

    According to market research firm IMARC Group, India’s cheese market was worth 88.9 billion rupees in 2023 and is projected to grow to more than 512 billion rupees by 2032. Of this, the artisanal segment is nascent, but burgeoning. Across India, artisan cheesemakers such as the Spotted Cow Fromagerie, Begum Victoria, Eleftheria and Käse are crafting products that rival their European counterparts. 

     

    The Parsi topli paneer | Photo credit: Meher Mirza

     

    Not only is there a stampede for cheese by customers looking to buy cheeses online, there is now a huge B2B demand as well. “Last year, 77% of our business was B2B,” says Namrata Sundaresan of Käse, who supplies to Papa’s, the Oberoi group of hotels and a host of others. There is now also a swelling pool of eaters who wish to learn cheese-making – Sundaresan takes class after class in Ooty (and online). Smoked Cheddar, Gouda, Pepper Jack, Camembert, Brie, Feta, Belper Knolle – this is the new Indian palate.

    And the world is beginning to sit up and take notice. 

     

     

    In April 2026, PM Modi tweeted:

    “Cheese from India makes its mark globally… India made an impressive debut at the Mundial do Queijo do Brasil 2026, which is a vibrant international competition for cheese and dairy products. Four Indian products won medals, including 1 Super Gold, 2 Golds and 1 Silver. The Super Gold was won by Eleftheria Gulmarg (Brie Style), the Golds were won by Yak Churpi-Soft, Nordic Farm, Leh, Ladakh and Eleftheria Brunost (Whey Cheese) while the Silver was won by Eleftheria Kaali Miri (Belper Knolle Style). Congratulations to Mausam Narang and Thenlay Nurboo. Such successes strengthen India’s artisanal dairy sector on the world stage.”

    The cavalcade of prizes point of course to the rising prominence of Indian fromageries on the global stage. But they illumine something else too: not only are Indian cheesemakers the cream of the crop, indigenous Indian cheeses such as chhurpi are now rubbing shoulders with the Camemberts of the world. Thus is the Western gaze inverted. 

    Many fromageries are also incorporating distinctly Indian flavours into European styles. One of Käse’ semi-hard cheeses is studded with fenugreek seeds, then aged. Eleftheria’s Belper Knolle-style cheese is daubed with crushed garlic, Himalayan pink salt, and Kerala black pepper. And at The Cheese Collective, Mansi Jasani infuses cabécou with pav bhaji masala. Meanwhile, Spotted Cow Fromagerie cheekily winks at their cheeses’ hallowed origins by naming them Bombrie, Camembay, and Tomme de Bombai.

     

     

    unsplash.com

     

    This also reflects the current moment in Indian fine dining more broadly — creators beholden to a yoke of two origins, plucking and borrowing from and subsuming Indian and international flavors with abandon. Cheese purists may scoff, but the suggestion that there is only one standard, preserved in aspic, for what a cheese should be, is specious. Cheese, like everything else, adapts and acclimatizes to its home, wherever in the world it may be.

     

    “
    Not only are Indian cheesemakers the cream of the crop, indigenous Indian cheeses such as chhurpi are now rubbing shoulders with the Camemberts of the world.
    ”

     

    Clearly, Indian restaurants subscribe to this view as well, since the border-bending inventiveness of cheese-besotted chefs seems endless. Bombay Canteen takes salan, a dish foundational to Hyderabad, and plops a burrata into it. In Bengaluru’s LUPA, a slow-smoked Roma tomato galette is coupled with a Five Cheese Boursin on thinly-rolled puff pastry. At Bandra Born in Mumbai, creamed stracciatella is served with podi butter and cumin focaccia.

    But perhaps at the end of the day, all we need are hunks of bread torn by hand, the bright sweet crunch of a perfectly ripe tomato and a plate of cheese  – crumbly, gooey, oozing, melting – for the perfect meal.

  • The Finishing Touch

    On a sun-scorched summer afternoon in Mumbai, a young woman stands in front of a mirror practicing the perfect smile. She is not preparing for a wedding, a beauty pageant, or a television appearance. She is preparing for a job interview with a company headquartered in Silicon Valley. Around her, a dozen other students are engaged in similar exercises. One is trying out his firm-gripped handshake. Another is rehearsing small talk. 

    We are behind the scenes at one of India’s finishing schools. Across cities, the names may vary (finishing school, grooming academy, image-consulting center, communication institute), but the curricula all point in the same direction — how to adopt social fluency in a furiously competitive world. At their core lies the age-old idea: how you present yourself is how the world will judge you. After all, relying on grit, talent and academics alone can get you only so far. 

    Outside these schools, the city never sleeps. It is an ever-throbbing hive of Pilates studios, fancy restaurants, luxury shops, and multi-story buildings. The polished faces of Bollywood stars shine from gigantic billboards suspended over car-choked roads. Delivery riders zig and zag between SUVs, while vendors hawk their wares outside colonnaded five-star hotels. Everywhere is movement — economic, digital, social. Mumbai, like India’s other metropolises, is poised at the threshold of a new era of emerging multipolarity. 

    Image consulting centers began opening their doors in the 1990s when India launched its open market economy; as the economy kept revving up, so did the schools. Today, the industry sits at the crossroads of several forces: economic liberalization, massive globalization, the growth of the middle class, and of course the vagaries of an inscrutable social media. 

     

    “
    India's grooming school industry sits at the crossroads of several forces: economic liberalization, globalization, the expansion of the middle class, and of course the vagaries of an inscrutable social media.
    ”

     

    It is a time ripe for these institutes. Knowledge of etiquette, interpersonal skills, deportment, and social graces carried a particular prestige because it signaled membership in an international world. “I know my English was good, but my confidence was quite low,” says Preeti S, who attended Amity Finishing School in Noida, “I think it definitely helped my leadership skills develop.”

     

    www.pexels.com

    A Wide Appeal

    Students come from all classes and communities, and include aspiring corporate professionals, homemakers, entrepreneurs, beauty influencers, college graduates, and middle managers. A young graduate in Kanpur aspires to work for a multinational company in Singapore. A beauty enthusiast in the Maharashtrian village of Kolad dreams of becoming an influencer. A software engineer in Kochi spends half the day speaking to colleagues in California. A model in Mumbai is preparing for Mr Universe. 

    Depending on their goals, they are taught etiquette and manners, workplace communication, public speaking, networking, emotional intelligence, interview techniques, leadership development and even social responsibilities. Certain agencies steer students into exhausting training regimens that even involve prepping for the IELTS (a standardized exam that tests English proficiency for people wanting to emigrate to). Diet, makeup, and fashion decisions are policed to meet global standards. 

     

    unsplash.com

     

    Each school has its own curriculum and style. The Refinery Finishing School for instance focuses on blended etiquette. The founder, Ematullah V, explains, “We often forget what Indian culture gives us – sanskar, adaab. So I try to bring in a lot of personal context.” 

    She goes on to explain that she has seen a recent boom in image consulting, and soft skill training. A generation raised on Instagram, YouTube, and reality television has inherited a culture saturated with transformation narratives. Every platform offers examples of people who have reinvented themselves through some type of makeover. Naturally enough, the schools today include personal branding and social media strategy within their curriculum.

     

    “
    A generation raised on Instagram, YouTube, and reality television has inherited a culture saturated with transformation narratives.
    ”

     

    Once Upon a Time

    We know that the story of finishing schools begins far from India.

    For much of the 19th and 20th C, Switzerland represented the global capital of the finishing school world. Homed in ancient mansions girdled by perfectly-manicured gardens, sat dozens of institutions that existed only to polish the manners and etiquette of the daughters of aristocratic families. 

    But the social revolutions of the postwar era crushed the old ways underfoot. The war upended conservative ideas of femininity, while soaring property values made it more profitable to sell off old school buildings. The Swiss finishing school fell into eclipse. 

    But battling all odds, one school survived. Cannily, they recalibrated their lens away from European aristocracy and towards the global elite. Rather than preparing women for high society, they unbolted their gilded gates to students from around the world readying for international business, diplomacy, luxury hospitality, even modern household management. French yielded to English. Sewing and waltz lessons vanished. International etiquette and cultural intelligence (e.g. how to eat with chopsticks) took their place.

    In India, the mirror turns the other way around. The students are rarely members of aristocrats, billionaires, or oligarchs. They are far more likely to be first-generation professionals, knuckling it out until they lift their families from poverty.

    The critique is familiar. Grooming schools encourage conformity. They reward appearance over substance. They package insecurity as opportunity and sell confidence back to consumers at a premium. 

    And yet “I think it is fantastic for the country,” says Ematullah, “It’s one way to set yourselves apart from the competition.” 

    Whatever verdict history renders on India’s grooming school boom, it captures something unmistakable about this moment: a country sprinting to reinvent itself, one handshake, one accent, one LinkedIn post at a time. The finishing school may have started in Swiss mansions built for aristocrats, but in India it has been reborn as something more democratic — a bet, however imperfect, that anyone willing to practice hard enough in front of a mirror can confidently walk into a room and straightaway feel at home.