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  • Intelligence Is The New ‘Influencer’

    For a decade, influence ran on a simple equation: bigger audience, more belief. Follower count was credibility. If a million people were watching someone, they were worth listening to.

    That equation is breaking. Trust is moving — away from scale, toward proximity; away from polish, toward honesty; toward people who feel like us, not people performing for us. The influencer economy isn’t dying. But the assumption that bigger means more believable, certainly is.

    Humans learn by copying, and one of our oldest shortcuts is prestige bias: since judging real skill is hard, we look for indirect cues instead — who’s admired, who’s copied, who’s deferred to — and copy that person. Prestige stands in for competence. This competence is no longer a ‘brand’, it’s real, lived experience.

     

     

    Social media used to manufacture prestige. Now it audits it. Comment sections, side-by-sides, and review threads give audiences something they never had at scale: a cheap way to check if a claim is actually true.

    Today, most users on the ‘Gram can sniff sponsored content a mile off. Is the influencer losing their influence? Perhaps.

    Instead, people are pivoting towards relatable, everyday content creators. The historian deep-diving into colonial-era Delhi. The foodie gobbling his way around Mumbai. The museologist researching textiles. The paleontologist gabbing about dinosaurs. The neurologist teaching their audience how to stave off dementia. Sommeliers explaining the nuances of a sparkling wine. Krish Ashok, a ‘techie’, draws science into his food reels; he has 1.4 million followers on Instagram. Eleanor Barnett of the account HistoryEats is a researcher and food historian – she has 42.5K followers. These are people who never wanted a “personal brand” but know something real and are willing to explain it on camera. Their currency is niche, specific expertise, not charisma, and they are the new online experts. People trust them because they come bearing deep, researched, specific knowledge. Intelligence is becoming the new ‘influence.’

     

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    Instead, people are pivoting towards relatable, everyday content creators. The historian deep-diving into colonial-era Delhi. The foodie gobbling his way around Mumbai. The museologist researching textiles.
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    The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer makes this explicit. Most consumers now name relatable, everyday creators — not perfectly-polished, face-filtered celebrities — as their most credible, authentic source on brands. This is part of a wider retreat into smaller, familiar circles of trust, away from ‘influencers’ to ‘content creators’.

    The second shift? People are no longer online only to be entertained or to be sold a particular product; they’re going to Instagram to learn something. It’s no wonder then that many users prefer viewing niche, educational creators rather than entertaining ones.

    And they’re being found through search, not discovery feeds. Nearly half of US consumers now use TikTok as a search engine — a number that’s jumped sharply in two years — and a real chunk say they’d trust ChatGPT over Google for some queries.

     

     

    None of this is entirely new. Edelman’s own study back in 2005 explained that “trust shifts from authorities to peers.” This isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s the swing of the pendulum, accelerated and made visible by platforms built for it. The word ‘trust’ here is key; in the age of AI influencers and fake engagement, who can viewers even believe anymore?

    What is new is verification speed. People don’t just prefer peers over authorities in theory anymore — they can check a claim in seconds.

    That could be what is finally deflating the influencer bubble. Not that audiences have stopped wanting people to follow, admire or imitate. Prestige bias is too deeply embedded in our psyche to vanish overnight. But it is no longer enough.

    The creators who thrive in the next phase of the internet may not be those with the biggest platforms, the most polished feeds or the most lucrative brand partnerships. The new measure of influence may be surprisingly old-fashioned: knowing what you are talking about.

  • The Queens of the Board

    Chess is one of the rare competitive arenas in which men and women play under exactly the same physical conditions — no height advantage, no difference in muscle mass, no question of endurance. There are sixty-four squares and, theoretically, an equal opportunity to master them. And yet women remain dramatically underrepresented at the highest levels.

    India offers an intriguing counterpoint — because India is not simply a country that plays chess. It is the country that gave the world chess in the first place, and it is now producing a generation of women who are beginning to claim that inheritance for themselves. Koneru Humpy, Harika Dronavalli, R Vaishali and Divya Deshmukh are all elite players, their steepling achievements driving them to international fame as Chess Grandmasters.

    In 2025, something startling occurred. The 19-year-old Deshmukh battled the 38-year-old Humpy over the chessboard in the final of the FIDE Women’s World Cup. The symbolism was unmistakable. Not only were two Indian women facing each other in a global final, they were doing it over a game that was invented in their own country.

     

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    The game India gave away

    For of course, India has always been chess’ first home. If you unspool it back to its earliest avatar, you’ll likely end up at chaturanga, a game that emerged in India around the sixth century. The name was a reference to the four divisions of an Indian army — infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots — which eventually became the pawn, knight, bishop and rook of modern chess. Chaturange trundled onwards to Persia (today’s Iran), where it was christened with the name shatranj, before (eventually) moving on to Europe.

    Certainly, the game was changed as it moved onwards in the world, but its geometries remained the same. A warlike board game that could be marshalled as easily by male as well as female players.

     

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    India has always been chess’ first home. If you unspool it back to its earliest avatar, you’ll likely end up at chaturanga, a game that emerged in India around the sixth century.
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    Humpy became India’s first female grandmaster and one of the strongest women players in the world. Harika Dronavalli established herself among the elite. Vaishali followed, becoming one of India’s newest women grandmasters. Then came Deshmukh, Vantika Agrawal, Savitha Shri B, Padmini Rout, Nandhidhaa PV, Bhakti Kulkarni and Tania Sachdev. The list of names grew and grew.

    The Beth Harmon problem

    In 2020, something changed. Netflix put on a show about a fictional young chess prodigy – The Queen’s Gambit – an orphan who floats up the world of chess competitions. The twist in the tail? The orphan was a girl, Beth Harmon.

    After the show aired, online searches for ‘how to play chess’ soared. The series was watched by sixty-two million households in its first twenty-eight days. Most significantly, Harmon is shown to be the smartest person, easily slicing her way past (male) opponents.

    Yet, at the same time, The Queen’s Gambit exposed the distance between representation and reality. Judit Polgár, the Hungarian grandmaster who became the only woman ever to enter the world’s top ten, pointed out that her own experience revealed that her male opponents were considerably less gracious than those on the show.

    What makes a chess queen?

    Similarly, even in India, two truths co-exist. The pool of talent has widened, thanks to digital access to the game, and increasing school tournaments. State and national academies now foster more young girls entering competitive circuits.

    And yet the women’s chess boom in the country is not always representative of its grassroots reality. Don’t be fooled by the scroll of female names; India’s own Gender Equality in Chess Index has highlighted gaps in female participation, resources, representation and institutional support, with calls for stronger grassroots programs, better funding and coaching for women, more women coaches, and greater female representation in chess administration. India has 91 Grandmasters and more than 120 International Masters, yet a mere handful of these are women.

     

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    The 19-year-old Deshmukh battled the 38-year-old Humpy over the chessboard in the final of the FIDE Women's World Cup. The symbolism was unmistakable.
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    The first task, therefore, is not to find more prodigies. It is to widen the funnel — school chess clubs treated as ordinary rather than extracurricular, accessible tournaments outside the major cities, affordable coaching, and families who see women’s chess as a legitimate pursuit.

    At the same time, women need greater access to strong competition. Humpy has made this point herself — women’s chess has become significantly more professional, but women-only tournaments can limit young players’ opportunities to compete against the strongest men (for no lack of intelligence). Separate tournaments have their own indubitable advantages but those spaces might soon become claustrophobic.

     

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    A different kind of inheritance

    India’s relationship with chess has come full circle. A game that began, in one of its earliest forms, as a representation of an army has travelled through kingdoms and empires, across continents and languages, into computers and phones — and back to the country that first imagined it. Humpy helped establish that Indian women could build professional lives around a game their own civilization had invented. Deshmukh and Vaishali are now showing what happens when that possibility becomes normal.

    The most important transformation may not be the number of medals Indian women win. It may be the number of girls who see a chessboard and don’t see an obstacle; they see an opportunity.

  • What Is India Watching?

    Imagine, if you will, an evening in a Bengaluru household. A daughter scrolls through a Korean thriller in the bedroom; her brother is three episodes into a Japanese anime series on his phone; her mother has a Malayalam crime drama paused in the kitchen; the television in the living room is blaring the latest Bollywood blockbuster for her dad. The entire family used to gather around one big television screen; once an evening ritual, it has now shattered into as many screens as there are family members.

    For a country as polyphonic as India, Bollywood has long had an outsize sway over its cinema screens. No more. Star-spangled films now perform unevenly at the box office, and the reason is not, as teeth-gnashing producers sometimes grumble, piracy or poor marketing.

     

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    Covid-19 changed many things about India, not least amongst them, the country’s viewing habits. Knuckled into watching OTT films and shows, Indians discovered Korean dramas, Spanish thrillers, German mysteries and Japanese anime.

    Streaming platforms, sensing captive audiences, invested in dubbing and subtitles at a scale that made the original language nearly irrelevant. What began as a lockdown habit has since congealed into a watching preference.

    English, once the language through which Indians accessed global culture became merely one option among many. A new Hindi film release competes not against last month’s Hindi release but against Squid Game, The Devil Wears Prada 2, a Marathi romcom or a Malayalam supernatural thriller.

    This in no way means that star power has ebbed completely. A jingoistic, big-budget macho film Dhurandhar: The Revenge, starring Ranveer Singh and Akshaye Khanna, raked in collections of ₹1,850 crore worldwide, no mean feat. Perhaps unsurprisingly, younger male viewers predominated.

    However, it was the only Bollywood film that even came close to such numbers.

     

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    Once confined to pirated downloads and online forums, anime has become one of the country's fastest-growing fandoms, and not in the cities one would expect.
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    Amazon Prime Video’s Made in India: A Titan Story and Netflix’s India’s Got Latent both drew enormous audiences this year even as regional cinema — Malayalam, Marathi, Gujarati — found viewers well beyond its home states.

    The most surprising of all is the rise of anime, which offers the clearest evidence of the new geography of Indian taste. Once confined to pirated downloads and online forums, it has become one of the country’s fastest-growing fandoms, and not in the cities one would expect. Nagpur ran its own anime convention before many larger cities attempted one. Japanese films now open in towns that had never screened Japanese animation before. Comic conventions once devoted to superheroes now reserve entire halls for manga. Ramen shops and Naruto backpacks have followed.

    These too, have been Indianized. Fans are adding an Indian taste to anime characters through art and AI reels. This is globalization created by fan clubs and convention organizers, rather than handed down by any big budget Bollywood studio.

     

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    Back in the fragmented living room, the threshold for spectacle has risen along with everything else; it must now be earned, not merely advertised.

    What Indians watch has become, in other words, a rough census of what they will no longer tolerate: a familiar face standing in for a good story, a single industry standing in for the world. In a country long defined by the boundaries of language and geography, the algorithm has found a shared taste that owes nothing to either.

  • Well Read, Well Traveled

    There’s nothing that sticks in the craw of a consummate bibliophile as much as being told that reading is ‘trendy’ again. And yet, it’s impossible to deny that reading is having its moment in the sun (again).

    Book Doof (communal reading experiences) is Australia’s hottest trend, with book bedazzling (decorating covers) coming in a hot second. The third, somewhat more baffling trend, is the book bouquet, where groups of people come together to learn how to destroy a book only for it to be fashioned into a bouquet of paper flowers.

    Across the frothing ocean, in India, entire villages are transforming themselves. The Maharashtrian village of Bhilar has been declared the country’s first ‘book village’ with residents opening up their homes into open-door genre-specific libraries. This is being replicated in Jammu & Kashmir’s Aragam village.

    Tourism Kerala is bricking an entire literary tourism circuit for visitors,  connecting the birthplaces, memorials, and residences of major Malayalam authors across several districts — a push that gained extra momentum after Kozhikode was named a UNESCO City of Literature.

     

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    Meanwhile, Paju is South Korea’s ‘Book City’, with 900-odd book-related business dotting its picturesque streets. The Forest of Wisdom is the central attraction, a library with thousands of books available to anyone who drops in. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves line the walls.

    And in Tokyo, the Book and Bed hostel is famous for its beds designed as giant bookshelves into which guests curl up at night to sleep.

    Not at all surprising then, that literary tourism and reading retreats are 2026’s breakout travel trend. Not that there’s anything particularly new about bookish travelers. Janeites have long followed in the steps of Jane Austen’s writing (Bath being a particular favorite). Innumerable articles have been inked about walking through Paris in the footsteps of Ernest Hemingway.

    So what’s different? The enormity of the offering – it has swelled to include all manner of authors everywhere around the world and all manner of travel, and (as always) the accompanying marketing push.

    Today literary tourism covers a broad gamut of experiences; everything from traveling to real-world locations from novels, touring writers’ homes and museums, joining literary walking tours, attending book festivals, booking multi-day ‘readaway’ retreats, hunting down beloved independent bookshops, and traveling with book clubs. Increasingly, travelers are letting a book choose their destination rather than the reverse.

     

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    Not at all surprising then, that literary tourism and reading retreats are 2026’s breakout travel trend. Not that there’s anything particularly new about bookish travelers.
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    Travel companies now run week-long getaways in places like the Cotswolds, Costa Rica, and coastal Maine, combining book-appropriate lodging, chefs cooking meals from the texts, and light excursions combined with the real appeal: extended, unstructured reading time. Book clubs have followed the same trajectory, growing from casual local gatherings into full travel communities with retreats spanning Oregon, Maine, Morocco, Greece, the Caribbean, and beyond.

    Often, authors are themselves leading these retreats, speaking about their creative process, and the extensive behind-the-scenes work required to put a successful book together.

    Together, these formats show literary tourism evolving from a niche pilgrimage activity into a diversified travel category — one blending retreat culture, author access, fandom-driven itineraries, and destination storytelling, with hotels now joining in by adding libraries and book-themed stays.

    Skyscanner’s “Bookbound” report found that a majority of travelers have either booked or would consider booking a trip inspired by a book, and hotel searches using the platform’s “library” filter have jumped sharply year-over-year. Meanwhile, the vacation rental platform Vrbo reported that the vast majority of people it surveyed were interested in a getaway built around reading and relaxing.

    And yet every conceivable report screams at the decline in readers; we are told over and over again that book sales are dropping, and books are interesting only in so far as they are made into a film or a television show. But book travel is soaring, suggesting that travelers want the immersive, story-driven experience that books represent. Literary tourism is now estimated to be worth well over $2 billion, with continued growth projected into the next decade.

     

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    So why now? The slow food movement was the harbinger of the slow travel movement, into which this slots perfectly. People don’t want to be irked by the constant popping of screen notifications, spending leisurely days doing…well, nothing in particular. Booktok has done its bit too, spurring travel companies to design itineraries directly around bestselling and viral book titles.

    Besides, fiction offers an escape valve during periods of uncertainty, and literary travel intensifies that escape by making it physical as well as mental. Historically, genre booms have tracked global anxieties — fantasy surged during the upheaval of the 1930s and ’40s, science fiction rose alongside the space race and countercultural movements of the 1960s, and today’s interest in myth and speculative fiction reflects a broader cultural reckoning with rapidly shifting systems.

    What ties all of this together is a shared appeal: books give a place meaning before a traveler even arrives. A guidebook can tell you what’s there; a novel can make you feel something about it first. That emotional head start — paired with the desire to disconnect, linger, and travel more intentionally — is what’s turning literary tourism from a niche interest into one of the defining travel trends of the year. Whether it’s a five-star retreat with a private author talk or a single afternoon spent browsing a stranger’s home library in a small village, the throughline is the same: travelers increasingly want to step into the story, not just check the destination off a list.

  • Your Face Wash Smells Like Breakfast

    Walk down any supermarket aisle and you’ll notice something strange. Your perfume is a swirl of bright yuzu and grounding green tea. Those berries you bought to accompany your breakfast muesli now star in sleeping lip masks. That vibrant persimmon in your fridge? It has rebranded itself as a volumizing shampoo. Open your bathroom cabinet, and you could almost assemble a brunch menu.

    That’s not a happy coincidence. It’s part of a slow, deliberate cycle that’s been shaping our consumption patterns for decades — one where ingredients don’t just travel between cultures but between categories. From menu to mirror. From the barista counter to the beauty aisle.

     

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    This cycle is called the Menu Adoption Cycle, and it is how ingredients slowly move up the cultural ladder — from food to trend to lifestyle. It usually begins with fine-dining chefs or wellness influencers playing with an ingredient that’s niche, exotic, or ancient. Then cafés and boutique food brands take over, bringing it into pop-culture’s reach. Soon, global food giants get in, turning the once-niche into fast-moving consumer goods. And finally, the spillover: personal care. You might not even get raspberries in India. But you’ll probably put them on your face.

    This isn’t new. But the speed and saturation with which it now happens is. Blame it on Instagram, where vivid colours and minimalist packaging transform ingredients into aspirational props. Or TikTok, where trends collapse entire categories — breakfast becomes beauty and groceries become glow-ups. A grandmother’s remedy became a ritual — bottled, branded, and sold as soft luxury.

     

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    This cycle is called the Menu Adoption Cycle, and it is how ingredients slowly move up the cultural ladder — from food to trend to lifestyle.
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    Blueberries rose in public estimation only after a concerted effort to present it as an especially healthy fruit, rich in antioxidants. Once the media lapped it up, a fruit that was only used as a stuffing in pies became known as a cancer combatant, a soldier against cognitive dysfunction and an inflammation shield. From there, it was a short leap into kitchens, and an even shorter leap into our bathroom cabinets.

    Or take avocado — the fruit of millennial brunch culture. Its rise as a food trend came with real estate jokes and housing crisis memes, but soon it was starring in hair masks, moisturisers, and anti-aging creams. Avocados aren’t even native to India or the US for that matter. They were introduced to the former via Sri Lanka around the 1940s, and only recently began to be cultivated in parts of Karnataka to meet local demand. In the US, they were introduced in the early 20th century, but it wasn’t until California growers launched strategic marketing campaigns in the 1990s that the avocado moved from niche ingredient to a symbol of health and lifestyle. The point is: an ingredient doesn’t need to be familiar to feel essential. It just needs the right aesthetic.

     

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    As urban wellness culture grows, the same patterns emerge globally. But interestingly, many Indian ingredients with deep cultural histories (kokum fruit, the Bengali gondhoraj lime) rarely complete this global loop. They don’t fit the aesthetic code. They’re not instantly recognizable. They don’t ‘pop’ on a shelf.

    So why do we keep consuming this way?

    Because ingredients today are identity cues. We don’t just want nourishment or skincare.

    The cycle isn’t just cultural. It’s emotional. The moment we start craving a flavour, we also start craving what it represents: health, calm, minimalism, and/or glow. And when we can’t have the real thing, we reach for the signal. Because what we consume — on our plate or on our skin — is never just about need. It’s about aspiration. It’s about how we want to be seen.

    So the next time your shampoo smells like your breakfast, know this: it didn’t get there by accident. It was designed to. Because maybe we’re not just chasing glow. Maybe we’re chasing the calm of a ritual we never got to keep.

  • Lost In Translation

    Western political labels don’t always travel well to India.

    For decades, pundits and commentators have assumed that India’s politics can be plotted on the same spectrum as that of Britain or the United States: left versus right, liberal versus conservative, free markets versus redistribution.

    And while they aren’t entirely wrong, Indian politics is cleaved along different faultlines. Trying to understand Indian voting behavior through Western ideological labels is rather like trying to read a map drawn for another country.

     

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    What do we think about when we talk of the political Right? A conventional Western understanding might gesture towards cultural conservatism with a preference for smaller government, lower taxes and freer markets. The left, by contrast, favors wealth redistribution, stronger welfare systems and greater state intervention.

    But the chips fall differently in India. Research by political scientists Suhas Palshikar, Pradeep Chhibber and Rahul Verma has shown that economic policy has rarely separated India’s major parties in the way it has in Western democracies. Across ideological camps, voters overwhelmingly expect the state to provide welfare, subsidize essential goods and intervene to reduce poverty. This holds true whichever party forms the government.

    The current example would be India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which has expanded cash transfers, subsidized cooking gas, promoted rural welfare schemes and widened access to banking. Millions of Indian voters associate the party not with laissez-faire economics but with an active state delivering tangible benefits. If the Left-wing is understood simply as favoring government support for underserved people, then the label makes perfect sense to many BJP supporters.

     

     

    Increasingly, Indian politics revolves around questions of identity: who belongs, whose history should be recognized, and what role religion should play in public life.

    Chhibber and Verma argue that contemporary Indian politics is organized around two separate dimensions. One concerns statism — the degree to which government should intervene in economic and social life. The other concerns recognition i.e. which identities and which communities deserve official acknowledgement and protection. It is this second axis on which the ruling party’s electoral appeal rests. Debates over minority rights, Article 370, caste reservations, religious conversion and the place of Hindu identity have become defining political questions. These issues do not and will never fall neatly onto the familiar left-right spectrum inherited from Europe.

    Research by Alexander Haas and Aditi Majumdar bolsters this point. Rather than asking respondents whether they are left or right, they measured ideology through attitudes towards issues that dominate Indian politics: state intervention, caste-based redistribution and Hindu nationalism.

    Once ideology is measured this way, BJP supporters cluster exactly where one would expect — on the culturally conservative side of questions relating to religion and national identity. The apparent contradiction largely disappears.

     

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    Nivedita Jhunjhunwala, a PhD candidate at the University of Texas, studying the Indian public’s evaluation of wartime violations of international law (civilian casualties, use of prohibited weapons etc) found that her preliminary research happened unintentionally to throw up similar intriguing points. Her observation? Roughly 34% of BJP supporters in her sample, self-identified as left-leaning on a standard ideology scale.

    “For many Indian respondents these labels may be thinking about economics, not culture,” Jhunjhunwala explains, “In everyday Indian usage, ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ are loosely associated with pro-poor government schemes, welfare delivery, and state support for the disadvantaged — all things the BJP has actively pursued under Modi … A BJP supporter who backed the party because of welfare delivery may sincerely self-identify as left-leaning on that dimension, without any sense of contradiction with their cultural or nationalist views.”

    The other reason she posits is that Indians may be understanding the word through a more colloquial rather than political sense. Besides, “Hindu nationalism may simply operate on a dimension that is orthogonal to the left-right axis as most Indians understand it,” she says, “Supporting cow protection, opposing minority reservations, or backing the abrogation of Article 370 simply feels like common sense, or nationalism, or religious duty. These commitments don’t register on the left-right scale because that scale wasn’t built to capture them.”

    Labels don’t fail because voters are confused; they fail because the labels were built somewhere else for someone else. That’s not a quirk of Indian politics; it’s a reminder that ‘left’ and ‘right’ were never universal categories. The words survive the journey. The meaning usually doesn’t.

  • Who Owns the Next Global Story?

    Consider the credits on Trial by Fire, a Netflix drama about the 1997 Uphaar cinema fire in Delhi that killed 59 people. The story is set in India. The dialogue is in Hindi. The American screenwriter had never set foot in India. The editor was German. You might think that this was a recipe for disaster. On the contrary, it was one of Netflix India’s strongest drama, getting rave reviews across Indian and international media. 

    Television’s centre of gravity has shifted. 

    To Sidharth Jain, Founder at House of Talkies and The Story Ink, who has spent two decades moving between publishing, television and streaming, that credit roll captures the future of entertainment. The question is no longer where a story comes from, but about the people who can move it across cultures. As global streamers search the world for their next hit, the companies with the greatest influence may not be the ones making films, but the ones discovering stories early and translating them for international audiences.

    Netflix commissions Korean thrillers, Spanish crime dramas and Japanese anime with the same enthusiasm that Hollywood studios once reserved for American sitcoms. Amazon develops Indian police procedurals alongside British literary adaptations. Apple finances French historical dramas, Mexican crime series and German science fiction. The world’s largest entertainment companies have quietly become multinational publishers, sourcing stories wherever compelling narratives—and future profits—can be found. English-language originals are no longer the default.

    The economics explain why. Subscriber growth in North America and Western Europe has slowed, while the next hundreds of millions of viewers are expected to come from Asia, Africa and Latin America. India offers both scale and value: a well-regarded novel, film or format can often be acquired for far less than comparable American intellectual property, while the domestic audience is enormous and increasingly connected. Netflix and Amazon have both expanded aggressively in Indian production, and non-English programming now accounts for more than a third of all viewing on Netflix. What was once labelled “international” content has quietly become mainstream.

    Yet global distribution is not the same as global storytelling.

    “Netflix is like the world’s largest hard drive of films,” Jain says. “Just because it’s on the hard drive doesn’t mean it’s global.” His recommendation feed remains overwhelmingly Indian; a British subscriber’s looks entirely different. Algorithms have not erased cultural borders. They have simply digitized them.

    The productions that genuinely cross over, he argues, usually have something else in common: creators who understand both the source culture and the audience they hope to reach. Monsoon Wedding succeeded because, in his view, Mira Nair could tell a deeply Indian story in a cinematic language international audiences instinctively understood. Slumdog Millionaire travelled because a British director interpreted India through a Western narrative grammar—controversially, perhaps, but effectively. Bend It Like Beckham and Bride and Prejudice performed a similar feat for the British South Asian experience.

     

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    His point is that India’s bottleneck is not source material. It is translation—not linguistic translation, but cultural translation. The industry needs more people fluent in both Mumbai and Los Angeles, Chennai and London, capable of recognising which local stories possess universal emotional architecture and how to adapt them without sanding away what makes them distinctive.

    That observation has implications far beyond filmmaking.

    For decades, New York or London’s literary agencies occupied one of the entertainment industry’s most influential positions. They did far more than negotiate book contracts. They identified promising stories, packaged projects, hired the requisite talent and connected authors with studios long before cameras rolled. They became gatekeepers of the global adaptation business.

     

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    The next global franchise could emerge from a Malayalam thriller, a Tamil science-fiction novel or a Bengali detective series just as easily as from Hollywood.
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    India has historically lacked comparable institutions. Publishing, cinema and television largely evolved in parallel. Rights management remained fragmented, literary representation was relatively small, and production companies often became involved only after a book or story had already proved commercially successful.

    Streaming platforms are helping to collapse those boundaries.

    As platforms compete for original intellectual property, the greatest competitive advantage increasingly lies in discovering stories before anyone else does: scouting unpublished novels from around the world, commissioning original ideas, acquiring life rights, building relationships with regional-language writers and identifying concepts with international potential. 

     

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    Streaming has also overturned another long-held assumption: that international stories must be made in English to achieve worldwide success. Audiences have become comfortable with subtitles, multilingual casts and culturally specific settings. Increasingly, it is the local details that travel.

    For India, whose storytelling traditions span dozens of languages, this creates an extraordinary opportunity. The next global franchise could emerge from a Malayalam thriller, a Tamil science-fiction novel or a Bengali detective series just as easily as from Hollywood. The caveat? We need the right team to tell the stories.

    The challenge is no longer producing stories. India has never lacked those. It is discovering, developing and owning them before the rest of the world arrives.

    For decades, ambitious writers believed success meant reaching Hollywood. Increasingly, Hollywood is the one looking elsewhere. The next Harry Potter, Squid Game or Money Heist may well be born in India. 

  • Mumbai in Miniature

    A pointed arch. A flying buttress. A gargoyle. A ribbed vault. These familiar features of Mumbai’s Gothic Revival architecture seem almost designed to be miniaturised into pendants, brooches or charms. Likewise, the rounded balconies, porthole windows and sunburst motifs of the city’s Art Deco buildings lend themselves naturally to cabinets, furniture and decorative objects. Increasingly, designers are treating Mumbai’s architecture not simply as heritage to be preserved, but as a vocabulary that can be worn, displayed and collected.

    South Mumbai offers one of India’s most recognisable architectural landscapes. Its Gothic Revival buildings, adapted to local climate and built from locally available materials, have long attracted visitors to the area’s heritage souvenir shops. But where most souvenirs stop at magnets, t-shirts and coffee mugs, some designers are aiming for something more enduring.

    Valliyan’s inventive jewelry | Instagram

    One example is Valliyan’s Bombay Gothic collection, which translates Gothic Revival motifs into pendants, brooches and cuffs. Like many of the brand’s earlier collections, including Metal Crush, Hot Tropics, Hip Hop and Evil Eyes, it draws on a recognisable visual language, but this time its source material is the architecture of South Mumbai. Pieces named after the Sistine Chapel echo the pointed-arch doorways found across the city’s buildings.

    Nitya Arora, who founded the brand nearly 18 years ago, grew up on Marine Drive, and the Gothic features of the schools she attended left a lasting impression. She says these structures still hold her interest in a way newer buildings don’t. Asked who she designs for, she says: “People with a personality and imagination, an open mind, who are sure of themselves and know who they are and enjoy being unique rather than having mob mentality as you often see on Instagram and Pinterest. Individuality has largely died. I design for people who enjoy beauty and expressing themselves through art and fashion.”

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    Among the best-known examples of this style are the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation building, designed by Frederick William Stevens and completed in 1893; Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus), finished in 1887 to mark Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee; and the Rajabai Clock Tower on the University of Mumbai campus. All three have shaped Arora's design sensibility.
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    Among the best-known examples of this style are the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation building, designed by Frederick William Stevens and completed in 1893; Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (formerly Victoria Terminus), finished in 1887 to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee; and the Rajabai Clock Tower on the University of Mumbai campus. All three have shaped Arora’s design sensibility.

    Similarly, brands such as Mysticum Luna, which retails in India, or Donna Veverka’s brand of jewellery, based in Boston, also miniaturize Gothic Revival-inspired motifs into jewelry. On Pinterest too, it is an aesthetic much sought after, with search results turning up multiple options.

    If Gothic Revival supplied the city’s monumental identity, Art Deco shaped its everyday life. Art Deco, short for arts décoratifs, spread internationally through the twentieth century, appearing not just on buildings but on bridges, trains, trucks and radios. In Mumbai, most Art Deco construction dates to the 1930s through 1950s, and it transformed Marine Drive, Churchgate and the Oval Maidan into one of the largest concentrations of Art Deco architecture anywhere in the world. Buildings along Marine Drive carry names like Framroze Court, Keval Mahal, St. James’ Court and Zaveri Mahal. Rather than copying European precedents directly, local architects adapted the style to Bombay’s tropical climate and cosmopolitan culture, favouring rounded balconies, streamlined facades, porthole windows, sunburst motifs, chevrons, stepped ziggurats and curved corners.

    Gothic Revival architecture could be associated with imperial authority, since it was the style seen in monumental civic institutions—public education, legal bodies, administration—bearing a semblance of grandeur. Art Deco, on the other hand, could be associated with the day-to-day life of people residing in Bombay: apartment buildings, cinemas, commercial blocks, many of them seen during commutes along Marine Drive, overlooking evening promenades and continuing to house generations of residents. 

     

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    It is this emotional familiarity that has made Mumbai’s Art Deco heritage increasingly attractive to contemporary designers and luxury brands, who, rather than reproducing historic buildings in literal form, are sourcing their visual inspiration from what they see around them, then translating those visuals into consumer objects.

    Bobby Aggarwal’s Marine Drive Graffiti collection of limited-edition bar cabinets is an example of this approach. Inspired by landmarks around Churchgate, Marine Drive and the Oval Maidan, including Metro Cinema and Liberty Cinema, the collection distils recognisable architectural features such as bas-relief façades, stepped forms, chevron patterns and curved silhouettes into furniture that functions simultaneously as design object and cultural artefact.

     

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    In Aggarwal's works, one also finds illustrations of balconies, parapets, windows, drying clothes, air-conditioners, yoga mats, pigeons and street furniture, meant to evoke the lived realities of Mumbai's residents through the elements that interact with the structure of the building.
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    Aggarwal himself describes the collection not as a recreation of Art Deco but as a “dialogue with the city,” suggesting that the cabinets reimagine the memories associated with architecture. In his works, one also finds illustrations of balconies, parapets, windows, drying clothes, air-conditioners, yoga mats, pigeons and street furniture, meant to evoke the lived realities of Mumbai’s residents through the elements that interact with the structure of the building. The cabinet becomes a portable fragment of Mumbai’s urban identity. Buyers are therefore not only acquiring a functional piece of furniture but also an emotional connection to the city’s architectural past. 

    It would be easy to dismiss these objects as another example of heritage becoming merchandise. Yet they also reveal something about the changing relationship between cities and luxury. Increasingly, consumers are buying not simply craftsmanship but memory. Gothic Revival and Art Deco have become more than architectural styles; they have evolved into visual identities that can be worn, displayed and collected. In that sense, Mumbai’s skyline no longer exists only in stone and concrete. It now lives in cabinets, brooches and pendants, carrying fragments of the city into people’s homes and wardrobes.

  • Beauty Beta: Why Dubai Tests Indian Taste

    When an Indian skincare brand wants to go global, it rarely starts with Paris or New York. More often, it starts with Dubai. 

    Over the last few years, Dubai has quietly emerged as the testing lab for Indian beauty’s global ambitions. Indie Wild, Kay Beauty, Asa, and even legacy-adjacent names like Forest Essentials and Kama Ayurveda have all either launched or soft-tested products in the Gulf city before making big moves elsewhere. 

    Of course there’s nothing official about it. There are no press releases, no conferences announcing the Dubai ‘beta launch’, but industry insiders know: if it sells in Dubai, it will probably work everywhere. 

     

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    The logic is both economic and emotional. On the one hand, Dubai offers ease of business –  tax benefits, strategic shipping routes, and a supportive regulatory climate. On the other, it holds an outsized aspirational pull for South Asians. It’s a city where the diaspora is dense, spending power is high, and beauty culture is deeply coded. Simply put, if a product resonates with the Indian woman in Dubai, who balances subcontinental nostalgia with global polish, it has likely found its sweet spot.

    “Dubai is where we figure out what kind of brown girl we’re really speaking to,” said the president of a Delhi-based skincare brand, requesting anonymity. “The audience is Indian, yes, but also Pakistani, Sri Lankan, sometimes Arab – and they’re discerning. They want clean formulations, visible results, but also something that smells like home.”

    This confluence of familiarity and aspiration is what makes the Gulf city such fertile ground. Indian beauty today is at a tipping point, caught between tradition and trend, ubtans and serums. Brands want to retain cultural credibility while also speaking the language of international luxury. And in Dubai, they can do both. A turmeric cleanser doesn’t feel out of place next to a $200 French ampoule. A kajal pencil isn’t relegated to nostalgia; instead, it is usually a statement, repackaged with intention.

     

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    Dubai gives brands a cosmopolitan sandbox without the complication of linguistic or regional fragmentation. It’s a preview of how Indian beauty might perform in a truly global market, not just a local one scaled up.
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    The city’s hyper-global malls, curated boutique stores like Apotheca and THAT Concept Store, and a growing number of multi-brand e-commerce platforms have opened the floodgates. Beauty insiders say some of their most engaged customers are second-generation diaspora kids who grew up with Fair & Lovely in the bathroom cabinet, but now want niacinamide that’s brown-girl-safe and sourced from Kerala. For them, Dubai has become some sort of a middle ground. A place to rewrite what Indian beauty looks and feels like.

    And then there’s the power of proximity. For Indian founders, Dubai is a short flight, not a giant leap. It’s a place to build supply chains, test inventory, meet buyers, all without the bureaucratic friction of Western markets. The difference in pace is stark. While expansion in the US or the EU can take years of compliance and capital, Dubai offers nimbleness. It’s global, but not intimidating. Strategic, but emotionally proximate.

    There’s also a more subtle reality at play. India’s own domestic beauty market is massive, but fractured. It’s divided by price points, language, skin tone, and ingredient literacy. What works in Delhi might flop in Coimbatore. What sells on Nykaa may never reach Tier 3 towns. Dubai, by contrast, gives brands a cosmopolitan sandbox without the complication of linguistic or regional fragmentation. It’s a preview of how Indian beauty might perform in a truly global market, not just a local one scaled up.

     

     

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    But Dubai isn’t just an experiment. Increasingly, it’s becoming the main event. With Indian and South Asian diasporas taking on stronger cultural capital, brands are realizing that speaking to them first, not as an afterthought, might be the key to shaping their global narrative. This is a breath of fresh air. Maybe this is how we stop exporting Ayurveda in a brass bottle and build a beauty language that is brown, modern, and borderless.

    As Indian beauty steps into the spotlight, buoyed by clean formulas, indigenous ingredients, and a cultural confidence not seen in decades, its testing ground deserves attention. Dubai is where strategies are stress-tested, aesthetics are refined, and markets are made. 

    The next time you see a desi serum in a SoHo boutique or an Indian lipstick shade trending on TikTok, remember: it may have had its quiet debut in a mall in Dubai — swatched under halogen lights, approved by a woman who knows her haldi from her hyaluronic acid.

  • The Sari Blouse Is Wearing the Pants

    One of Sabyasachi Mukherjee’s hottest-selling creations is the Bipasha blouse, designed for actress Bipasha Basu. Worn under a sari, it has a deep, plunging neckline and, in contrast, structured full-length sleeves. Manish Malhotra fashions blingy bikini blouses, while Gaurav Gupta is known for his structured, corset-like pieces, mostly strapless.

    But this is not a piece about fashion designers. In fact, these innovative, runway-first looks have quickly made their way off the ramp and into weddings, dinners, house parties, clubs, family gatherings, and even board meetings. Even the neighbourhood designer aunty is pushing for halter-neck or backless cholis. And now they are being seen at local markets too, indicating a major societal shift. 

     

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    The traditional versions are often kept aside now, in favour of the readymade ikat blouses of Suta, the front-open, strappy blouses of Kalki, or even a dangerously dipping sari blouse at the local bazaar.

    The blouses are becoming sexy and sensual — the stuff of couture that has main character energy. Traditionally, a blouse matched the sari — a matching piece of garment usually came with it, and it still does. But it’s the blouse that gets picked first now; the sari is styled around it. 

    It’s how women today are negotiating style, tradition, and sensuality. Through the blouses, they’re claiming more agency over their bodies even while draped in a traditional garment. This is how the modern blouse becomes a tool of self-expression and confidence, unconfined by conservative and regressive morals of modesty. In fact, it’s an act of defiance.

    The garment itself has come a long way. If we scroll back to the pre-colonial era, there was a time when a blouse — even a petticoat, for that matter — didn’t exist. The sari was a seamless drape. It was the British who enforced the stitched upper garment as a means of modesty. 

    A statement blouse becomes a versatile piece that can be styled in many different ways — paired with a ghagra, a mini skirt, trousers, even a sarong, to create different looks for different occasions. There are hundreds of suggestions on the cut, pattern, and style of the blouse across the internet and social media, borrowing from Western fashion, a stranger’s grandmother’s wardrobe. 

     

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    Through the blouses, they’re claiming more agency over their bodies even while draped in a traditional garment.
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    This shift isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s the product of a generation of Indian women who have grown up with more exposure than any before them — to global fashion, thanks to fashion magazines, influencer reels on Instagram and spreads on Pinterest. Globalization didn’t just bring Western silhouettes into Indian wardrobes; it gave women a wider vocabulary for what ‘traditional’ could mean. 

    Social media has also collapsed the distance between the runway and real life. What Sabyasachi or Gaurav Gupta send down a red carpet gets dissected, saved, and recreated within days — not just by stylists, but by anyone with a neighborhood tailor and a Pinterest board. This democratization means a college student styling a backless choli for a friend’s wedding is participating in the same visual language as a Bollywood actress at Cannes. The blouse becomes a shared cultural moment, not a top-down trend.

     

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    And underneath all of it is a quieter, more personal shift: women are simply more comfortable being seen. Confidence, once something to be modestly downplayed, is now something to be worn — literally, on the body. Choosing a plunging neckline or a sheer panel isn’t necessarily about being provocative; it’s about a woman deciding what she wants to show, on her own terms, rather than what’s expected of her. That’s the real modernity here — not just the cut of the blouse, but the agency behind the choice to wear it.

    The daring blouse designs reflect a society moving away from conservatism — driven by an increasing number of confident women who choose to dress for self-expression rather than societal approval.