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  • The Age Of Un-Seriousness

    If you’re a millennial with even one Gen Z friend, you already know the internet has changed languages without telling the rest of us. You’ll be scrolling through Instagram at lunch, minding your business, and suddenly you’ll spot a reel of a 22-year-old doing a completely unhinged lip-sync in the office bathroom with sparkly emojis exploding around them. Or your younger cousin will send you a TikTok to ‘explain’ their bad day, except it’s literally just a five-second clip of someone screaming into a pot and somehow, it lands perfectly.

    And then there are the moments none of us escape: that ‘SLAY 54 miles‘ billboard on the highway, the political rally edited like a K-pop fan-cam, Wimbledon dropping a South Indian track on their socials like it’s a weekend mood board. You look at all this and think, “How is everyone so unserious?” But that’s the thing — this isn’t unseriousness for the sake of unseriousness. It’s become the internet’s emotional logic.

     

     

    What we often forget is how this tone evolved. Gen Z didn’t stumble into chaos; they were raised within it. Their adolescence unfolded under lockdown. Their college years lived in breakout rooms. Their early adulthood was shaped by climate dread, economic uncertainty, school-shooting drills, political volatility, and a news cycle that never ended. When life feels like one long crisis, humour stops being entertainment and becomes a coping mechanism. Irony becomes the safest way to articulate fear. Absurdity becomes honesty.

    Older generations had their own chaos, sure, but they still reached for sincerity when it really mattered. Gen Z doesn’t. To them, sincerity without humour feels exposed. Vulnerable. Slightly unsafe. That’s why, even though their communication style looks unserious from the outside, it’s actually a way of cushioning feelings.

    And because they grew up inside the internet rather than around it, this tone isn’t performative. It’s instinctive. Everything overlaps in their feeds — joy, anxiety, memes, tragedies, personal updates — often within the same 10 minutes. Their emotional vocabulary is layered by necessity, not design. If you ask a Gen Z friend how they’re doing, they’ll reply with a meme before they reply with words. They’ll send you existential dread in the form of a reaction GIF. They’ll deliver sincerity sideways. 

    This is exactly why traditional advertising suddenly feels like it belongs in a museum. Soft lighting, serious copy, slow panning shots — that tone doesn’t translate anymore. Gen Z’s attention responds to pulse, chaos, self-awareness, and cultural references delivered at speed. So brands had to adapt. 

     

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    Gen Z’s tone has become the internet’s default. Earnestness alone can’t hold attention anymore — not in this economy, not in this climate, not on this internet.
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    Which brings us to the internet’s new favourite genre: audacious, chaotic marketing. Corporate TikToks that behave like theatre kids. Newsrooms quietly slipping memes between headlines. Political campaigns stylised like idol-fan edits with dramatic transitions and unnecessarily emotional backing music.

    Take Zohran Mamdani. His posts often look like someone handed a very passionate 19-year-old full creative control: chaotic edits, unmistakable Gen Z humour, deeply sincere messaging wrapped inside playful chaos. It works not because it’s silly but because it’s fluent. It speaks in the rhythm of the generation it’s trying to reach.

    And once you understand that, the entire internet starts to make sense. The unserious tone is a cultural fluency test. It’s not “Is this funny?” It’s “Does this feel like someone who lives in the same digital reality as me?” Brands that get this right are welcomed in. Brands that miss the beat get roasted within hours. That’s why meme-marketing agencies — once a punchline, now pull in actual revenue. What surprises people most is that this unseriousness doesn’t weaken the message. It sharpens it. A meme can communicate a political critique faster than a press release. A chaotic reel can get someone to care about an issue they ignored in headline form. A joke becomes a vessel for seriousness, just delivered sideways.

    Zoom out, and the shift becomes clear: we’re living through a moment where seriousness no longer holds a monopoly on legitimacy. A generation raised on instability found an entirely new way to express urgency, frustration, hope, and even grief. And now entire industries — from media to politics to public institutions, are adjusting themselves to match that tone.

     

     

    So when you see a billboard that says ‘SLAY 54 miles’, it’s not because transportation departments suddenly discovered camp. It’s because Gen Z’s tone has become the internet’s default. Earnestness alone can’t hold attention anymore — not in this economy, not in this climate, not on this internet.

    Marketers love calling this a trend because trends pass. But this isn’t passing. It’s a worldview. It’s a generation looking at a world that often feels absurd and responding in its native language: humour as honesty, chaos as communication, unseriousness as survival.

    And maybe that’s the twist, maybe the generation that seems unserious is actually the one being the most real. They’re not pretending, or polishing, or dressing their thoughts up in a corporate tone. They’re saying: the world is overwhelming, but we’re still here, laughing through the panic, making meaning out of noise, and finding a way to stay human through it all.

  • Rebranding A Goddess

    If social media has taught us anything, it’s that literally anything on earth can be ‘maxxed’. If you count your macros, you’re proteinmaxxing. If you track every aspect of your sleep cycle, you’re sleepmaxxing. If you’re focused on becoming as attractive as possible, you’re looksmaxxing. A step beyond looksmaxxing is hardmaxxing, which includes dangerous practices such as smashing the jaw to reshape your facial bone structure. And now there’s Lakshmimaxxing.

    What in the Heavens is Lakshmimaxxing? You may well ask. The answer requires teasing out the question into two strands. First, maxxing, a term borrowed from gamers, where min-maxing meant squeezing every possible advantage out of a character. Second Lakshmi, very obviously a Hindu goddess, worshipped (amongst other things) for beauty, prosperity and abundance, both spiritually and materially. In other words, Lakshmimaxxing involves funnelling the Goddess’ attributes into an Instagrammable self-optimization productivity hack.

     

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    And so while one section of the Internet is anguished at the use of a goddess that they revere, another says that the most infuriating part of the commotion is how certain parts of Indian cultural imagery are conveniently repackaged by the West for visibility and marketing while the culture itself is often disregarded or treated as regressive.
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    The term was seemingly coined by Canadian Instagram influencer Well_Witch (Lisa Power) who offers ayurveda-related tips to her 233K followers, with posts like ‘Eat According to Your Dosha’ and ‘Ancient Feminine Glow Technologies (according to Ayurveda)’. Amongst her most recent reels? She tells her followers they “need to be Lakshmi-Maxxing” by (amongst other things) creating a goddess altar, waking before sunrise, eating freshly cooked food, burning ghee lamps morning and evening, and having daily breast oil massages.

    In Power’s wake came a slew of other Western influencers, such as Alicia Munian, posting about this latest viral ‘trend’: “Clean girl aesthetic? How about Lakshmi maxxxing instead? Abundance. Beauty. Grace. Prosperity. Divine feminine energy. Why settle for minimal when you can be divine?”

    Predictably, a howl of outrage went round the Internet.

    Lakshmimaxxing transforms a revered goddess into a lifestyle influencer: tidy up your home, learn to be grateful, manifest your divine feminine power, fill your house with beauty and abundance. A goddess detached from cultural and religious context, appropriated by social media influencers, whitewashed, and turned into a sort of self-help mantra; a blasphemous thought in itself, made several levels worse by the fact that this is cobbled to a long line of whitewashing — the dupatta sold as a ‘Scandinavian scarf’, the jhumka vaguely labelled as ‘vintage jewellery’, the Kolhapuri chappal purloined by Prada at their fashion show in Milan in 2025. Even India’s traditions of yoga and meditation have been commodified into a Western wellness product. 

     

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    And so while one section of the Internet is anguished at the use of a goddess that they revere, another says that the most infuriating part of the commotion is how certain parts of Indian cultural imagery are conveniently repackaged by the West for visibility and marketing while the culture itself is often disregarded or treated as regressive. After all, “Indian grandmothers have been Lakshmimaxxing for generations without a podcast, morning routine or Pinterest moodboard,” opines Laksh Borah, an Indian-origin Instagrammer in the UK. When does cultural appreciation turn into cultural appropriation?

    That does not mean every contemporary interpretation is disrespectful and must be spurned. Gatekeeping is never the answer. It does mean though that the greater popularity a trend achieves, the more important it is to understand what is being borrowed and where it came from. The objection isn’t to cultural exchange, or even to drawing inspiration from Lakshmi’s obvious and powerful symbolism. It’s to the erasure that so often accompanies it: practices dismissed as regressive when they’re Indian, then embraced and monetized once they’re rebranded for a global, largely Western audience.

    That double standard is where the sting in the tail lies. It’s not simply that a goddess is being used to sell an aesthetic. It’s that the culture she comes from doesn’t get to travel with her. So is Lakshmimaxxing appreciation or appropriation? Probably both, in different measures, depending on who’s posting and why. But the more interesting question the trend raises isn’t about one influencer’s intentions — it’s about whether the internet’s endless appetite for optimization can hold space for meaning, history and reverence, or whether everything, eventually, gets maxxed into a sellable, marketable version of itself.

  • The Trust Economy

    Something is brewing in the business world.

    To understand what that is, let’s angle our lens towards the Indian financial services company, Zerodha. Zerodha’s profits last year were ₹4,237 crore. So why is its co-founder and chief investment officer, Nikhil Kamath, buying creative agencies like BTG (By The Gram) and One Hand Clap?

    Up until very recently, brands rented distribution by buying advertising space to flash their latest campaign to would-be consumers; the more you scaled up, the wider the reach. But when the campaign ended and a new one began, the whole model repeated itself, over and over and over again. But that model is changing. Kamath is no longer looking for reach.  He’s buying that indefinable thing called taste, and proximity to culture. Different vehicles, same road: to work with the people who already have a room full of listeners, rather than build a room and hope for an audience to show up.

     

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    Kamath is hardly alone in this endeavour; much of India’s creator economy is mirroring these strategies too. In 2025, Network18 (a group whose business model was predicated on the old-fashioned TV model) launched Creator18 as a formal push into creator-led advertising. It already has exclusive contracts with over 1,000 creators, a pointed sign that owning creator relationships is as central to a news conglomerate as owning TV channels.

    Creators are also becoming investors. Raj Shamani, host of Figuring Out, has backed 11 companies, including becoming an early investor in Wint Wealth. The podcaster and content creator, Ranveer Allahbadia, has moved into a cluster of businesses — Monk Entertainment, Level Supermind, and BigBrainCo — while angel-investing in wellness and fintech startups.

    And capital is also flowing the other way round, towards commerce-shaped creator infrastructure rather than the pure content plays. In 2026 so far, the most notable creator-economy deal in India internationally has been Wishlink (a platform enabling creators to monetize through commerce rather than brand deals), which accounted for roughly a third of all Asia-Pacific creator-economy funding this year.

     

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    The government is already on board, with this year’s Union Budget allocating resources to the “Orange Economy” and creator-skilling initiatives, recognizing content as an asset akin to any other form of intellectual property.
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    Consolidation is happening from the influencer-agency side too. Good Glamm Group has merged four separate creator-and-content businesses, including Plixxo, Winkl, Vidooly and MissMalini Entertainment, into Good Creator Co. as it looks to build an end-to-end content-to-commerce ecosystem, rather than a series of one-off campaigns. Chtrbox, an agency founded by Varun Duggirala, Roshan Abbas, Gaurav Kapur and others, was acquired by US-based QYOU Media in 2021 to grab a toehold in Indian creator culture, and in 2025 it became the first influencer marketing agency to list on the BSE SME platform.

    This isn’t just a domestic phenomenon. Take Publicis, one of the world’s largest advertising holding companies that just spent over $675 million, buying Influential and Captiv8, creator networks spanning 15 million-plus creators. Later’s $250 million acquisition of Mavely, an affiliate platform, did more or less the same thing. Both traditional advertising agencies, both simultaneously concluding that the economics of renting versus owning audience relationships no longer favored the former.

     

    Ranveer Allahbadia is a content creator and entrepreneur. | in.pinterest.com

     

    BCG estimates that Indian creators would impact anything between $350–400 billion of consumer spending annually, and that figure is projected to cross $1 trillion by 2030. The government is already on board, with this year’s Union Budget allocating resources to the ‘Orange Economy’ and creator-skilling initiatives, recognizing content as an asset akin to any other form of intellectual property. This is the message that one agency founder was quick to seize upon while speaking to reporters about the Budget. He noted that while renting audiences was an option, brands that invested in building their own media infrastructure would reap disproportionate rewards. Not that it wasn’t obvious already.

    After years of brands asking “how do we get people to notice us,” the more interesting question circulating in Indian boardrooms right now seems to be: what do we own that makes people want to listen to us in the first place? The biggest brands of the next decade may not possess the biggest budgets. They may not have the biggest stars. But they’ll be the ones with the best relationship with their audience, one that doesn’t need to be rebuilt over and over again.

  • Framing The Subcontinent At TIFF

    Perhaps no major street in Toronto has transformed over the past two decades as Bathurst Street. Home to working-class folks from Jewish and Black families, and thick with bookstores, galleries and quirky businesses, it possesses a rather bohemian air. Recently, quite out of the blue, a soundtrack album of the 2008 film Slumdog Millionaire was found at one of its thrift shops.

    Slumdog, once intended as a direct-to-video film, exploded in popularity after showings at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), grossing over USD $387 million at the box office off of a $15 million budget – one of the most profitable movies ever, taking in eight Oscars at the Academy Awards along the way. Even then, though, it was a divisive film, critiqued for turning poverty and social evils into entertainment and distorting India’s economic boom. Even the director Danny Boyle, acknowledged in 2025 that the film would not be made in the current climate.

    Boyle’s reflections nearly twenty years later raise the larger questions: how has Indian filmmaking changed, and who is it for?

     

    A still from RRR: the director of the film, S.S. Rajamouli, was a keynote speaker at TIFF in 2022, where he discussed the global phenomenon of Telugu cinema.

     

    TIFF’s India Story

    Decades ago, most arthouse film festivals would praise Satyajit Ray and Mrinal Sen, while ignoring commercial films in India. Reflecting the growth of Toronto’s Indian population (from 6% in 1991 to 14.6% in 2021), then-TIFF programmers Noah Cowan and David Overbey, altered that course, by creating 1994’s ‘India Now!’ program, featuring Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen, Dev Benegal’s English, August, Anand Patwardhan’s Father, Son and the Holy War, and films by Mani Ratnam.

    Cameron Bailey (now the CEO) recognized that Shah Rukh Khan or Amitabh Bachchan could electrify crowds in the same way Matt Damon or George Clooney did. That’s how Karan Johar’s Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna premiered in Toronto, with thousands of fans thronging to greet the cast. In subsequent years, Bollywood blockbusters such as Singh Is Kinng, Dil Bole Hadippa!, and English Vinglish have appeared on screens; a recognition of their tremendous commercial opportunity, noted Meenakshi Shedde, Indian film critic and advisor to TIFF.

    Notably, two audience segments easily co-existed – one for Bollywood, and one for arthouse cinema – exciting a commercial cinema fan base, while simultaneously broadening its appeal. After all, Bollywood was once a cultural language that united new immigrants, many of whom were urban professionals from Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Gujarat, Kerala, and other parts of India, settling primarily in Toronto and Vancouver, and sharing a common frame of reference built around Hindi cinema.

     

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    Many of these films are backed by industry powerhouses Anurag Kashyap, Guneet Monga, and Karan Johar – all regulars at TIFF, often casually walking the Canadian streets – but they highlighted contemporary India which simultaneously appealed to recent immigrants, second-generation millennials and non-traditional fans.
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    But that unifying force has weakened as the diaspora itself has grown more fractured. Canada’s South Asian population has quadrupled from 1996 to 2021, with statistics revealing that immigrants now come from 111 different countries of birth – a record high – making the diaspora far more complex and fragmented. Films have always held up a mirror to changes in society, and this was no different. As an example, Malayalam has recorded an 811% increase in twenty years, as a spoken language in Canada, with South Indian films like RRR (2022), KGF: Chapter 2 (2022), Ponniyin Selvan II (2023), Kalki 2898 AD (2024), and Pushpa 2 (2024) becoming major draws for Canadians of South Asian origin.

     

    An Evolution

    During his trips to India, Bailey observed this changing Indian film economy. Multiplexes were beginning to create room for smaller, edgier films aimed at urban audiences that sat in between commercial hits and arthouse film, and TIFF’s 2012’s ‘City to City’ program highlighted them. This was to become a landmark event for the diaspora. In the following years, The Lunchbox (2013), Angry Indian Goddesses (2015), Lion (2016), Village Rockstars (2017), and All We Imagine as Light (2024), and Homebound (2025) have all been shown, signaling a new wave of Indian cinema: more local, yet internationally connected, and difficult to categorize.

    When Bollywood did appear – as it did with Priyanka Chopra Jonas in Mary Kom (2014) and The Sky Is Pink (2019), Irrfan Khan in Talvar (2015), Manmarziyaan (2018), Bhumi Pednekar’s Thank You for Coming (2023), and Reema Kagti’s Superboys of Malegaon (2024) – it was more prestige Hindi cinema than masala films.

    Many of these films are backed by industry powerhouses Anurag Kashyap, Guneet Monga, and Karan Johar – all regulars at TIFF, often seen casually walking the Canadian streets – but they highlighted contemporary India which simultaneously appealed to recent immigrants, second-generation millennials and non-traditional fans.

     

    A throwback to 2008’s big release, Slumdog Millionaire, a film with a problematic cultural legacy.

     

    2026: Continuing the Journey

    If early Indian films highlighted auteurs, a later era incorporated Bollywood, and more recent films showcased edgier and prestige Hindi cinema, TIFF’s September 2026 slate appears to reveal the diversity of region and form.

    Films such as Angh (Nagaland), Dorothy (Tamil Nadu), Half (Kerala), Phoolan (North India), and Strong Son (Canada) will be shown, many of which are world premieres. Toronto-born Richie Mehta, most famous as the creator of the Emmy-winning Delhi Crime, returns to TIFF for a third time with Phoolan, inspired by the maverick bandit queen.

    Documentary filmmaker Shaunak Sen, whose 2022’s All That Breathes won top awards, appears with his Termite, with Kolkata-born Rahul Roye’s Aman, British-Indian Varun Raman’s Into the Betaverse, and Prajjwal Rajawat’s Butter Chicken to Go, about three South Asian food-delivery drivers in the winter in Canada, also in the short films section. Before becoming a full feature, Canadian filmmaker Ian Bawa’s Strong Son, began as a short as part of TIFF’s talent development initiative in 2021.

    Indian films aren’t seeking permission to explain themselves anymore. Half, a Malayalam vampire revenge movie is premiering for the popular Midnight Madness crowd, accustomed to action, horror, and fantasy. Angh will compete in TIFF’s prestige program, Platform, highlighting emerging filmmakers.

    TIFF is not a mirror of Indian cinema: its goal is to select films capable of crossing cultures and borders through often a neat package of cinematography, universal narratives, international financing and established stars. But it continues to diversify its palette, the same way Indian audience members are. This is, in many ways, simply demography catching up with programming: a diaspora this fragmented was never going to stay satisfied with a single national cinema speaking on its behalf. The diaspora is moving away from questions of ‘am I represented?’ to ‘which India is being shown?’

    TIFF will undoubtedly look to the subcontinent for the trifecta of a Bollywood blockbuster, an established auteur such as Payal Kapadia, and a diaspora or Indo-Canadian filmmaker like Deepa Mehta. But nearly twenty years after Slumdog Millionaire, the question is no longer whether an Indian film will be in Toronto. It is which India arrives: Mumbai or Nagaland, Bollywood or Malayalam horror, a new immigrant’s India or a Canadian-born.

  • Gold Dust

  • A World Full Of Dumplings

    There’s something about a plate of momos that just feels like home — even if you didn’t grow up eating them. Fat little parcels of warmth and comfort, ladled steaming hot onto paper plates, dipped into a pool of chile sauce or chutney: in Indian cities, they’ve become a kind of emotional staple. Cheap and filling, momos are sold on bustling street corners, in high-end cafés, and at 2 am outside college hostels for empty-bellied students.

    Momos arrived in India with a cloud of Tibetans who fled the Chinese annexation of their homeland. But Indians took them to heart; they are Delhi’s most ubiquitous street snack, pot-bellied with tandoori masala or sweetened with a stomach of chocolate.

    But here’s the thing: you’ll find a similar joy halfway across the world.

    China has, expectedly, a universe of dumplings: Shanghainese shiaomai, soupy xiaolongbao, shuijiao (boiled dumplings) and guotie, pan-fried till their skins are crisped and gilded.

     

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    But the dumpling cannot be restricted to any particular geography. In Polish kitchens, it’s the pierogi. In Turkish households, it’s the tiny, hand-folded manti. In Korean feasts, it’s the plump mandu. In Nigeria, there’s moin-moin — a steamed bean cake, savory and wrapped. In Nepal, it’s the jhol momo, swimming in a spiced sesame broth. In Korea, the mandu might be stuffed with tofu and kimchi. In Italy, ravioli could hold ricotta and spinach. Georgian khinkali is a knob of dough pinched and twisted and stuffed with meat or vegetables.

    Closer to home, in Southern India, there’s kozhukattai, often stuffed with jaggery and coconut. Bengal has dudh puli, a festive rice dumpling soaked in kheer. The northeast celebrates momos in dozens of variations, and in Gujarat, muthias are hand-shaped and tempered with mustard seeds.

    Every culture, every corner, seems to have stumbled upon the same soul-soothing idea — dough cradling a filling, warm from the inside out. These fillings reflect geography, available ingredients, and cultural touchstones. After all, what makes dumplings so universal is what they hold — a snapshot of place and people.

     

     

    Call it what you will, the dumpling is less a recipe and more a shared instinct — an edible expression of care, survival, and joy. Legend tells us that Chinese boiled dumplings, jiaozi, were born 1,000 years ago to muscle through a harsh winter. Steaming hot parcels of dough, their bellies fattened by lamb, ginger and garlic, were fed by a Chinese physician named Zhang Zhongjing to people suffering from frostbite.

    The reason dumplings exist everywhere, even in sultry summers and torrid monsoons, probably had practical origins. Take a small amount of meat or vegetables, wrap it in dough, and suddenly you have a meal that stretches further, stays warm longer, and can be boiled, steamed, or fried depending on your resources. That’s why they’ve long been linked to moments of migration, hardship, and adaptation. But over time, they became symbols of family, celebration, and love.

    What’s fascinating is how these forms rarely clash. Instead, they create a kind of culinary constellation. Nobody argues whether the momo or pierogi came first — because they’re not copies, they’re cousins.

     

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    In the past decade, social media has given dumplings a fresh global stage. TikTok and Instagram are filled with videos of people folding momos with their grandmothers, or experimenting with gyoza shapes. Dumpling pop-ups in Brooklyn serve Tibetan, Japanese, and Nigerian versions side by side. In Darjeeling, you can now find curated momo trails for tourists eager to try every variety.

    There’s also something democratizing about dumplings online — they don’t require elite training or Michelin-starred kitchens. They invite hands-on making, often in groups, around kitchen tables. In that sense, they’re perfect for a generation craving tactile rituals in a digital world.

    So the next time you bite into a momo — or pierogi, or mandu — know that you’re tapping into a global language of care, one fold at a time.

  • Indie Idols

    Dogs found on the street are unsafe and harmful for the people they come in contact with.

    That’s an assumption that is now being refuted and dismantled in India. The fact that indigenous dogs can be rescued and adopted as pets is an idea whose time has come (some argue that the practice has been long-standing). 

    One can also trace this shift in the social sense. While adopting purebred dogs has long been associated with the unwritten rule of positioning oneself within the upper echelons of society, things might be changing. People are beginning to question the aspirational status attributed to adopting exotic, pedigreed dogs, while understanding the real harm of unethical puppy mills.

    Across the world too, rescuing is now considered a beneficial practice. Social media pages with a global presence, such as We Rate Dogs and The Dodo, with 6 million and 12.9 million followers respectively, regularly feature stories of rescued animals, including collaborations with celebrities. Matt Damon and Rita Ora are examples of celebrities who have adopted rescued animals. This distinction of being a renowned celebrity with affluence and yet choosing to rescue animals sends a strong message to those who look up to them. After all, it wouldn’t be too bad to do what Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus does! 

     

     

    Back in India, the famous Indian stand-up comic and actor Vir Das has been an important voice for these animals, as he uses his platform to remind people that indigenous dogs will provide more love and gratitude than one could ever imagine. Another outspoken and influential figure in the political fraternity is Maneka Gandhi. She is the founder of People for Animals, established in 1992, one of the largest animal welfare organizations in the country. 

    Similarly, organizations such as Welfare for Stray Dogs (WSD), the Rotary Club of Bombay, and the Knights of Cubbon Park in Bengaluru have been playing an active role in animal rescue. The Rotary Club of Bombay, for instance, has been making short films on the plight of stray dogs, organizing fundraisers to raise awareness regarding the same, and has undertaken the responsibility of feeding more than sixty dogs. Simultaneously, WSD vaccinates, sterilizes, and treats street dogs in Mumbai for free. 

    For dog lovers, none of this is particularly new. But in August 2025, something changed.

    Last year, the Supreme Court of India directed municipal authorities in Delhi and the National Capital Region to capture stray dogs and permanently relocate them to shelters or pounds. The order followed reports of increasing dog-bite cases, including the death of a six-year-old girl from rabies. It sought to empty the capital’s streets of animals that had long inhabited its neighbourhoods alongside human beings.

    The order provoked widespread opposition from animal-welfare organizations, caregivers and concerned citizens. Critics argued that permanently confining such a large population of dogs was both inhumane and practically impossible, given the shortage of suitable shelters. There was also fear and apprehension about the dogs being indiscriminately killed behind closed doors. Later that month, the original order was modified by the Supreme Court, allowing healthy dogs to be returned to the areas from which they had been taken after they had been sterilized, vaccinated and dewormed. Dogs infected with rabies or exhibiting aggressive behaviour were excluded from this provision. The Court also directed municipal authorities to establish designated feeding areas for community dogs.

     

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    The country’s native breeds have been shaped by different climates, landscapes and working relationships with local communities. Karnataka’s athletic Mudhol Hound, for instance, is well adapted to hot and arid terrain, while the thick-coated Bakharwal has traditionally guarded livestock in the Himalayan region.
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    The controversy prompted a larger conversation about humane methods of managing India’s free-ranging dog population. Alongside demands for sustained sterilization and vaccination programs, more voices began advocating the rescue and adoption of homeless animals. Protests against the order were held not only in New Delhi but also in cities across the country, such as Bengaluru and Mumbai, giving the question of adoption renewed urgency.

    The “adopt, don’t shop” campaign challenges the practice of purchasing pedigree animals from pet stores and unethical breeders when millions of dogs and cats are already in need of homes. Its message has gradually influenced the way some people choose companion animals. Yet adoption in India also requires us to think more carefully about the language used to describe the dogs living on the country’s streets.

    ‘Indie’ is commonly used as an umbrella term for Indian street and community dogs. However, many are mixed-ancestry dogs whose physical characteristics have developed over generations of living in particular environments. At the same time, India is home to numerous distinct native breeds whose individual histories are often obscured by the usage of broad labels.

     

     

    Just as India’s human population cannot be compressed into a single cultural or physical identity, its dogs cannot be adequately represented by one convenient category. The country’s native breeds have been shaped by different climates, landscapes and working relationships with local communities. Karnataka’s athletic Mudhol Hound, for instance, is well adapted to hot and arid terrain, while the thick-coated Bakharwal has traditionally guarded livestock in the Himalayan region. Tamil Nadu’s Rajapalayam and Chippiparai were bred for hunting and protection, while the rare Jonangi, associated with parts of India’s eastern coast, is known for its close relationship with fishing and agricultural communities.

    Many of these indigenous breeds are now endangered or routinely overshadowed by imported pedigree breeds. Educating ourselves about them is therefore not simply a matter of choosing Indian dogs as pets. It is also a way of recognizing that these animals have distinct histories,
    temperaments and relationships with their ecological surroundings, as well as an important place within India’s cultural heritage.

     

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    Street dogs are frequently portrayed either as dangerous animals that must be removed or as helpless creatures dependent entirely upon human charity.
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    In Kolkata, the founders of Sienna Café, Rewant Lokesh and Shuli Ghosh, have set an example by rescuing and adopting three dogs — Nimki (aged two), Nabi (four), and Noori (six). Lokesh describes the dogs as “smart, low-maintenance, easy to train and extremely loyal.” Ghosh observes that many people continue to seek pedigree dogs as pets. But not all hope is lost: she has also noticed more families adopting dogs from their neighborhoods and fostering puppies that have been abandoned or injured.

    Of course, adoption alone cannot resolve India’s ongoing struggle with animal homelessness, dog bites and rabies. It must be accompanied by well-funded sterilization drives, widespread vaccination, responsible waste disposal and accessible veterinary care. But while such challenges exist, every responsible adoption gives an existing animal the security of a home and stands up against a market that treats living beings as products. To adopt rather than shop is not merely the act of rejecting pedigree as a status symbol, as has been the case for so many affluent homes. The practice also helps cement the notion that companionship need not be manufactured when so many animals are already waiting to be chosen. Maybe they are waiting right outside your home!

  • The Multiple Faces Of Indian Cinema

    Everyone immediately recognizes a French film. But what does an Indian cinematic aesthetic look like? Now that answer is far too big, too plural, and too contradictory to fit one scheme.

    Let us first consider French film. That French film has its own distinctive palette is obvious, but it is not because France is culturally singular. Rather, it came about because of the French New Wave movement, a small, cohesive group of filmmakers and critics who first set out a shared theory of cinema: natural light, jump cuts, location shooting, a cool, desaturated urban look, philosophical dialogue instead of plot. The group, including Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, André Bazin, Jacques Demy, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, Chris Marker, was deeply influential. Even sixty years on, filmmakers from Claire Denis to Olivier Assayas to Céline Sciamma are still working within that grammar, either extending it or pushing back against it. That is not ‘French’ culture necessarily; it is the pull of one movement, kept alive because French film culture is small and centralized enough.

     

    Satyajit Ray favored rural landscapes and natural lighting. | in.pinterest.com

     

    India on the other hand, never had one defined canonical film movement. Even though Bollywood’s sweeping influence may suggest a homogenous Indian culture, it represents only a fraction of the totality of the country’s cinema. Instead, India has a series of regional and historical visual dialects — Mughal grandeur, Bengali lyricism, Tamil modernism, Deccan gothic, Bombay maximalism.

    You might think the simple explanation is the country’s immense geographical diversity. You would be right, but that is only one part of a much wider story. Each region has developed its own distinct film tradition — Bengali, Telugu, Malayali — complete with its own circle of critics, financiers and audiences. These traditions have evolved largely in parallel, shaped not only by language but also by distinct theatrical histories and cultural inheritances.

    Bollywood is kitschy and hyperbolic. For example, one of Hindi cinema’s greatest spectacles, Mughal-e-Azam draws its visual grammar from Mughal court painting. Its marble halls, jewel-toned costumes, and candlelit mirrors form an Indo-Persian dreamscape that defined cinematic opulence long before CGI. The film’s grandeur wasn’t just aesthetic; it was architectural, a world was built from the grammar of Mughal architecture itself: symmetry, excess, and devotion.

     

    “
    Mughal-e-Azam draws its visual grammar from Mughal court painting. Its marble halls, jewel-toned costumes, and candlelit mirrors form an Indo-Persian dreamscape that defined cinematic opulence long before CGI.
    ”

     

    Malayalam cinema holds two temperaments at once — Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s slow, decaying feudal Kerala and Lijo Jose Pellissery’s swirling, operatic chaos — yet both speak the same visual language, rooted in ritual, water, and waiting.

    Tamil cinema’s aesthetic has always been more architectural than ornamental — geometry, light, and precision. Mani Ratnam (in films such as Alaipayuthey and Kaatru Veliyidai) made the modern South Indian city cinematic: trains, glass, rain, blue filters, and human intimacy against motion.

    Meanwhile, Bengal’s cinema has always looked like literature feels — rhythmic, intimate, poetic. In Charulata, Satyajit Ray turned Tagore’s 19th-century prose into light and shadow — embroidered curtains, quiet gestures, emotional precision.

    In Tumbbad, a film set in the Deccan region of Maharashtra, the monsoon itself becomes a character. Decaying Maharashtrian mansions collapse under greed; rain and myth mix until you can’t tell which is more alive. This is the Indian Gothic — where darkness is domestic, where horror seeps from architecture and inheritance. Western gothic lives in castles; Indian gothic lives in attics, temples, and forgotten wells.

     

    Mani Ratnam’s earthy tones | in.pinterest.com

     

    To understand Indian cinema visually is to understand that it has no single center. Mumbai glamour, Chennai modernism, Kolkata lyricism, Kerala austerity — each forms a language of image, rooted in geography, history, and art. If French cinema is color-coded precision, Indian cinema is painterly chaos with intent — every excess justified, every stillness loaded.

    For a global audience used to Indian cinema as ‘spectacle,’ the truth is richer: a cinema that moves between temple and nightclub, miniature painting and neon alley, myth and modernism — and somehow makes them all speak the same emotional tongue.

  • Delivering Care On Two Wheels

    Across India’s big and small cities, compact scooties carrying massive boxes, zooming on congested roads and through narrow alleys, are a common sight. A delicious cake is on its way in Benaras, ordered by a sibling or a son in the US, making up for their absence from thousands of miles away. 2 am medicine deliveries with a customized message — “please deliver and check if my parents are okay” — are commonplace on delivery app messages.

    As the little Scooty progresses towards the given address, the sender knows their love is being delivered soon. The delivery partners are the frontmen of our capitalist society’s love language. As personal care is outsourced, the ‘Swiggy lad’ braves heat, rain, cold, and extreme work conditions to deliver a product in about 15 to 20 minutes.

     

    www.pexels.com

     

    They play a big part in urban love stories too. “Sent this because you were upset this morning” or “Enjoy this, I’ll be late for dinner” have become routine acts of love in a fast-paced, pressed-for-time world that would rather send a text or a voice message than pick up the phone and call someone. It means a lot when someone takes the effort to browse the app, order your favourite meal, pay for it, and coordinate with the delivery agent.

    When app-based delivery services started, older Indians were their strongest critics. They ridiculed the idea of paying someone to do household errands. But Covid-19 changed that. People from their 20s to their 70s are now used to the convenience of quick, at-home deliveries. The Indian diaspora makes up a small part of the subscribers, marvelling at the availability of such low-cost delivery services in India and grateful for them, as they let them connect with their families even from miles away.

    What’s interesting is how these algorithm-backed apps, these mega digital operations, are still fronted by a basic human connection. It’s momentary — lasting just as long as the opening and closing of a door. But it’s there. The performance of care is outsourced, not the thought. And the delivery guys become the face of this new social dynamic.

     

    “
    The delivery partners are the frontmen of our capitalist society's love language. As personal care is outsourced, the "Swiggy ka ladka" braves heat, rain, cold, and extreme work conditions to deliver a product in about 15 to 20 minutes.
    ”

     

    There was a time when the vegetable vendor, the ironing man, or the postman played similar roles. They would come in, bring fresh produce or a long-awaited money order, inquire about the family’s well-being, keep a spare key of the house for emergencies, and even water the plants while the family they sold their wares to, was away.

    But as gated communities and strict security checks keep itinerant vendors out, scooty-riding, app-approved delivery partners have replaced them — at the cost of a delivery fee (but no Diwali tip).

     

    unsplash.com

     

    And it is a cost the delivery partners themselves bear the most. Their jobs are not easy. The pressure of on-time delivery is immense. Penalties for delayed delivery can be brutal, and the pay hardly compensates for the hours and effort they put in. Social media glorifies delivery agents for going over and above their call of duty — seeking medical help for someone injured, feeding street dogs, sometimes of their own accord and at times as part of the job. They are perceived and portrayed as care ambassadors. That’s proof they have become an integral part of our social system — and it’s why they get so many eyeballs, and so much interest, in the hard-to-crack, clickbait world too.

  • Spirited Away By Anime

    You notice it in small, familiar ways. You open Netflix for something mindless, and somehow the anime recommendations outnumber everything else. At the bookstore, the manga section has quietly ballooned into its own landscape. Even in everyday conversations, the references slip in: a coworker comparing their work ethic to a Naruto arc, a teenager at the café arguing about the emotional peak of Attack on Titan, a friend admitting that Your Name ruined them more than any live-action film this decade.

    Anime was something a handful of kids watched after school, tucked between Toonami slots and Pokémon reruns. Somewhere between then and now, those after-school curiosities became one of the world’s most widely shared emotional languages. What used to be niche fandom is now mainstream grammar — shaping taste, storytelling, humor, and even how global audiences understand heroism, grief, power, and love.

     

    Anime conventions are sprouting across Tier II and III cities in India. | in.pinterest.com

     

    The scale of that shift is staggering when you look closely. The anime market, valued at over $30 billion in 2023, is projected to climb toward $60 billion by 2030. More than half of that revenue already comes from outside Japan. Netflix says that more than half of its global subscribers, over 150 million households, watch anime. Suddenly it’s not that anime became big; it’s that it quietly became one of the biggest cultural forces in the world.

    And what’s interesting is how different this rise looks compared to the Western giants that defined global animation for decades. Disney’s empire was built on neat morality — fairytales with clear lines, emotional clarity, a formula polished into inevitability.

    Anime grew through a different philosophy entirely. It leans into tonal messiness: grief next to slapstick, 300-episode emotional arcs, worlds that break their own rules but somehow still make emotional sense. Veteran creators of long-running series like Dragon Ball and One Piece often point out that global audiences don’t mind unpredictability; they crave it. The twisty, chaotic anime logic isn’t a hurdle — it’s part of the pleasure.

    What anime understands, perhaps better than any other global form, is that modern audiences are living emotionally complex lives. Western entertainment still defaults to emotional tidiness; anime expects emotional contradiction. It lets its characters be absurd and profound in the same breath. It gives us villains with backstories so tragic they feel inevitable, and heroes who fail for years before they win anything. In an era defined by uncertainty, that elasticity feels truer than the comforting predictability of traditional Western arcs.

     

    “
    Nagpur has created its own cosplay convention while Jaipur, Bhubaneswar, Silchar, Guwahati and Vijayawada are thick with fan communities, perhaps more so than in the metros.
    ”

     

    Japan recognized the power of this aesthetic early. The government’s ‘Cool Japan’ initiative treated anime, manga, and kawaii culture not as fringe entertainment, but as cultural exports worthy of national investment. After World War II, Japan rebuilt its identity, visually and economically, through soft power: cute mascots, charming anthropomorphism, approachable design, and eventually the global emotional worlds of anime.

    The shift from militaristic imagery to gentle iconography wasn’t accidental; it was a rebranding that worked. Kawaii aesthetics softened international perception, and anime gave the world an emotional language rooted in that gentleness.

    But anime’s rise isn’t just about cultural diplomacy — it’s about who is allowed to be a fan. Gender politics shape that conversation quietly. Western culture mocks “Disney adults,” a term almost always aimed at women, coded as childish or unserious. Meanwhile, adult men debating Naruto power levels or crying over One Piece are celebrated with a kind of ironic respect. The asymmetry is telling: women’s fandom is infantilized; men’s fandom is legitimized. Anime complicates that calculus. It offers emotional intensity without stigma, and action without machismo. Even with its own complicated gender tropes, anime bridges a cultural gap Western media has never fully reconciled.

    Then there’s the generational span. Few mediums manage to connect teenagers, millennials, and older fans with equal appeal. But anime does. A 14-year-old diving into Jujutsu Kaisen can bond with a 40-year-old who watched Cowboy Bebop in college. A parent and child can both love Spirited Away, for completely different reasons. Anime carries the rare ability to feel timeless and contemporary at once — often because its emotional logic isn’t age-bound. It speaks to longing, ambition, friendship, existential dread, and resilience in ways that stay relevant across decades.

    Nowhere is that more visible than in India which is now, rather astonishingly, the third-largest anime audience after Japan and USA. The signal isn’t confined to metro multiplexes: when Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle opened in September 2025, it outgrossed every prior anime release in the country within a day and pushed into tier-2 and tier-3 towns that had never booked an animated title before, some cinemas even running 5 a.m. shows once reserved for Bollywood tentpoles.

    This unprecedented crush of cinema-goers was primed by streaming platforms such as Netflix (of course) and Crunchyroll’s catalogue of 800-plus titles. Many of their shows are dubbed in regional languages, further easing accessibility into spaces that might have dismissed such shows earlier. In 2025, a viral wave of Ghibli-style AI art engulfed Indian social media, which didn’t hurt anime’s ambitions either.

     

    Anime merchandise is everywhere! This here is the Ocean Bomb Dragon Ball Super Vegito Apple Flavored Sparkling Water.

     

    Economically, anime has become an ecosystem: games, conventions, films, merchandise, soundtracks, collectibles, cosplays, cafés, streaming subcultures. Nowhere is that more evident than in Tier II and Tier III cities. Nagpur has created its own cosplay convention while Jaipur, Bhubaneswar, Silchar, Guwahati and Vijayawada are thick with fan communities, perhaps even more so than in the metros. Comic Con hosted its first-ever event at Guwahati in November 2025 and then went to Jaipur in January 2026.

    With over 118 million active viewers and a market projected to grow past 13% annually through 2030, India is shifting from consumer to collaborator, with domestic studios already pairing Indian mythology with Japanese animation craft to build homegrown IP for a global audience.

    And while the numbers may inspire surprise, the true marvel comes from the fact that a seemingly disparate narrative tradition has become the center of gravity of Indian cities and towns.

    Anime didn’t achieve that by softening itself for global appeal. It did the opposite. It stayed rooted in Japanese sensibilities — its pacing, its emotional velocity, its aesthetics while trusting that global viewers would meet it halfway. And they did.