If you’ve lived through the pandemic, you’ve probably seen this on your Instagram. A woman bent over in quiet communion with her aloe plant, a man proudly displaying a small basket of tomatoes harvested from his terrace garden.
During the lockdowns, terrace and balcony gardening stopped being a niche hobby and became a default ritual. And what started as a response to confinement quietly settled into a regular hobby, long after those locks were keyed open.
But this isn’t a story just about terrace gardening. Now that life has tumbled back to the rugger-tugger of normalcy, now that we are back to being pressed for time (and money), who really has the time for a hobby?
Pottery, embroidery, and yes, even kitchen gardening (all practices that previous generations of Indian women carried out as part of the slog of their daily life) are now being shown on our phone screens as somewhat elite antidotes to modern living.
Tending to our terrace gardens began as a lockdown hobby. / pexels.com
In fact, such hobbies, ostensibly opposing a capitalist society, have always simply mirrored it. During the Industrial Revolution, the hobby was seen as a productive way for the working classes to spend their leisure time; the privileged classes were convinced that without a virtuous use of their time, workers would descend into – horror of horrors – idleness! Drunkenness! Immoral activities! The hobby became a moralistic, socially-approved task.
Several years later, the economist Thorstein Veblen’s text, The Theory of the Leisure Class, argued that in fact, ruling classes have always distinguished themselves through economically unproductive pursuits, while manual labor remained the task of those they considered ‘below’ them. He called this performance of idleness ‘conspicuous leisure’.
Veblen would have been amused to discover that he is in fact, an Instagram darling today, quoted across reel after reel. Or perhaps he might shudder to see the similarity between our societal and intellectual patterns.
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Pottery, embroidery, and yes, even kitchen gardening (all practices that previous generations of Indian women carried out as part of the slog of their daily life) are now being shown on our phone screens as somewhat elite antidotes to modern living.
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For many Indians nowadays, leisure has been entirely conscripted into work. Today’s gig economy is partly at fault. Contentment is never enough, and so we must strive for more, bigger, better always. Our free time is spent learning AI tools to level up at the office, or working with freelance clients on the weekend, or transforming our pets into Instagram stars. At one time, the biggest flex was to be busy, and what you did in your leisure time would, even indirectly, help build skills that would swell your productivity.
The economy builds a further tier onto this – crippled by rising prices and growing unemployment, do we even have a choice but to hustle?
The rise of pottery as a pleasurable pastime for the privileged / pexels.com
So what does it say then when we see actress and model Manushi Chhillar sharing a video of herself gingerly shaping a pot on a potter’s wheel, in between shoots? Or that Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, has an entire show on Netflix focused on entertaining wealthy friends by color-marbling silk scarves, or crafting elegant floral arrangements with flowers grown in her enviable garden?
Critics who lambasted her show as being out of touch are missing the point. The point is the conspicuous leisure – being able to live the ‘slow life’, to create pretty objects for no noticeable financial gain, to be able to do nothing useful with her spare time. She can afford these pastimes. Can we?
The pottery wheel and the calligraphy brush are not just hobbies. They are announcements. They say: I have discretionary income. I have unscheduled Saturday mornings. I have a home with a terrace.
None of this is to diss on pleasure. To celebrate beauty and profundity, to draw calm from chaos, and to halt the unbearable hurtling of our days often gives us the mental capacity to carry our lives forward. At a time when communication is frequently reduced to chattering heads on screens and meaningless nubs of emojis, old-fashioned social connection is powerful in itself. It is perhaps the essence of human experience. And sometimes, it is all just for fun, and even that is reason enough. But the question remains still – who amongst us today, can afford this?
November 2, 2025: The ICC Cricket World Cup final is played between India and South Africa, at the DY Patil Stadium in Navi Mumbai. For the first time ever, a stadium in India is sold out for a women’s cricket match. 45,000 fans attend. A whopping 185 million people watch from home, as 11 women make history on the pitch.
August 30, 2023: The Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska see a record-breaking 92,000 people flood the stands for a college volleyball match between the Nebraska Cornhuskers and Omaha Mavericks. The Cornhuskers win that match 3-0.
Two nights, two years apart, but both are signals of a recent uptick in the attention given to women’s sport. Once the stadiums would have been dotted with only a few supporters. Now, it finally feels like the whole world is tuning in. Only this time, the attention feels less incidental, and more intentional.
India’s players celebrate with the trophy after winning the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup 2025 in Navi Mumbai
In the US, the shift seems more gradual. A linchpin was the back-to-back FIFA World Cup wins in 2015 and 2019. An American women’s team winning a global tournament tremendously boosted US morale. It helped that since 2019, channels showing the FIFA World Cup, such as the BBC, ensured that more women’s games were broadcast live. The easier the access, the higher the audience; the growth showed on a global scale, with the FIFA Women’s World Cup breaking even on cost in 2023.
In India, the breadth of interest in women’s sports is somewhat more recent (with exceptional exceptions such as track and field athlete, P T Usha), and primarily focused on cricket. India’s watershed moments have been staggered. The last few decades saw feats of boxer MC Mary Kom, badminton player PV Sindhu, shooter Manu Bhaker, and wrestlers Sakshi Malik, and the Phogat sisters.
But it all came to a collective head with a team achievement in winning the 2025 Cricket World Cup. The level of attention soared when India hosted, and subsequently won, the ICC Women’s Cricket World Cup. This was the third time an Indian women’s squad had reached the finals, but the first time that they converted it into a win.
What might have caused such a wide societal transformation? Why now? With strong female role models becoming more prominent in 2010s USA, in fields such as STEM and politics that were male-dominant, it was only a matter of time before sportswomen actively followed suit. Amongst others, the achievements of Serena and Venus Williams on the tennis courts made people sit up and take notice of women’s sports. Up until then, a mere handful of broadcasters and spectators were paying attention to women’s sport.
Another important driver for this growth is the support of younger sports fans, who have grown up with a deep knowledge of gender and racial equity, and expect to see it engendered across sports arenas. But this too, is only part of the explanation; both male and female Boomers watched more women’s sports events at the 2024 Paris Olympics than their younger counterparts.
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In 2022, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) officially announced equal match fees for male and female players for international matches.
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Another narrative that has worked? The local hero making it big. Take the case of Caitlyn Clark, whose draft into the WNBA spiked attendances at both home and away games, with the highest recorded numbers since the WNBA first started in the 1990s. Clark was a college star who rose up the ranks, whose early success made her a generational talent to watch. This Caitlyn Clark effect not only shone the spotlight on other rookies, but also increased the attendance across women’s college sports, especially basketball, with talent scouts hoping to spot the next Clark in the making.
Another example? Harmanpreet Kaur, came from the small town of Moga in Punjab, eventually captaining the Indian Women’s Cricket Team to their first ever World Cup victory.
Sportspersons have long been the flagbearers of a country’s patriotism, with every international contest becoming a matter of national pride. For Indian women, there is an extra layer of sentimentalism. In cricket for example, men are painted as the ‘men in blue’, while women are characterized as ‘Bharat ki beti’ or India’s daughters.
Sentimentality is woven into the fabric of how female athletes are presented. Their humble beginnings, their willingness to play a sport despite the sociocultural opposition, given that women are still largely expected to perform softness (as against the brashness of male sportspersons).
Where both USA and India see parallels is in the recency of visual markers of gender equality on the world stage.
For the US, that marker was the first gender-equal lineup for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. While domestic tournaments had women stepping up and center, more athletes were spotlit on a global stage, cementing the ideals of representation.
India’s Jemimah Rodrigues batting against Bangladesh during the 2020 ICC Women’s T20 World Cup match / commons.wikimedia.org
In India, cricket led the way, as it usually does. In 2022, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) officially announced equal match fees for male and female players for international matches. And the World Cup win led to that mandate being extended to domestic games. For the first time, Indian women realized that being a sportsperson can be a long-term career option, and not just a hobby. A year later came the launch of the Women’s Premier League (WPL), the female version of the Indian Premier League, the most profitable arm of Indian cricket. This injection of lucre into the game has made a world of difference – for one, cricketers now have the best coaches and mentors globally.
Whether in India or in the US though, this exponential growth feels more like grounded reality than a passing trend. Sponsorship numbers are a great showcase of that, reportedly growing 50% faster than those for men. Sponsor confidence is also growing, with 86% claiming that their sponsorship contracts met or exceeded their ROI expectations.
The Indian players have been seen on talk shows, invited onto podcasts, and are the spokespersons for a number of products. In fact, cricketers make up for 78% of the total brand endorsements for sportswomen in India, with the remaining 22% covering a range of sports, from chess to wrestling. The momentum has translated to their domestic gameplay as well, with the Women’s Premier League seeing an enormous increase in viewership between 2023 and 2025. Cultural and commercial significance have come together for the first time.
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The number of sports bars that exclusively or near-exclusively screen women’s sports has ballooned in the US in 2025, proving that interest can be converted into financially-sustainable spaces.
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And the impact is visible. According to a KPMG report, the commercial value of women’s sports in India is projected to reach $900 million by 2030. While 58% of the audience for women’s sports is still men, the stadium crowd shows more families in attendance, setting the stage for long-term loyalty within the fan bases. In the US, three in 10 adults follow women’s sports ardently.
Alongside this swell of commercial support, an entire ecosystem is slowly growing around women’s sports. For instance, the number of sports bars that exclusively or near-exclusively screen women’s sports has ballooned in the US in 2025, proving that interest can be converted into financially-sustainable spaces.
The bottomline? Seeing is believing. Seeing more women in sports more regularly, engaged in solid gameplay, is believing that they have a future, and that more athletes are waiting in the wings, to take the path that’s being blazed for them. With increased accessibility to follow the sports live, there’s an incentive to sustain that interest. Which means that fans continue to look to broadcasters and organizers to be the drivers of making women’s sports easier to watch and follow. The onus of the continued success of women’s sports is on us as consumers. The players have been bringing their A-game, whether or not the world has been watching.
Mira Nair has said that every film she’s made over the past several decades was shaped by the art of Amrita Sher-Gil. “She taught me how to see,” Nair said when she announced Amri, her long-gestating biographical film about the Hungarian-Indian painter. The film wrapped production in May 2026, shot across Amritsar, Budapest, and Paris. The cast is exciting, with Anjali Sivaraman as Sher-Gil, Jaideep Ahlawat as her father, Emily Watson as her Hungarian mother, Jim Sarbh as the critic Karl Khandalavala (who was one of the few people in Sher-Gil’s lifetime who grasped what she was doing) and Priyanka Chopra-Jonas in a supporting role. The film arrives just as sixty of Sher-Gil’s paintings, on loan from the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, are completing their first European tour in nearly two decades, currently at the Drents Museum in the Netherlands, before a global circuit beginning in Paris in 2027, continuing to Los Angeles and Doha.
The intention behind all of this is clearly reverence. But reverence is not the same as understanding, and in Sher-Gil’s case the distance between the two is where the most interesting questions live.
We are living through a cultural moment that mistakes access for understanding. If something has been exhibited, auctioned, streamed, and explained, we tend to assume it has also been seen. Sher-Gil’s paintings propose a different standard. They are not difficult in the way that conceptual art is difficult, requiring decoding. They are difficult in a more fundamental sense. They decline to make themselves easy. They do not reward the kind of attention we have gotten very good at giving, the sort that is fast and appreciative but does not really stick. They ask to be sat with. And sitting with them is something the current cultural machinery surrounding her, from the film and the touring retrospective to the auction records and the forthcoming global circuit is not designed, by its nature, to encourage.
This is not an argument against the film or the exhibitions. It is an argument about what they are for, and what they simply cannot do.
Amrita Sher-gil, Indian modernist artist, 1937
Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest in 1913, to a Sikh aristocrat father and a Hungarian opera singer mother. The family moved to Shimla when she was eight. She began formal art training the same year. By sixteen, she was studying in Paris, first at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, then at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1932, she completed Young Girls, the canvas that won her the gold medal and Associate membership at the Grand Salon in 1933, making her the youngest artist, and the first Asian, to receive the honor. She returned to India in late 1934, carrying sixty canvases and what she described as an ‘intense longing’ not for home exactly, but for a subject matter that Europe could not give her. She died in Lahore on December 5, 1941, eight days before a major solo exhibition was to open. She was twenty-eight years old.
This is the outline of a life that has proven irresistible. Tragic early death, Eurasian identity, and an often-discussed personal life. She was Paris-trained, returning to the subcontinent before it was a country. The narrative almost writes itself, and it has been written many times, with great feeling and reasonable accuracy.
But the outline keeps getting mistaken for the point.
Look at Three Girls, painted in 1935, the first major canvas Sher-Gil completed after returning to India. Three young Punjabi women sit close together, bodies turned slightly inward, gazes averted. Yet, you don’t feel they’re shy. There’s a lingering feeling of something heavier, a sealed-off interiority that the composition both reveals and protects. The palette is warm but not consoling, ochres and earth reds, brown skin rendered without exoticization or false softness. The women are not performing their beauty or their suffering. They are simply there, in possession of a stillness the viewer cannot enter.
Amrita Sher-Gil, Three Girls
Sher-Gil wrote about this body of work with clarity that has not aged well in every respect, “I realized my real artistic mission, to interpret the life of Indians and particularly the poor Indians pictorially; to paint those silent images of infinite submission and patience.” The language is of its era. But notice what the paintings themselves do, which is something more complicated than the statement suggests. The women in Three Girls are not passive. They are not objects of a reformist gaze. They are, in some fundamental sense, withheld. They are kept in a space the viewer is allowed to look into but not enter. This is a formal choice. Whether it was also a moral one is exactly the question the work keeps raising.
Because Sher-Gil was not painting from the ground. She came from an aristocratic family with landed estates. She was educated in Paris, fluent in multiple European languages, and moved through colonial India with a mobility her subjects did not have. Her own letters describe wanting to capture ‘angular brown bodies, strangely beautiful in their ugliness,’ a phrase that, read honestly, sits uncomfortably close to the ethnographic gaze she is often credited with resisting. Scholars have noted that the same class distance that separated colonial photographers from their Indian subjects also separated Sher-Gil from the women she painted. The comparison is not a verdict. It is a question the work itself keeps open.
Which is perhaps also why the paintings remain interesting.
Look at Brahmacharis, completed in 1937 as part of the South Indian trilogy. A group of young male religious students, rendered in the flattened planes and muted ochres that Sher-Gil absorbed from the Ajanta cave murals in Maharashtra, fill a large canvas, nearly five feet tall. Their faces, like those in Three Girls, are turned away or downcast. They do not offer themselves to the viewer. The distance between the painter, a wealthy, European-educated woman looking at mendicant students in a country under colonial rule, and her subjects is not erased by the painting. It is present in the painting, in the careful, almost architectural arrangement of figures who remain, for all the empathy of the brushwork, on the other side of something. The painting neither resolves that distance nor pretends it does not exist. It just holds it.
Brahmacharis by Sher-Gil
That is what makes the work worth serious attention. The tension between Sher-Gil’s formal instinct to give her subjects a sealed interiority and her social position as someone looking across a significant class divide is not a footnote to these canvases. It is alive in them. The question is not whether her privilege invalidates what the paintings do. The question is what becomes visible in the work when we stop trying to answer that question and simply keep both facts in view at once.
During her life, Sher-Gil was largely misunderstood and knew it. She was often criticized for depicting a ‘dark side’ of India, praised more condescendingly for her ‘social concern’. She found both responses beside the point. In 1938, she wrote to Khandalavala: “I can only paint in India. Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque and the rest. India belongs only to me.”
The statement is typically quoted to illustrate confidence, ambition, refusal to be small. But it can also be read as a claim of attention, as if she is saying, “I am the one who is going to look at this, really look at it, and render what I see without flinching and without flattering. This is my subject and I will not share the terms of its representation.”
This is not an argument for dismissing the work. It is an argument for taking it more seriously than the symbol allows.
Within Indian art circles and among those who study modern Indian painting, Sher-Gil has never been obscure. She was declared a National Treasure by the Government of India, is in the permanent collection of the NGMA, has appeared on postage stamps, and is in every serious textbook of the period. Globally, the Drents Museum noted this year that she remains largely unknown to general audiences outside specialist circles, which is why the current touring exhibition matters.
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Which brings us back to Mira Nair, and to what Amri will need to be in order to honor its subject.
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When thinking of Sher-Gil’s work in a global context, the comparison most often reached for is Frida Kahlo. The parallels are obvious, but they can obscure as much as they reveal, and Sher-Gil spent enough of her life being flattened into a type that adding another layer of comparison does her no particular service.
What Sher-Gil is, right now, is in transition. Her work, her memory, and even her legacy is being moved through the film and the exhibitions and the auction attention. It is being moved from the category of ‘important Indian modernist’ into something closer to global icon. This is where the current moment becomes genuinely interesting and genuinely risky.
Iconization gives audiences permission to feel they have encountered an artist without having to reckon with the work. The stamps, the textbooks, and the auction records confirm that Sher-Gil matters. They do not tell us how to sit inside Three Girls until the stillness of those three women begins to feel like a question directed at us. They do not prepare us for the discomfort of Brahmacharis, for what it means to look at a painting that is itself about the act of looking across a distance that cannot be closed. Turning her into an icon smooths over exactly the tensions that make the paintings worth returning to.
Which brings us back to Mira Nair, and to what Amri will need to be in order to honor its subject. A film about a painter is, almost definitionally, a film about a life. The medium insists on narrative, on scene, and on forward motion. It cannot do what the art does, it cannot be still in that way, cannot withhold in that way. What it can do, if it is serious, is make the audience hungry for the paintings. It can use Sher-Gil’s story to create the conditions under which the canvases become necessary rather than decorative.
Amrita Sher-Gil Self-Portrait 7
It can refuse the consolation of the tragic arc and insist instead on the strangeness of the work, on the fact that a twenty-two-year-old’s painting of three Punjabi women contains a formal argument about looking, about privacy, about who gets to be depicted and on whose terms, that has not been settled yet. These are paintings that neither erase nor resolve the distance between painter and subject. They construct a sealed interiority for women who had very little power over how they were seen, while also raising questions about who gets to do that constructing, questions that remain unresolved eighty years later. Hopefully, the film sees that.
Nair is a filmmaker of real intelligence and long commitment to this subject. But the question Amri will need to answer is not whether it is accurate, or beautiful, or moving. No doubt it will be. The question is whether it makes you want to stand in front of the paintings, or whether it replaces them.
In a 1935 canvas not quite three feet tall, three women sit together and say nothing to us. They do not look at us. They were painted by a woman who had more in common with the people who would eventually hang them in museums than with the women depicted in them. And they are still among the most searching images made in twentieth-century Indian art, not because that tension was resolved, but because it was not.
Eighty years of biography, scholarship, exhibitions, and auction records have not settled what these paintings are doing. That is not a failure of attention.
In a rented room in Kota, Rajasthan, a seventeen-year-old from Patna is awake at midnight, studying for the Joint Entrance Examination, the brutally competitive test that is the gateway to India’s elite Indian Institutes of Technology. He has been here eleven months. His parents, a government clerk father and a schoolteacher mother, took out a loan to send him here. The coaching institute charges more than the father earns in a year. On the wall above the desk, the teenager has taped a printout. Not a motivational quote or a photograph of his family. But instead a photograph of the IIT Bombay campus. He has never been to Mumbai.
This is not an unusual story. In many ways, it is the story of modern India. The conviction that technology is the most reliable path upward has proved remarkably resistant to contrary evidence, held so firmly it has outlasted the layoffs, the AI disruption, and every data point that complicates it. To understand why, you have to understand that the dream was never really about technology.
The Architecture of an Aspiration
It begins with Jawaharlal Nehru.
After Independence, India’s first prime minister was explicit about what engineers were for. Speaking at the very first convocation of IIT Kharagpur in 1951, Nehru described the new institute as a “fine monument of India, representing India’s urges, India’s future in the making.” He had modeled the IITs on MIT after a visit in 1949, and envisioned them as the cornerstone of a post-colonial nation proving itself through technology. Engineering was not a career choice. It was civic participation.
That idea calcified into culture. Nearly 47 percent of Indian students aspire to become engineers. The phrase mera beta engineer banega (“my son will become an engineer”) is so embedded in the cultural lexicon that it functions simultaneously as a parental dream, social pressure, and a national cliché. The 2009 Bollywood film 3 Idiots, which remains one of the highest-grossing Indian films ever made, is a firm condemnation of a contemporary education system criticized for its constrictive and stressful nature, one blamed for increasing student suicides. The film also became a sensation in China, where its portrayal of educational pressure resonated deeply with audiences. The film’s most devastating joke is a throwaway line where a pregnant woman muses that her child will inevitably be either a doctor or an engineer, depending, naturally, on the child’s gender. Seventeen years on, people still quote it. The system it critiques is still largely intact.
IIT Kharagpur / in.pinterest.com
The reason is not irrationality. It is history.
The parents who pushed their children toward engineering in the 1990s and 2000s were making a rational bet. IT was one of the very few sectors in India offering global-scale salaries, relative job security, and a clear path into the middle class. Those bets paid off. A generation of engineers bought apartments, educated their children, and became the social proof that their communities needed to believe the path was real. The inheritance of ambition is not irrational. It is, in fact, quite a logical response to living memory of what worked.
But those children, the generation now entering the workforce, are inheriting ambitions formed under different conditions. The world they are entering has AI rewriting job descriptions in real time, a tech sector that lays off thousands in a quarter and hires them back the next, and an H-1B pathway to America that is politically contested in ways it never was before.
The Numbers the Dream Ignores
2025 was one of the most turbulent years in India’s technology sector. Tata Consultancy Services cut nearly 12,000 employees. Startups shed an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 jobs. Surveys show that 67 percent of engineers fear AI will take their roles, and that 60 percent of engineering graduates are considered unemployable by industry standards. The Aspiring Minds assessment found that only around 10 percent of Indian IT graduates can write code that a machine can actually execute.
That last number requires a pause. India produces hundreds of thousands of engineering graduates every year. The coaching industry that funnels students toward the IITs generates approximately ₹6,500 crore in annual revenue. Kota alone hosts over 250,000 students at its peak, in a city whose entire economy is built on exam preparation. And yet, a comprehensive skills assessment found that fewer than one in ten of the graduates this system produces can do basic programming.
What the system has actually created, then, is a two-tier reality. At the very top, the IITs, the NITs, the handful of elite institutions, it produces engineers of genuine global caliber. Of the roughly one million students who appear for the JEE each year, only around 10,000 are admitted to the 23 IITs. That is one percent. Below that narrow apex lies an enormous second tier. Millions of students who attended engineering college, earned the credential, and emerged without the skills the said credential was supposed to signify. The dream is real at the top. At scale, it is largely a sorting factory.
Even so, Kota’s enrollment bounced back in 2026, with coaching centers reporting 20 to 30 percent increases in admissions after a dip in 2023 and 2024. The dream, it turns out, is not particularly interested in the news cycle.
What the IIT Produces (What It Doesn’t)
The deepest irony of India’s tech obsession lies in the gap between what the IIT represents and what it actually delivers to the country.
Consider the diaspora. Indians account for approximately 71 percent of all H-1B visas issued in the United States. That is 2,83,000 in fiscal year 2024 alone, compared to 47,000 for the next-highest country, China. This is a structural dominance of a specific pipeline. The rise of the Indian tech diaspora was not simply a story of individual achievement. It coincided with a period when America’s expanding software industry was actively recruiting technical talent. From the Y2K era through the dot-com boom and beyond, the H-1B visa became a key pathway into that workforce. Indian engineers became one of the largest beneficiaries of that demand.
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The deepest irony of India's tech obsession lies in the gap between what the IIT represents and what it actually delivers to the country.
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Today, Sundar Pichai leads Alphabet, Satya Nadella leads Microsoft, Arvind Krishna leads IBM, and Shantanu Narayen leads Adobe. The roster of Indian-origin CEOs at the apex of American technology reads like a convocation list.
These figures function in India less as biographies than as parables. They are held up not as exceptions but as proofs of concept. They signal that the system works, the path is real, and the visa is the threshold. What is less visible in that telling is the scaffolding behind each success, the years in Kota, the family loans, the millions who sat the same exam and did not make it. Over time, what began as a labor pipeline evolved into something more powerful in the Indian imagination. It became evidence that the path worked.
And then there are the harder questions the parables just don’t answer. India produces the CEOs of the world’s most powerful technology companies, but not the companies themselves. India spends 0.65 percent of its GDP on research and development, compared to 2.4 percent in China and 3.5 percent in the United States. One analysis put it plainly, ‘India’s IT industry was built to deliver software services, not to invent.’ TCS, Infosys, and Wipro, the companies that helped create that demand for engineers in India and effectively built the Indian middle class, turned Bengaluru into a global destination. But they were made for execution, not origination. They scaled what worked. They delivered what clients asked for. They optimized. They did not, for the most part, create.
This is a direct consequence of the same cultural logic that fills Kota every year. The system that rewards exam performance over curiosity, credential over risk, and stability over failure is the same system that produces brilliant executives for other people’s companies while struggling to produce a Nvidia of its own. Liberalization opened markets, and the fastest path to growth lay in services. As one analysis observed, ‘frontier technology asks for long horizons and uncertain payoffs. It demands that money be spent before results are visible and that failure be accepted not as an aberration but as a necessary stage.’ That is beginning to change. In India’s major cities, startup failure is increasingly treated as a rite of passage rather than a source of shame. Founders now publicly announce closures, return investor money, and move on in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But a founder from Benaras tells us, “In Tier-II and Tier-III cities, the stigma still exists. It’s not as bad as it once was, but it’s there. The cultural permission to fail productively has not yet reached us. But the truth is you cannot build an Apple or a Nvidia or an OpenAI without it.”
Why Has AI Disruption Not Changed the Math?
Nearly 64 percent of Indian IT firms integrated generative AI tools in 2025. One report estimates that 640,000 low-skilled service jobs in the sector are at risk from automation, while only 160,000 mid- to high-skilled positions will be created to replace them. The math is not encouraging. The sector that has historically absorbed India’s engineering graduates is slowly reducing its need for exactly the kind of engineers the coaching industry mass-produces each year.
And yet the NASSCOM numbers reveal something counterintuitive. Direct tech sector employment is projected to reach approximately 6 million in fiscal year 2026, up 2.3 percent, with a net addition of 135,000 employees. Even in a year of structural disruption and high-profile layoffs, the industry added jobs. The sector is simultaneously contracting in some roles and expanding in others, a volatility that looks, at least from the outside, like chaos, but which, over time, still trends upward.
Perhaps that is the fact that keeps the dream alive. On aggregate, tech keeps winning. It does not win for everyone, and the cost in wasted potential, family debt, and in the most devastating cases, student lives, is enormous. But the aggregate keeps trending upward, and aspiration, once it becomes cultural and braided into identity, does not respond to individual tragedies. It responds to the aggregate.
What This Has to Do With The US
Americans are living through their own version of this story. A generation raised to believe that college was the reliable ladder has discovered that the ladder has become very expensive and leads to a labor market that no longer reliably rewards what it once did. The disruption is one American workers are anxiously tracking. AI replacing roles, the hollowing out of middle-skill jobs, and the sense that credential and effort no longer produce stability are all also already inside India’s tech sector. It’s just further along.
What India offers, then, is a story about itself. But zoom out and it is also an early preview. The question of what happens when a society’s most powerful aspiration outpaces its economy’s ability to fulfill that aspiration. Then, it is not uniquely Indian. It is merely more visible there, more extreme, more accelerated.
Vibrant Academy / in.pinterest.com
No Clean Answers
Back in the room in Kota, the teenager with the IIT Bombay printout knows, on some level, the contradictions of the world he is trying to enter. The dream is not delusional. India’s tech sector expanded from $118 billion in revenue in 2015 to an estimated $283 billion in 2025. The engineers who left for Silicon Valley and now write the next chapter of AI are not inventions. The path is real, even if it is narrow.
The problem is not that the dream is false. It is that the dream has been scaled to serve far more people than it can accommodate. And the machinery for managing that gap, the cultural permission to try something else, to redefine success, to fail without shame, and perhaps most urgently, to build something that the world has never seen before rather than execute what others have already imagined, is still catching up.
Until it does, the lights stay on in Kota. The printout stays on the wall.
A young Indian woman stands in London, blonde-streaked hair, cigarette in hand, barely able to recall a word of Hindi. By the film’s end, she has poured her liquor down the drain, draped herself in a saree, and rediscovered her roots. That is the arc of Preeti in Manoj Kumar’s Purab Aur Paschim (1970) and it tells you nearly everything you need to know about how India once regarded its diaspora.
Fast-forward 25 years. In Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), a swaggering NRI named Raj romps across Europe, flirts his way through Switzerland, and winds up in a Punjab mustard field. He is charming, cosmopolitan, and impeccably desi at heart. No redemption arc required for he was never lost to begin with.
The distance between these two characters is cinematic, but it is also the story of how India reimagined itself, its relationship with the wider world, and the Indians who chose to live in it. At the heart of that story is a surprisingly simple idea: the NRI, for decades, was not a person on screen so much as a form of proof. Proof that India could travel. Proof that its identity could survive the world. What that proof needed to look like has changed enormously and tracing those changes tells you more about India than about any NRI who ever actually lived abroad.
Purab Aur Pachhim / in.pinterest.com
The Cautionary NRI: Post-Independence to the 1980s
In the decades following Independence, the NRI on screen was less a figure of aspiration than one of warning. Films like Purab Aur Paschim presented life abroad as a moral test, one that many Indians were failing. Preeti, raised in London by a father who has grown contemptuous of his homeland, doesn’t merely lack Indian values. She has actively traded them for Western ones. The film’s resolution with her full embrace of Indian tradition functions as cultural restoration. The foreign land had corrupted her and only India could make her whole again.
This was not a mere coincidence of storytelling. This reflected the anxieties of a newly independent nation still defining itself in relation to a colonial past and the cultural influence of the West. India’s socialist-leaning economy in those decades was built on self-reliance and insularity. It was swadeshi (which literally translates to ‘of one’s own country’) in both commerce and culture. In that context, the Indian who left for the West was not admirable. They were, at best, a cautionary tale. At worst, they were deserters. Academic analyses of the film have noted that earlier Bollywood treated the diaspora through what one researcher called “the disparaging gaze of a ‘deserter’.” The NRI’s potential for cultural contamination had to be contained, reversed, or punished.
Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham / in.pinterest.com
The Liberalization Fantasy: 1991 and Everything After
Everything changed in 1991, when India dismantled its protectionist economic model and opened its doors to foreign capital, global brands, and a new vocabulary of aspiration. Suddenly, the world felt proximate. International mobility became something to chase, not fear.
Bollywood moved quickly. Netflix’s The Romantics (2023), which features the first on-camera interview with filmmaker Aditya Chopra, offers a telling piece of context here. The son of legendary director Yash Chopra and the creative force behind DDLJ, Chopra helped redefine how Bollywood imagined the diaspora. Director Smriti Mundhra, herself an NRI who grew up in the US, describes Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) as “a direct reflection of the diaspora and the world we live in”, noting that for her generation of Indians abroad, it was the first Hindi film that truly spoke to them. That reception was deliberate. DDLJ arrived at the precise moment when a growing diaspora audience was hungry to see itself on screen, not as a cautionary figure in need of cultural rescue, but as someone who could belong to both worlds at once. The shift was a creative decision grounded in a changed audience and a changed country.
By the mid-1990s, the NRI had been entirely recast. Alongside DDLJ, films like Pardes (1997) and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) introduced a new archetype, one of someone who is wealthy, globally mobile, Western in style, but irreducibly Indian in values. These characters lived in sprawling London homes and traveled freely across continents, but they wept at the sound of a Punjabi folk song and placed tradition above personal desire.
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The NRI's potential for cultural contamination had to be contained, reversed, or punished.
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Crucially, scholars have observed that the two films approached this balancing act differently. Where DDLJ proposed that Indian identity was a ‘portable asset’ that could survive migration intact, Pardes suggested that cultural loss was ultimately unavoidable, only postponed. The anxiety of the earlier era had not fully disappeared. It had simply been made romantic.
What DDLJ did, though, was shift the moral center. Raj is not rewarded for rebelling against tradition. In fact, he is rewarded for respecting it. His entire mission is to win not just Simran, but her father’s blessing. The emotional climax of the film is not a flight into modernity, it is a quest for family approval. While the geography had changed, the value system had not. The message, received by millions across India and in the diaspora, was reassuring. It said that you could leave home without losing it.
What the NRI Represented to India
To understand why this fantasy landed so powerfully, you have to understand what the NRI meant to the Indian watching from home.
The NRI of 1990s Bollywood was aspirational on multiple levels. At the most obvious, it represented wealth and mobility at a time when international travel was still rare and ‘foreign-returned’ still carried a certain halo. But success in London or New York carried symbolic weight beyond economics alone. These were cities that occupied a privileged place in the Indian imagination after centuries of colonial entanglement. To succeed there was to answer something. But to thrive there, on your own terms, while remaining recognizably Indian, that was the deeper fantasy. The NRIs in these films weren’t aspirational because they were just wealthy. They were aspirational because they felt like vindication.
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge / in.pinterest.com
This is why, as one analysis of DDLJ put it, the NRI was transformed from “the marginal outsider” into “not just a possible Indian national subject, but possibly one of its best.” In a decade when India was renegotiating its place in the world, the glamorous, rooted NRI offered a comforting narrative of national confidence.
What these films didn’t show was equally telling. The Bollywood NRI of the 1990s never dealt with visa rejections or immigration queues. They were never subjected to racial microaggressions, or if racism appeared at all, it was cartoonishly overt, easier to dismiss than the ambient, grinding kind that real diaspora Indians described experiencing. There were no student loans, no identity crises, and no painful silences at the dinner table where one generation spoke a language the other had half-forgotten. As one British-Indian viewer told us, real prejudice “is a lot more subtle and usually communicated through microaggressions.” “It’s nothing like the cinematic version. It’s somehow worse,” they added.
The screen NRI was not a portrait. It was a projection. And projections, by design, leave the difficult parts out.
The Quiet Shift: 2010s and Beyond
By the 2010s, the old anxieties had begun to soften. Global mobility was no longer a novelty for India’s growing middle class. International education, travel, and careers had become familiar realities rather than remote fantasies. India’s cultural confidence, its sense of itself as a significant global presence, had also grown considerably. So, aspiration no longer pointed exclusively outward.
The films registered this shift subtly but unmistakably. English Vinglish (2012) uses America not as an ideological destination but as a backdrop for one woman’s journey toward self-worth. The question of whether an Indian woman can survive contact with the West doesn’t arise. It’s taken for granted. What the film asks instead is quieter and more personal. It asks if she can survive her own family’s indifference to who she is.
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While the geography had changed, the value system had not… It said that you could leave home without losing it.
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Zoya Akhtar’s films push this further. In Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) and Dil Dhadakne Do (2015), characters move through global spaces with the ease of people who have always belonged there. International mobility is neither extraordinary nor threatened. The old binary, India versus the West, tradition versus modernity, all of it seems to have largely dissolved. What remains is a more layered, less anxious understanding of identity. One that is fluid, geographically unmoored, and unburdened by the need to prove anything to anyone.
More recently, films like Kapoor & Sons (2016) have quietly abandoned the fantasy altogether, presenting diaspora characters whose struggles are psychological and familial rather than cultural. The NRI is no longer a symbol. They are, finally, just a person.
Every Era Gets the NRI It Needs
The trajectory of Bollywood’s NRI, from a cautionary figure to a glamorous proof of Indian possibility to ordinary human beings, tracks something larger than cinema. It tracks how a country’s self-image changes as its circumstances do.
A socialist India, slightly weary of the West and intent on self-definition, needed the NRI to be a warning. A liberalizing India, newly hungry for the world and anxious about what it might cost, needed the NRI to be a reassurance. A more confident India, less obsessed with proving herself, no longer needs the NRI to be a symbol. It can simply be a person.
The Bollywood NRI was never really a portrait of the diaspora. It was a way for India to imagine herself and negotiate the questions that globalization was raising, all through the language of romance and spectacle. What do we keep? What do we trade? Who are we when the world comes closer? Those questions mattered enormously to a generation navigating an opening India without a roadmap, and the NRI, glamorous and rooted and improbably uncomplicated, offered one kind of answer.
As India changed, so did the fantasy. And perhaps that is why the NRI feels less central today. Not because the films failed, but because the questions that once made the character so powerful no longer carry the same urgency. The work is largely done. The mirror has been put down.
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.
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Formal finance still feels like a private club with a strict dress code. Social media feels like you can walk in wearing pajamas.
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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.
Open Temu and you are not immediately asked to buy something. You are asked to spin a wheel, claim a reward, watch a countdown, and share a link. The interface feels closer to a casual game than a marketplace, where participation comes before intent and value is unlocked through progression.
What looks like shopping is closer to training. The system does not persuade, it conditions your behaviour through participation. Temu’s rise is often explained through cheap prices and aggressive advertising, but that explanation misses what distinguishes the platform. It blurs the boundary between commerce and play, turning shopping into a system where rewards, urgency, and progression shape behaviour alongside price. What can look like novelty is better understood as a shift in how persuasion operates, embedded directly into interaction rather than delivered as a message.
Gamification is not new, but here it is no longer a layer that separates it from other aspects of our lives. Now, it is the system. Discounts are earned through participation, progression unlocks value, and attention becomes the currency that precedes money.
This works because games operate on a different logic than advertising. Traditional ads interrupt, they ask to be noticed, judged, and resisted. Games organise behaviour. Progress depends on returning, repeating, and completing actions, and over time those actions stop feeling like choices and start feeling like movement. And so when shopping is structured this way, the decision to buy feels like an end of that movement.
Temu is not alone in this approach. TikTok Shop folds buying directly into scrolling, blending entertainment and commerce into the same gesture. Shein-style interfaces rely on countdowns, points, and reward ladders that keep users moving through the app. Even airline and delivery platforms now use progress bars, limited-time perks, and visual milestones to structure behaviour. While the specifics differ, the logic is the same. When participation comes first, conversion tends to follow.
The mechanics are visible, often even obvious. But visibility does not make them neutral. The question is not whether users understand the system. It is whether understanding changes how they behave inside it.
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"Traditional ads interrupt, they ask to be noticed, judged, and resisted. Games organise behaviour."
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There is also an economic logic at work. Gamified spaces rely on users spending time, attention, and effort before spending money. Each interaction generates data, reach, and momentum for the platform. The reward might be a small discount or bonus, but the value extracted compounds. Participation drives growth, and growth strengthens the system that keeps users moving through it.
This helps explain why advertising now looks less like persuasion and more like environment. Platforms no longer rely primarily on telling stories or making claims. They shape the conditions in which decisions are made. When those conditions feel playful, resistance softens without needing to be confronted.
Temu’s success points to a future where retail feels less like browsing and more like progression. The store becomes something to move through rather than something to consult, and buying becomes the outcome of participation rather than its starting point.
This does not necessarily mean consumers are being tricked. The mechanics are visible. But visibility does not make them neutral. Design shapes behaviour whether or not users are conscious of it. When shopping is structured as a game, value shifts. It is no longer only about what you buy, but how you are encouraged to keep moving.
What Temu ultimately shows is not that people prefer games to shopping, but that the two have become difficult to separate. In a crowded digital economy, the product is no longer just the item itself, but everything moves you toward it. Advertising has not disappeared, it has been absorbed into spaces that no longer need to ask.
On a weekday morning in New York, the subway car settles into its usual choreography. Headphones in. Eyes lowered. Everyone practises a small, private neutrality to get through the day. Then someone glances up and frowns. A poster, bold, smug, a little too pleased with itself, has broken the spell. Faces follow the gaze, a ripple of annoyance travels down the carriage, and for a moment strangers are united by a single, shared reaction.
The ad has succeeded. Not because people liked it, but because they couldn’t ignore it.
Ragebait used to belong to political campaigns or the murkier corners of the internet. Now it’s creeping into beauty ads, grooming brands, tech startups, sparkling-water companies, places that once sold pleasure or convenience. And that shift isn’t accidental. It’s a clue to the emotional climate of American public life, and to the new tactics brands are using to cut through a landscape thick with noise.
Provocation has become a design choice. Marketers may not call it ragebait, but the vocabulary is unmistakable: “disrupt the scroll,” “spark conversation,” “stop people in their tracks.” It’s the language of rupture, not persuasion.
This approach works because irritation is more legible than charm. Charm takes effort; irritation is instant. Digital platforms long ago taught brands that strong emotions travel fastest, and anger, even mild anger, generates reactions. Reactions keep content circulating.
Provocation has become a design choice | Image Credit: Anthony Hortin on Unsplash
Circulation becomes visibility. And visibility is the currency that every brand is scrambling for.
What’s new is how this digital logic is spilling into the physical world. The subway has become a testing ground for emotional disruption. You’re captive. You’re overstimulated. Your guard is down. A provocative poster doesn’t feel playful. It feels like an intrusion. And that’s precisely why advertisers place it there.
Walk through any major American city and you can sense the shift. Once, public advertising aimed to entertain or inform. Now it often aims to interrupt. The mood mimics the internet — quick, reactive, slightly abrasive. Public space begins to feel less like a commons and more like a comment section.
The effect is subtle but cumulative. Irritation becomes ambient. The day begins with a small jolt of friction rather than ease. Not enough to push anyone over the edge, but enough to raise the emotional temperature by a degree or two.
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In a landscape where calm is scarce, irritation becomes oddly efficient. A shortcut to visibility. A cheap emotional spike. Brands aren’t creating the exhaustion; they’re capitalising on it.
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This isn’t about sensitivity. It’s about the atmosphere. When brands treat everyday life as raw material for agitation, the commute becomes a site of emotional extraction. The poster isn’t merely selling a product. It’s shaping the emotional texture of the morning.
The cost to brand identity? The strategy delivers attention, but attention is not loyalty. This is the quiet paradox of ragebait: a brand can win the moment and lose the meaning.
If a company irritates you into remembering them, they become associated with irritation — not trust, not aspiration, not desire. Even if people don’t consciously reject the product, they mentally downgrade the brand. The emotional temperature sticks to the name.
The long-term danger is erosion. Warmth disappears. Coherence dissolves. Consumers may recall the punchline but not the product. And gimmicks rarely scale. What provokes today becomes wallpaper tomorrow, and suddenly the brand has trained its audience to expect stunts rather than substance.
Provocation is incredibly easy to copy and nearly impossible to own. When every brand starts raising its voice, no one stands out. The volume goes up, but the meaning drains out.
It’s tempting to blame algorithms or generational habits, but the deeper cause is cultural fatigue. Americans are overwhelmed by the sheer velocity of stimuli — alerts, feeds, notifications, headlines, ads stitched onto every inch of public and private space.
In a landscape where calm is scarce, irritation becomes oddly efficient. A shortcut to visibility. A cheap emotional spike. Brands aren’t creating the exhaustion; they’re capitalising on it. But desperation is not a strategy.
Campaigns are being built on gentleness instead of aggression | Image Credit: Olena Kamenetska on Unsplash
Every emotional cycle has a counter-cycle, and small signs of a cultural correction are emerging. People seek quieter retail spaces, restaurants with no screens, hotels that emphasise stillness, even “silent flights.” The desire is not only for escape but for clarity. Calm becomes a commodity.
Some brands are already leaning into this shift. Campaigns built on gentleness instead of aggression. Long-form storytelling instead of short-term shock. A return to consistency rather than spectacle.
The cultural pendulum is moving toward relief — brands that lower the temperature rather than raise it. Not purity, not nostalgia, but something subtler: the pleasure of not being yelled at by your own commute.
Ragebait advertising isn’t a trend so much as a symptom. It reveals something about the current American mood: overstimulated, emotionally thin-skinned from too much noise, and increasingly attuned to disruption as the default instead of the exception.
When public ads adopt the tone of online conflict, the boundaries between physical and digital life blur. We start to inhabit the same emotional posture everywhere — reactive, watchful, slightly on edge.
Subways have always been cultural barometers. They show you the city’s preoccupations long before the city can name them. Today they tell us something subtle but important: irritation has become ambient. Not explosive, not dramatic, just a faint, steady buzz.
And if that buzz becomes the norm, it’s worth asking who benefits, who adapts, and what emotional costs we’ve quietly agreed to pay.
For most of urban history, waiting was the one thing everyone shared. Passengers stood in the same lines, commuters sat in the same rows of plastic chairs, and departure boards dictated the same uncertain rhythm for everyone. That uniformity is beginning to fracture.
Today, waiting is no longer just something to get through. It is something increasingly shaped, designed, and, in many cases, sold. From airport lounges bundled with premium credit cards to metro systems introducing controlled waiting zones and amusement parks replacing queues with timed entry, the pause before movement is becoming a managed experience.
What used to be a neutral stretch of time is now one of the clearest indicators of access, infrastructure, and intent. If you want to understand how movement works today, it helps to look at how the world waits.
The new architecture of the pause
The contemporary airport lounge didn’t begin as a cultural symbol. Early airline lounges were exclusive spaces designed for premium passengers, offering comfort, privacy, and status. Over time, they expanded and softened, becoming more widely accessible through credit cards, memberships, and loyalty programs. Today, it is one of the most recognizable interiors on the planet. Airlines and credit-card companies market it as an experience. Carriers like Emirates and Singapore Airlines design their lounges as extensions of their brand, with curated dining and quiet zones. At the same time, credit-card networks like American Express have expanded lounge access through their Centurion Lounges, positioning waiting itself as a premium benefit.
With its comfortable seating, muted sound, controlled temperature, and a manufactured sense of calm, these spaces are designed to interrupt the chaos outside and offer a curated pocket of time. It’s almost as if it’s telling you to step briefly into a world where nothing demands your attention (except, of course, finding your gate).
Homes and offices around the world now borrow the same visual vocabulary with curved sofas, diffused lamps, and warm neutrals. Airport lounge style has become one of the fastest-spreading interior trends globally. The idea is not to mimic an entire airport, but to recreate the emotional tone of one particular room within it. What it signals is control. People are not trying to fill waiting time, but to shape how it feels.
Waiting as design
Across cities, the blueprint of waiting is being rewritten. In metros and subways, platforms are becoming cleaner and better lit, with designated waiting zones, leaning rails, screens, and soundscapes designed to reduce stress. In train stations, modernization has taken the form of lounges, rest pods, charging kiosks, and temperature-controlled waiting areas. In airports, waiting is a choreography of experience from the moment you enter the terminal to the moment you reach your boarding gate.
Even amusement parks have reimagined waiting. Disney’s Genie+ system and virtual queues at parks like Disneyland and Universal Studios stagger entry times and replace physical lines with timed access. Attractions now include interactive corridors and pre-show environments, turning the wait into part of the experience.
India’s hybrid waiting culture
India is one of the few places where two modes of waiting coexist so visibly. On railway platforms, waiting is communal. People sit in clusters, vendors weave through the crowds, and time moves with a kind of ambient rhythm. Yet, at the same stations, IRCTC executive lounges now offer curated silence, plush chairs, and filtered lighting. Metros in Delhi and Mumbai have introduced premium waiting zones, cleaner seating, and digital displays that provide real-time updates, reducing uncertainty and making waiting feel more predictable. This duality is as contradictory as it is revealing. It shows a society negotiating between older collective rhythms and newer aspirational ones.
But access to these designed forms of waiting is uneven. Premium lounges, fast-track queues, and membership-based spaces are often gated by cost, status, or access to credit systems. What looks like a cultural shift is also a stratification of experience, where some people wait in curated calm, and others continue to wait in noise, heat, and uncertainty.
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“Lounge-core” has become one of the fastest-spreading interior trends globally.
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The speed of digital adoption has accelerated this shift. In India, UPI transactions now exceed 22 billion a month, reflecting how quickly everyday exchanges are completed. As payments, ticketing, and navigation move onto mobile systems, many of the small, functional waits that once structured daily life begin to disappear. What remains is not the need to wait, but the experience of it, which is increasingly shaped, designed, and, in some cases, sold.
The American contrast
American waiting spaces reveal a different story. Train stations like Penn Station and Union Station are being renovated, but they still reflect the practical, often underfunded and utilitarian spirit of public infrastructure. New York’s subway system remains largely uncurated. Airports, however, tell a contrasting tale. They have become stages for atmosphere. Lounge networks expand. Architectural overhauls reimagine terminals as calm corridors of motion. The divergence shows how waiting reflects not just design choices, but broader priorities around public infrastructure, investment, and who these spaces are built for.
When waiting becomes something you choose
As waiting became designed, it became something people began to optimize rather than simply endure. People may not choose to wait, but they increasingly choose how they wait when given the option. The shift suggests that people may not choose to wait, but they increasingly choose how they wait when given the option. Membership cultures accelerated this with their credit cards, airline apps, metro passes, and digital wallets. All of them promise smoother transitions, quieter spaces, and cleaner pauses.
It explains why airports now compete on ambience, why metro redesigns prioritize wayfinding (clear signage and navigation) and light, why homes adopt lounge aesthetics, and why hotel lobbies resemble living rooms. Modern retail is built around ‘dwell time’. Even hospitals, clinics, and banks now redesign their waiting spaces to manage the emotional texture of the pause.
The shared global shift
The most striking thing is how consistent this trend is across continents. Doha, Delhi, Singapore, Tokyo, New York, Lagos, Dubai, each does it differently, but the underlying instinct remains the same. The world is redesigning its pauses. Time, not speed, is becoming the competitive edge.
In the coming years, the biggest questions about movement may be about not just how fast we travel, but also how we spend the time before we do. Climate, migration, digital payments, urban design, and work patterns will change how cities handle the moments between motion.
A decade ago, global entertainment followed a familiar pattern. A small group of countries produced most of the mainstream shows that traveled around the world, and most of those shows were in English. Translation existed, but it was secondary. For mainstream television and film distribution, subtitles were often treated as a courtesy and dubbing as an afterthought. Cultural influence moved outward from a narrow center, and everyone else adapted to it. This is how shows like Friends and FullHouse became household names across the world in the 1990s and early 2000s, building devoted subcultures far from the places they were made.
That arrangement held as long as distribution stayed limited and production budgets remained relatively manageable for broadcasters and studios. By the mid-2010s, both conditions started to collapse. In January 2016, Netflix expanded into more than 130 new countries in a single move, abruptly widening the potential reach of any show it carried. At the same time, the cost of producing flagship domestic originals rose sharply. Translation stepped into that pressure point, and the economics of global storytelling shifted around it.
Online platforms learned quickly that international titles offered a different kind of return. A series like Money Heist made this obvious. It began as a modestly performing Spanish show and was cancelled by its original broadcaster in 2017. Once Netflix acquired, translated, and pushed it across markets, it found large audiences in Europe, Latin America, and eventually Asia and the Middle East. By 2021, Netflix reported that more than 180 million households had watched the series globally. What mattered wasn’t that it became a hit everywhere at once. It was that language stopped limiting where a story could go.
A still from Narcos | Image Credit: IMDb
From a platform’s perspective, the logic was simple. Original shows were expensive and risky. International titles, once translated well, traveled cheaply and kept viewers engaged longer. Subtitles and dubbing stopped being support functions and became central to growth strategy. Netflix executives later confirmed this shift in scale, noting that in 2021 alone the company subtitled roughly seven million minutes of content and dubbed more than five million minutes globally. Naturally, translation budgets rose, dubbing pipelines expanded, and release schedules began to assume global circulation from day one.
Viewer behavior increasingly reflected this shift. A YouGov survey found that 72 percent of viewers in India were open to watching foreign-language content, while industry reports tracked rapid growth in dubbed-content consumption across streaming platforms. Estimates from the early 2020s projected India’s dubbed-content market to grow by over 60 percent as platforms expanded multilingual distribution.
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Influence now travels through subtitlers, dubbing artists, and release schedules rather than diplomats.
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That shift changed how creators worked. As translation became reliable, the incentive to mimic Anglo-American storytelling weakened. Writers and directors from the Global South no longer needed to flatten their work to feel ‘exportable’. A Korean legal drama like Extraordinary Attorney Woo leaned heavily into local workplace hierarchies, social rhythms, and cultural cues and still became one of Netflix’s most-watched non-English series globally in 2022. Nollywood followed a similar pattern. Nigerian films did not need shared history or linguistic familiarity to build viewers abroad once subtitles and dubbing lowered the barrier to entry.
Distinctiveness became an asset rather than a risk. Translation allowed stories to carry their own cultural density without being rewritten for an imagined global norm.
Audiences adapted just as quickly. Once platforms began releasing high-quality subtitled and dubbed versions simultaneously, viewers started exploring work from regions they had rarely encountered before. This shift became unmistakable between 2019 and 2021. Parasite crossed $250 million at the global box office after winning the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award, while Squid Game reached more than 1.65 billion hours viewed in its first 28 days on Netflix, becoming the platform’s most-watched series at the time. What began as curiosity turned into habit. Anime had already demonstrated parts of this shift years earlier, building massive international fandoms through subtitled distribution long before global streaming platforms consolidated.
Viewers learned how to watch across languages. They learned to follow emotion, pacing, and genre conventions without full cultural familiarity. Demand followed, and with it, higher expectations for translation quality.
A still from Crash Landing on You | Image Credit: IMDb
Platforms responded by investing in dedicated dubbing hubs in Madrid, Seoul, Mumbai, and Los Angeles. Translation became less about literal accuracy and more about tone. Humor, timing, and emotional cadence mattered because they kept people watching. A poorly dubbed show now risked losing audiences who had learned what good translation sounded like.
These dynamics altered the creative map. Spanish thrillers began influencing crime writing beyond Spain. Korean dramas reshaped expectations around emotional arcs and character development. Anime’s visual language informed animation choices far outside Japan.
This unsettled older assumptions about cultural power. English-language entertainment still commands large audiences, but it no longer defines global taste on its own.
Translation is not neutral and it is certainly not perfect. Context is sometimes smoothed over and meaning is often shifted. Decisions about what to explain and what to leave implicitly shape how cultures are perceived. These debates matter and remain unresolved. Even so, platforms continue to expand translation budgets because the returns are clear. Netflix’s own engagement reports show non-English-language titles now account for a substantial share of total viewing hours across regions, particularly outside North America. International titles retain subscribers, and their value compounds over time.
What emerges is a form of soft power that operates without official choreography. South Korea’s surge in global cultural visibility after Squid Game did not come from a state-led export campaign, but from audiences absorbing language, social hierarchies, food, games, and emotional codes through a translated series they chose to watch. Influence now travels through subtitlers, dubbing artists, and release schedules rather than diplomats.
Translation reshaped global storytelling because it reshaped the incentives underneath it. Platforms needed scale, creators needed freedom, and audiences wanted variety that did not feel engineered. When those needs aligned, translation became infrastructure rather than accessory.
The result is a global media environment where stories circulate with fewer gatekeepers and fewer assumptions about whose voice travels best. Soft power now grows less from dominance than from availability. It grew because translation widened access and because viewers learned, willingly, to listen across languages.
Or, as Bong Joon-ho said when his subtitled film stood on the Golden Globes’ stage in 2020, “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”
The industry, it seems, spent a decade turning that insight into infrastructure.
