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  • Why Gen Z Turns to Social Media for Financial Advice

    Scroll through TikTok long enough and you’ll find a Gen Z creator explaining compound interest with the same energy someone else uses for a GRWM. Another breaks down taxes the way friends dissect breakups. It’s oddly comforting. Financial advice, once the domain of suits and spreadsheets, now arrives with trending audio and jump cuts.

    For Gen Z, money lessons don’t come from a person in a blazer across a mahogany desk. They come from social media. From Instagram reels explaining how to manage a monthly budget of ₹45,000 a month in a big city. From TikToks that start with, “Here’s what I wish I’d known about savings at 18.” And while that might seem frivolous at first glance, it makes more sense the longer you sit with it.

     

    Nearly 70 per cent of Gen Z turns to social media for financial guidance | Image Credit: rupixen on Unsplash

     

    This is a generation that grew up watching adults lose jobs overnight, watching rent climb faster than salaries, watching their student debt turn into inheritance. They’re not hostile to financial knowledge. They’re just wary of how it’s been delivered. Too formal. Too opaque. So they go where explanations already live — their feeds.

    A 2025 study conducted by Spruce Money, found that nearly 70% of Gen Z in North America are influenced by financial trends on social media (or the internet), compared to 51% of millennials and 27% of Gen X. TikTok leads the pack, followed by Instagram, Facebook, podcasts, and online communities. That hierarchy matters. TikTok isn’t just popular. It’s where the language is familiar and relevant, and the information easily available. No jargon, no shame, no assumption that you already know the basics.

     

    “
    Formal finance still feels like a private club with a strict dress code. Social media feels like you can walk in wearing pajamas.
    ”

     

    What older observers often miss is that Gen Z doesn’t treat social media advice as gospel. Many openly acknowledge the risks. They cross-check tips on Google, Reddit, or with a friend who “knows this stuff.” They follow multiple creators precisely because they don’t fully trust any single one.

    Formal finance still feels like a club with a dress code. Social media feels like you can walk in wearing pyjamas.

    This shift isn’t limited to the United States. In India, ‘share market’ creators explain SIPs and stock basics through memes and masala edits. In Brazil, TikTokers dance while breaking down inflation. In Nigeria, young creators teach forex trading with the same cadence others use for makeup tutorials. In South Korea, finance YouTubers cut advice with K-drama clips and jokes about anxiety that land a little too close to home. Across contexts, the tone is the same — peer-to-peer, informal. 

    Yet, beneath this swathe of easily accessible information, lies tremendous potential for misinformation. Exaggerated claims and casual scams can spread swiftly. The line between a helpful tip and a dangerous shortcut can blur in a 30-second reel.

    Regulators have started to notice. In Australia, nearly one in three young adults follows at least one financial influencer, and most admit those influencers have changed their behavior. In India, SEBI’s 2026 guidelines require ‘fin-fluencers’ to disclose sponsorships and avoid offering unlicensed advice. The UK and Brazil are moving in similar directions. The goal isn’t to shut these creators down, but to acknowledge that they’ve become part of the financial ecosystem, whether more traditional financial institutions like it or not.

    But focusing only on regulation misses the larger point.

    Gen Z lives in an economic reality where traditional markers of stability feel increasingly distant. Home-ownership feels like a distant possibility, if at all. Rising inflation eats much of their paychecks. Long-term planning feels like a luxury reserved for people with monetary cushions. In that context, advice that feels human, immediate, and survivable carries more weight than advice that is accurate but unreachable.

     

    Gen Z lives in a time where traditional stability feels increasingly distant | Image Credit: Leeloo The First on Pexels

     

    Authority used to look like expertise delivered from above. Now it looks like someone slightly ahead of you, explaining what worked for them and what didn’t, without pretending to have solved everything.

    Social media didn’t replace banks, advisors, or financial education. Institutions left a gap, and the internet filled it in a way that felt immediate, democratic, and legible.

    For older readers trying to understand this shift, the question isn’t why Gen Z trusts TikTok. It’s why so many formal systems still make understanding money feel like homework instead of a conversation. 

    Once you answer that, the feed starts to make a lot more sense.

  • Why Translation Became the New Soft Power

    A decade ago, global entertainment followed a familiar pattern. A small group of countries produced most of the shows that travelled, and most of those shows were in English. Translation existed, but it was secondary. Subtitles were a courtesy and dubbing was an afterthought. Cultural influence moved outward from a narrow centre, and everyone else adapted to it. This is why 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 stayed manageable. 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.

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

    From a platform’s perspective, the logic was simple. Domestic originals were expensive and risky. International titles, once translated well, travelled 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. Translation budgets rose, dubbing pipelines expanded, and release schedules began to assume global circulation from day one.

     

    A still from Narcos | Image Credit: IMDb

     

    That shift changed how creators worked. As translation became reliable, the incentive to mimic Anglo-American storytelling weakened. Writers and directors 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.

    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.

     

    “
    Influence now travels through subtitlers, dubbing artists, and release schedules rather than diplomats. It arrives quietly, embedded in character choices, humour, and ordinary life.
    ”

     

    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. Humour, 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. Once translated, these works carried not just plots but social cues, everyday behaviour, and ways of relating that had previously struggled to travel.

    This unsettled older assumptions about cultural power. English-language entertainment still commands large audiences, but it no longer defines global taste on its own. Viewers routinely choose shows in languages they do not speak, drawn to atmosphere, character, and emotional structure rather than familiarity. Recognition has shifted away from linguistic proximity toward resonance.

    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 implicit 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.

     

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

     

    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. It arrives quietly, embedded in character choices, humour, and ordinary life.

    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 grows 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 a global 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.

  • 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.

     

     

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

     

     

    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

    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 Bombay, 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 it a new language, one people could see and respond to.

    The city’s energy came from its people: Koli fisherfolk, Gujarati traders, Parsi entrepreneurs, Marathi merchants and mill workers, and waves of 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.
    ”

     

    The Many Lives of Bombay

    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.

     

     

     

     

    Bombay Dreaming

    What draws people to Bombay 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.

  • When AI Starts Speaking in Vernacular

    Ask a mainstream AI chatbot for directions in Quechua, or try to joke with it in colloquial Marathi, and something feels off. The words may come back technically correct, but the meaning doesn’t quite land. The response sounds like someone who learned the language formally and missed how it’s actually used.

    That gap isn’t accidental. It reflects where today’s most widely used AI systems come from.

    Large language models are overwhelmingly trained on English-language data, much of it drawn from formal writing, Western media, and standardised registers. When other languages appear, they tend to show up in their most polished forms: textbook Hindi, European Spanish, or standard French. Everyday speech, regional slang, oral traditions, and cultural reference points are far less visible.

    For people outside those defaults, using AI often means translating yourself first.

    That’s beginning to change, largely through regional efforts to rebuild the interface itself.

    Across Latin America, a coalition of universities and researchers is working on LatamGPT, a regionally developed language model trained on Latin American data and contexts. The goal is not scale, but representation, and to build systems that understand how language is actually spoken across the region.

    That matters in a place where Spanish varies sharply by country and class, and where millions speak Indigenous languages such as Guarani in Paraguay, Nahuatl in Mexico, or Mapudungun among Mapuche communities in Chile and Argentina. These languages carry grammatical structures, metaphors, and ways of reasoning that don’t map cleanly onto English.

     

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

     

    The challenge goes beyond vocabulary.

    In 2023, ChatGPT was asked to translate the Mexican idiom “me cayó el veinte.” The literal output, “the twenty fell on me,” missed the point entirely. What the phrase actually means is closer to “I finally got it” or “the penny dropped,” a reference to old payphones that only worked once a 20-cent coin clicked into place.

    A model trained on dictionaries can translate the words. A model trained on lived languages understands the context.

    That distinction explains why regional models are gaining urgency.

    India faces a parallel problem at a different scale. With 22 official languages and thousands of dialects, linguistic exclusion is built into digital systems by default. The government-backed Bhashini programme aims to create open language datasets that allow translation and speech tools to function across Indian languages. Alongside it, companies like Sarvam AI are building Indic-language models trained primarily on Indian data, rather than adapting English-first systems after the fact.

     

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

     

    These efforts mirror earlier shifts in digital adoption. WhatsApp’s success in India wasn’t just about cost. It was about accommodation. Voice notes, regional scripts, and flexible keyboards allowed people to communicate without switching registers. Users didn’t have to learn the platform. Instead, the platform learned them for the users.

    Building AI that works this way requires different data and different ethics.

    Much of the world’s linguistic richness isn’t archived neatly online. It exists in oral histories, local television, community radio, street signs, and WhatsApp messages. Turning that into training data raises questions of consent and ownership.

    Projects like Masakhane in Africa and Karya in India approach this collaboratively, paying contributors and keeping datasets open and community-owned. The work is slower and messier than scraping the web. It is also more accountable.

    What’s emerging is not just a technical correction, but a shift in power.

    As AI moves into healthcare, education, and public services, language stops being a cosmetic feature. It becomes the interface through which people are recognised or ignored. When systems understand only formal, standardised speech, they privilege certain users over others.

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

  • 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 pattern. Pattachitra turns up in curated exhibitions on “traditional art,” far from the communities that practise it.

     

    Indian folk art has always travelled. What’s different now is the scale, the polish, and the prestige of the spaces it moves through. The recent resurgence has brought visibility, funding, and institutional attention. But the artists who created these forms are far less mobile.

     

    What’s unfolding is often described 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 moments 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.
    ”

     

    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. Indigenous Australian dot paintings circulate widely through international galleries and museum shops, even as Aboriginal 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, Native 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. Museum stores, fashion houses, and international festivals benefit from the aura of tradition without fully engaging with questions of authorship, labour, or rights.

     

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

     

    There are exceptions. Some organisations 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 that Indian folk art is being seen globally. Visibility is not the enemy. 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 continuity without power. Until that imbalance is taken seriously, Indian folk art will continue to be admired abroad while its makers remain peripheral to the success of their own work.

     

    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.

  • Where Did All Our Third Places Go?

    On most evenings in mid-20th-century Mumbai, Shivaji Park was not an “amenity.” It was just where people went. 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, 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: you could be there without explanation.

     

    That condition has become increasingly rare.

     

    An al fresco cafè | 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. He was precise. What made third places work was not charm or design, but accessibility. They tolerated idleness. They allowed regulars without requiring membership. They made room for people whose only reason for showing up was time.

     

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

     

    Most third places did not disappear overnight. They were slowly made inhospitable. In Mumbai, Irani cafés like Kyani 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 part of public 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, monetised, or optimised.

     

    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, or proof.

     

    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. Presence alone no longer felt sufficient. There had to be a reason. A receipt.

     

    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.

     

    A crowded restaurant at daytime | 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, a kind of heat that clings to buildings, radiates from pavements, and turns your own home into an oven by noon. Urban summer is no longer just inconvenient, many would say it is unbearable. In many places, it’s becoming a structural problem, one that 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 planners and governments are being forced to ask a quieter 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 and kept homes habitable through brutal summers. Across the Mediterranean, whitewashed buildings served the same function. These choices were practical responses to climate that later  came to be recognised as stylistic ones.

     

    For decades, that kind of design knowledge was sidelined. Modern construction favoured speed, uniform materials, and darker surfaces that tended to trap heat. Cooling became something machines were expected to solve.

     

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

     

    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.

     

    “
    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 how 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.

     

    This pattern is repeating elsewhere. Not everywhere, and not all at once, but enough to notice. In Tokyo, the resurfacing of uchimizu, sprinkling water on streets during peak heat, reflects a similar impulse to cool cities without new infrastructure. In Mexico City, community-led lime washing programmes reduce 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 climate rather than against it.

     

    The same logic runs through older architectural forms across hot regions. Mud-brick construction in North Africa 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.

     

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

     

    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.

     

    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 globalised design norms that assumed energy would always be cheap and plentiful.

     

    As that assumption collapses, cities are being forced to look again.

     

    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.

     

    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.

  • When Books Became the Last Un-curated Object

    On a weekday morning in New York, a man pulls a paperback from his tote bag and props it against his knee. In a subway car full of phones, the gesture feels almost declarative. Across the aisle, someone glances over, not out of curiosity, but recognition.

    Scenes like this are becoming more noticeable. In London, on the Overground, in Seoul, in study cafés that fill by noon, and even in Bengaluru, in library-cafés where people come as much to sit with a book as to escape the heat. Reading in public isn’t new. What’s new is how visible it feels.

    Part of that visibility comes from contrast. Nearly everything else we consume now arrives pre-filtered. The shows we watch, the music we hear, the news we encounter, even the jokes that find us are shaped by recommendation systems designed to anticipate our preferences. The book, oddly enough, still resists that logic. It doesn’t auto-play. It doesn’t refresh. It doesn’t quietly optimize itself to keep you engaged.

    We now have library-cafes in Bengaluru where people read, and escape the heat | Image Credit: Vika Glitter on Pexels

     

    That resistance has started to matter. Despite years of predictions about the death of print, physical books remain dominant. In the United States, print accounted for close to three-quarters of publishing revenue as recently as 2022. Surveys also suggest that print remains the most widely used format across age groups, even as younger readers increasingly move between print, e-books, and audiobooks.

    E-books haven’t disappeared, but they haven’t replaced print either. Digital reading has grown steadily, especially in genres like romance, where speed and volume matter. What’s emerging instead is a split. Screens for convenience and paper for presence. The choice feels less about format and more about how people want their attention handled. In markets like India, where access to e-readers, stable connectivity, and digital payment systems is uneven, print remains the default rather than a preference.

    That distinction becomes clearer in public. In Tokyo, dedicated reading spaces and silent cafés have emerged as environments designed for sustained focus. In Seoul, book cafés offer multi-hour seating for readers who want to stay in. In India, informal reading communities like SGNP Reads and South Bombay Reads have begun organizing public reading sessions, turning parks and promenades into shared quiet spaces. In New York, the subway has always had readers, but the sight of a paperback now stands out against endless scrolling.

     

    “
    Many younger readers move fluidly between print, audiobooks, fan fiction, and online communities. The book offers texture where the screen offers flow.
    ”

     

    Part of the appeal is physical. A book takes up space. It occupies both hands. It sets a pace you can’t speed up without effort. In a life where work, leisure, and socializing all collapse onto the same glowing rectangle, the book reintroduces a boundary, albeit a modest one.

    Yet, that boundary is increasingly rare. Work messages arrive on the same screen as entertainment. News alerts interrupt conversations. Even leisure is measured, tracked, and optimized. The book doesn’t participate in that economy. It doesn’t ask who you are or adjust itself based on past behavior. In a culture obsessed with personalization, the book remains curiously indifferent.

    Of course, books are not untouched by algorithms. Covers are tested, titles are optimized, and BookTok can turn a novel into a bestseller overnight. But the act of reading, especially reading in public, still resists total mediation. Once the book is open, the feed stops.

    Books offer a rare encounter with something that doesn’t choose you back | Image Credit: Element5 Digital on Pexels

    That is perhaps why books have become visual objects again with bold covers. Publishers seem to have leaned into this visibility with spine-forward design becoming more common. Special editions of books like Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros, with sprayed edges and highly stylised covers, have been designed as much for display as for reading, particularly within BookTok-driven genres.

    Is this nostalgia, or is it compensation? Historically, reading has always moved in cycles. Moments of rapid technological change often produce counter-movements toward slower forms of media.

    This shift isn’t exactly a revival. Print never disappeared. What’s changed is how visible and intentional it now feels. Many younger readers move fluidly between print, audiobooks, fan fiction, and online communities. The book offers texture where the screen offers flow. This helps explain why independent bookstores are opening again. In the United States, their numbers have grown by roughly 70 percent since 2020, with more than 400 new stores opening in 2025 alone.

    It would be easy to frame this as a romantic shift. But something more pragmatic seems to be underway. In a world where nearly everything is curated in advance, the book remains one of the few experiences that unfolds without anticipating you. It doesn’t adapt, optimize, or respond. It simply demands attention. And increasingly, that seems to be the point.

  • How India’s App Economy Learned to Read You

    Open a phone in India and it is easy to miss how little effort is involved. Dinner appears in Swiggy before hunger has fully registered. Groceries arrive from Zepto in under ten minutes, timed neatly between meetings. CRED nudges you with a reward that feels oddly well placed. Nothing breaks, nothing asks too many questions, and the system works.

     

    What disappears in that smoothness is how much learning sits underneath it. Over the last decade, India’s app economy has become exceptionally good at recognising behavioural patterns, not just what users do, but when they do it, how often, and in what sequence. The most successful platforms no longer compete primarily on features or price. They compete on prediction.

     

    This shift did not begin with manipulation. It began with scale. Between 2016 and 2020, India underwent one of the fastest digital expansions in the world. After Reliance Jio entered the telecom market in 2016 with ultra-cheap data plans, mobile internet usage surged across income groups. Today, four out of five Indian households have a smartphone, and India ranks among the world’s largest consumers of mobile data by volume. According to India’s Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, smartphone penetration crossed 80 percent of households by 2023, while average monthly mobile data usage per user exceeded 20 GB, among the highest globally. Hundreds of millions of users came online in a compressed window of time, often mobile-first and app-first.

     

    That scale changed the economics of apps almost overnight. Food delivery, quick commerce, and fintech became winner-take-most markets. By 2022, India’s food delivery market was already dominated by two platforms controlling the vast majority of orders, while leading fintech apps reported that repeat users generated a disproportionate share of revenue. Margins were thin, competition was intense, and customer acquisition costs rose quickly. Retention mattered more than novelty. Engagement mattered more than differentiation. Behaviour became the most reliable signal platforms had.

     

    Food Delivery became one of the winner-takes-most markets | Image Credit: Erik Mclean on Pexels

     

    So apps began to observe closely. Not in the cinematic sense of surveillance, but in the infrastructural sense of logging patterns. When people open an app, how long they linger, which offers they ignore, which ones they redeem late at night after a long day. Late-evening discount nudges on food delivery apps, for instance, are often timed to coincide with historically higher order completion rates, especially among repeat users. Over time, these traces form behavioural profiles that are less about identity and more about rhythm. Hunger has a schedule, spending has a mood, and attention has a curve.

     

    The country is overwhelmingly an Android market, which means lower-cost devices, faster adoption, and looser default permission settings. Android accounts for over 95 percent of smartphones in active use in India, a sharp contrast with the United States, where iOS and Android usage is more evenly split. Digital literacy varies widely, and privacy controls are often abstract compared to the immediate payoff of convenience. In this environment, behavioural data is easier to capture than explicit intent, and far easier to monetise. Industry studies consistently show that personalised, behaviour-timed notifications convert at significantly higher rates than generic promotions, making prediction more valuable than stated preference.

     

    The result is a different relationship between user and platform. The app does not need to ask what you want. It waits, infers, and nudges. Rewards systems, flash offers, and personalised notifications are calibrated around timing rather than persuasion. The aim is not to change behaviour, but to meet it at its most predictable moment.

     

    This is why many Indian apps feel intuitive. They are not responding to conscious choice. They are responding to repetition.

     

    “
    Cheap data, dense competition, and a massive, heterogeneous user base make behavioural optimisation unusually valuable. The app economy does not need to persuade users to behave differently. It simply learns how they already do.
    ”

     

    There is also a cultural dimension to this dynamic. In a country shaped by inequality and aspiration, everyday behaviour becomes a resource. Fintech apps learn when users feel optimistic enough to spend. Delivery platforms learn when exhaustion overrides frugality. Patterns drawn disproportionately from urban and semi-urban users are packaged into predictions and fed back as ease.

     

    None of this is illegal. Much of it is disclosed, technically, through consent screens and privacy policies. But consent here is ambient rather than deliberate. The exchange is rarely stated plainly. In return for speed, convenience, and small moments of pleasure, users offer up patterns of daily life.

     

    What makes this system powerful is not that it hides, but that it feels normal. This is not a uniquely Indian story. American platforms pioneered many of these techniques. But India is where the model sharpens. Cheap data, dense competition, and a massive, heterogeneous user base make behavioural optimisation unusually valuable. The app economy does not need to persuade users to behave differently. It simply learns how they already do. Over time, this changes what products are built for. Success is measured less by usefulness and more by stickiness. The most valuable users are not the most satisfied ones, but the most predictable ones. Behaviour becomes capital.

     

    Seen this way, India’s app boom is not just a story of innovation or convenience. It is a story about how everyday life is being translated into signals, and how those signals now sit at the centre of consumer capitalism. The system works because it feels frictionless. But that frictionlessness has a cost. It makes the trade invisible. And that may be the most consequential shift of all.

  • The Payment Revolution Was Not Televised

    It is a Wednesday morning and Salim has not carried change in three years.

    He runs his autorickshaw through the western suburbs of Mumbai, and at the end of every ride, his passenger does the same thing. They open a phone, point it at the small printed QR code taped to the back of the front seat, and pay. No fumbling for change, no negotiation about whether he has a fifty, no waiting while someone searches a bag for coins that may not be there. The money arrives in the driver’s account before the passenger has even put their phone away.

    The driver is not an outlier. Across India, a country that ran almost entirely on cash a decade ago, this is often how transactions happen now. From fancy city restaurants to shops in towns that may not even have a bank branch, people now turn to digital payments.

    This happens through a system called UPI or Unified Payments Interface. It is a real-time, instant payment system that allows you to transfer funds between bank accounts using a smartphone, QR code, or virtual ID. By the end of 2025, UPI was processing 21.6 billion transactions in a single month.

     

    In 2025, India saw 21.6 billion UPI transactions across the year | Image Credit: Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

    That scale marks a shift. UPI has grown beyond a new system or a policy success into an infrastructure that has become invisible through use. What was once an alternative to cash is now the default layer through which everyday transactions move. At the same time, other markets, including the United States with the launch of FedNow in 2023, are only beginning to build comparable systems. The question has quickly shifted from whether digital payments will take hold to what happens once they already have.

    The story of how this happened begins on the night of November 8, 2016. Prime Minister Modi appeared on television at eight in the evening and told the country that its two largest currency denominations, ₹500 and ₹1000 notes, the currency of vegetable vendors and domestic workers and small shop owners, would cease to be legal tender at midnight. Four hours’ notice for 86 percent of the cash in circulation. The lines outside banks began forming before dawn and did not shorten for weeks. The human cost was real and the politics remain fiercely contested. But in the space that the absence of cash opened up, something else took hold. UPI had launched just months earlier to modest interest; suddenly it had the entire country’s attention, not because it had been marketed well, but because there was nothing else to turn to.

     

    “
    The payment revolution was not televised. It happened in the hands of hundreds of millions of people who needed it to work.
    ”

     

    To understand what UPI is, it helps to understand what it is not.

    It is not an app. Google Pay and PhonePe and Paytm all run on UPI, but UPI is the infrastructure beneath them. The system was built by the National Payments Corporation of India, a non-profit backed by the Reserve Bank of India. It is open to anyone, owned by no one, and available to every bank, app, and fintech company that wants to build on top of it. Any two banks can talk to each other through it and any two apps can transact across it. The system does not privilege one platform over another, which means competition happens in the services built on top of it rather than in the rails themselves.

    What it does is simple. It lets anyone send money to anyone else, instantly, from one bank account to another, using only a phone number or a virtual ID. It works across platforms, banks, and users. For those without smartphones, it works through a basic menu system accessible on any mobile phone, the kind that has been around since before the internet was in everyone’s pocket.

    In 2023, the United States launched FedNow, its long-awaited instant payment system, welcomed as a significant modernization of American financial infrastructure. By the time it arrived, there was a gap in the two markets that is worth understanding, because it did not happen by accident. The United States built its financial infrastructure around private competition, mainly card networks, fintech platforms, and bank-by-bank systems, a structure reflected in services like Venmo, Zelle, and Apple Pay, which operate within proprietary or limited networks rather than a unified public rail.

     

     

    Venmo works within Venmo, Apple Pay works within Apple’s ecosystem, and Zelle works between participating banks. Each is a private solution to a public problem, capturing value for its owner and excluding users not already inside the system. The result is a patchwork that works well enough for most people most of the time. But its gaps fall hardest on the people least able to navigate around them.

    What this looks like in ordinary life is harder to convey in numbers. It looks like the domestic worker who receives her salary at midnight on the last day of the month, transferred in seconds, without her employer needing to find an ATM or her needing to be present to collect it. It looks like the small textile shop in Surat whose owner now has a complete digital record of every transaction, with a credit history where none existed before, which means access to loans previously unavailable to businesses like his. It looks like the teenager splitting a food delivery order with four friends, each paying their share in under thirty seconds, none of them thinking of it as a financial transaction at all.

    The friction of cash, the exclusion of people without banking relationships, and the invisibility of small economic actors to institutions that allocate credit, was a structural condition shaping which transactions were possible and who could participate in which economies. While UPI did not dissolve that structure, it changed who is visible inside it. The domestic worker with a transaction record is now legible to a bank, visible in data in a way she was not before. The textile shop owner exists, financially speaking, in a way that his years of cash dealings never allowed. Legibility is not equity, and visibility is not access, but you cannot begin to participate in a formal economy that has no record of your existence, and for millions of people, UPI created that record for the first time.

     

    Quote: While UPI did not dissolve that structure, it changed who is visible inside it.

     

    None of this is without complication. The same infrastructure that processes Salim’s fares also creates a permanent, state-accessible record of every payment every Indian makes. India still lacks comprehensive data protection legislation that would give citizens clear rights over this information. Who can access transaction data, under what conditions, with what oversight, these remain contested and unresolved, and the scale of the system makes the stakes of those questions large.

    There is also the question of cost. UPI’s zero-fee model for small transactions drove adoption, but running the infrastructure is not free, and where that cost falls, and who decides, are governance questions the system’s success has deferred rather than answered. And then there is the more enduring concern, the one of an infrastructure that does not flatten inequality by existing. It changes its shape. The textile shop owner has a credit history now, but does that translate into a loan at a fair rate? That depends on systems well beyond UPI’s reach.

    The payment revolution was not televised. It happened in the hands of hundreds of millions of people who needed it to work, on a Wednesday morning when a man in an autorickshaw stopped carrying change and did not miss it.

    It was scanned, though. It was absolutely scanned.