There was a time when therapy was a hushed topic, discussed in whispers and hidden behind closed doors. Now, the stigma is beginning to fade. Gen Z grew up in an era where conversations about anxiety, depression, and burnout became normalized. Therapy is now digital intimacy. It has moved from the couch to the screen, and in some cases, your therapist isn’t even human.
A lot of people are turning to AI-driven chatbots for emotional support. Available 24/7, judgment-free, and infinitely patient, these digital therapists fill a gap in traditional mental health care. Support is now easier than ever to access with tools such as cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), crisis intervention, and mindfulness training at your fingertips.
Mental health care is overloaded, therapy is expensive, and waiting lists are long. With that reality in mind, AI treatment provides instant relief from lunchtime anxiety and midnight worries. But can an algorithm offer the kind of support that people need?
AI-powered therapy apps are all the rage. / www.pexels.com
Malvika Fernandes, a Dubai-based psychotherapist in private practise offers a trenchant rebuttal. “A chatbot can never replace a qualified therapist. This is a very complex field with professionals spending decades studying the mind, behaviour, attitudes and cultural contexts that affect clients’ mental health. A chatbot may give overtly positive, soothing responses that may help you feel in control. AI usually gives solution-oriented suggestions. But they won’t be able to offer the nuanced processing work that is required.”
Fernandes goes on to suggest that “You can use ChatGPT or Claude as your first aid when there is no other way out, but it cannot be your first option; however, it can certainly give generic, additional support. Hopefully your first option is a human connection – a friend, a family member, a colleague, a neighbor, a therapist, your pet, even journaling or just sitting with your own thoughts. It can even be somatic practises like dance or pottery or swimming. Only if we don’t have those options available, then yes, we can look to a chatbot for help.”
Is AI able to understand human emotions, or can it just mimic empathy? Even as access to AI therapy grows, there remain risks. Is it possible for chatbots to determine if a user is in a crisis? What happens if they are wrong? After all, AI can never truly respond; it can merely pull from a database of responses.
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What happens when an app, trained on Western cultural mores that skew towards individualism rather than collective family dynamics, offers mental health advice to a user from the Global South?
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“Can it help by challenging certain thoughts? Certainly, in small ways as tertiary support, it offers very soothing responses,” explains Fernandes. As someone who has tested these chatbots out, she believes that AI will tell you what you want to hear, not what you need to hear. A Stanford study reports how chatbots can cause ‘delusional spirals’ by validating flawed human beliefs.
Equally importantly, what happens when an app, trained on Western cultural mores that skew towards individualism rather than collective family dynamics, offers mental health advice to a user from the Global South? Context is crucial when it comes to mental health.
But perhaps the biggest question of all is why. Why do we need to turn to chatbots at all? We know that unfettered capitalism pushes populations towards productivity and individualistic success, without interrogating the mental health costs. Meaningful human interaction has plummeted, with a strong individualistic social media taking its place.
Simultaneously, in the Global South, as in the Western world, there is a tremendous push towards online and digital spaces. The irony here is that we are turning towards digital solutions that have likely exacerbated the problems in the first place.
Can a phone ever really replace a human psychiatrist? / unsplash.com
In India, certainly, there is a shortage of trained professionals equipped to handle mental health crises – the data reveals that there is 1 therapist for 10 lakh people in the country. And even when accessible, therapy is expensive, and in some areas, dogged by a strong stigma.
Given these circumstances, chatbots may work as a trial ground for certain digital mental health solutions. There are now niche therapy apps tailored for LGBTQ+ individuals and students, making mental health support more inclusive.
All this is to say of course that AI shouldn’t replace human therapists, although it can certainly play a supporting role. But it is impossible to ignore how it will reshape the ways in which we seek emotional support, ways which we once thought impossible.
Laid out in a neat grid, they resemble miniature art: delicate green bamboo, crimson characters, blue circles, and compass-like winds carved into smooth rectangles of ivory, bone, or plastic. You’ve probably seen them before — scattered across your grandmother’s dining table or trending now on TikTok as a satisfying ASMR clack.
Mahjong isn’t new. Its history is long and layered. Believed to have originated in the mid-1800s in China, the game was once the preserve of Qing officials and scholars before it spread across social classes and borders. In 1920s America, it surged in popularity thanks to an export boom and was a status symbol among white upper-middle-class women, complete with their own ‘exotic’ tile sets and rulebooks – that love for Mahjong continues to this day. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan (and elsewhere), the game evolved into its own regional variants and became a staple of family life.
Today, Mahjong is back — loudly, proudly, and globally. In New York, Asian-American communities are reclaiming it as part of their own cultural inheritances. In London, hidden Mahjong clubs have emerged in basement speakeasies. In Hong Kong, competitive Mahjong tournaments are being live-streamed with fashionably dressed players and full sponsorships.
Image Courtesy: Sangeeta Kewalramani, House of Mahjong
Unsurprisingly, India is having its very own Mahjong moment too.
In Mumbai, a group of young professionals started The Mahjong Network via WhatsApp. Within months, it had grown into a full-blown movement, with rotating hosts, mentorship sessions, and tournament-style gatherings. Aditi Dugar, restaurateur at Masque, Masque Lab, TwentySeven Bake House, and Paradox has Instagrammed her love of the game. Stars of the Netflix show The Fabulous Lives of Bollywood Wives, Maheep Kapoor and Bhavana Panday are similarly obsessed. In Delhi, casual brunch cafés now offer Mahjong-themed mornings. In Bengaluru, a Parsi restaurant offers daily Mahjong classes; in Mumbai, an (unrelated) Parsi cafe offers the same thing. On Urbanaut, a ticketing platform, a plethora of Mahjong events rub shoulders with jazz performances and guided museum tours. Schools and colleges are hosting tequila and Mahjong alumni events. Indian jewellery brands such as Nishkara are even crafting jewelry and bag charms inspired by Mahjong tiles. Across India, brunches, birthdays and tea parties are being designed around Mahjong tables.
There is nothing new about Mahjong in India though. The Times of India of the 1920s is dotted with mentions of Mahjong-playing ladies, an elite British craze sparked by the colonial ties between China and India. Lacquered scarves with dragon designs and imported bone-and-bamboo Mahjong sets were all the rage with the ladies who lunch stepping to their colonial club of choice for their weekly game fix. Colonial-era Chinese restaurants, opened by immigrants from China, likely also operated as Mahjong clubs, possibly helping to pull new fans to the game.
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Today, Mahjong is back — loudly, proudly, and globally. In New York, Asian-American communities are reclaiming it as part of their own cultural inheritances. In London, hidden Mahjong clubs have emerged in basement speakeasies. In Hong Kong, competitive Mahjong tournaments are being live-streamed with fashionably dressed players and full sponsorships.
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Even after Independence, the game never really disappeared. It sat quietly in Parsi homes, where aunties would gather around the card table in the afternoon, and in Indian military circles, passed between postings as a refined time-pass.
It’s no wonder then that India, a largely family and community-driven country, has taken to the game so thoroughly. Everyone from nostalgic Gen X-ers who remember watching their parents play, mid-career women looking for a new social scene, and Gen Zs are embracing Mahjong as an exercise of both mind and memory.
Sangeeta Kewalramani, Mahjong teacher and founder of Mumbai’s House of Mahjong echoes this. “Socially, it brings people together across generations, I’ve even taught grandparents and grandkids together,” she explains. “I think why it has a renewed appeal is because of its versatility. For example you can host a Mahjong lunch party with the girls and also compete formally at a tournament. You have older women who’ve been playing rummy or bridge for years and are now loving the novelty of Mahjong. But more and more I see women in their 20s and 30s getting hooked.”
In some ways, the appeal of this Chinese game in India mirrors the global moment. It taps into the longing for connection and community in offline spaces, and a quiet rebellion against endless productivity.
Part of its comeback lies in the aesthetics: the tactile satisfaction of the tiles, the visual charm of the sets, even perhaps the gifting culture that is intrinsic to the nature of the game. “It’s no longer just about the tiles; it’s about the lifestyle, the hosting, and the gifting traditions that surround the game – giveaways and prizes are an integral part of the whole culture. Mahjong is its very own subculture now,” explains a representative from Nishkara.
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In Mumbai, a group of young professionals started The Mahjong Network via WhatsApp. Within months, it had grown into a full-blown movement, with rotating hosts, mentorship sessions, and tournament-style gatherings.
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Another reason? Everyone agrees that in a world defined by hyper-speed and endless screen time, Mahjong offers a kind of analog elegance. It demands attention, invites conversation, and unfolds in real time — four people, one table, no scrolling.
But there’s also something deeper at play. The pandemic left many of us starved for community and craving rituals that feel grounding. Mahjong delivers both. It’s strategic, communal, and meditative, a rare combination in modern life.
sangeetakewalramani / Instagram
But this is where we differ from the rest of the world. Mahjong players in India largely belong to a specific social class with the privilege to access gated and membership-only spaces such as the Willingdon Club in Mumbai. Mahjong sets, although easily available, are expensive, and access to Mahjong classes is often paid.
We’re living in an age not of invention, but of re-invention. From vinyl to zines, from Indian pickles to Mahjong tiles, there’s a wider cultural pull toward revisiting what once was: toward reclaiming forms of slowness, tactility, and togetherness that got lost in the churn of modernity.
Mahjong isn’t just back. It never left. We’re the ones circling back, clicking tiles like rosary beads, finding comfort in repetition, connection in tradition, and clarity in the clatter.
We’ve all grown up eagerly awaiting the monsoon season — not just for the joy of sipping chai and indulging in hot pakoras, but for the arrival of the undisputed king of fruits: the mango. For many of us, mangoes are wrapped in memory: grandmothers and mothers lovingly slicing them after a meal, their fragrance filling the air. Succulent, fresh, and impossibly tender, the mango has been a ritual, a nostalgia trip, a slice of summer on a plate. India’s love for mangoes goes far beyond summer indulgence — it’s a centuries-old obsession deeply embedded in the country’s culture, diplomacy, and history.
Every sun-charred summer, people scramble to buy them by the dozen, and visitors to India often leave with brimming crates, as souvenirs. Airports, during mango season, are dotted with cartons of the fruit, ready to cross borders — a happy consequence of modern-day globalization.
And yet, there is nothing new about globalization. If we jigsaw together fragments of Indian history, we would see that centuries before the first European ship crossed a storm-tossed ocean to India, the mango was already trotting across the globe. Born in the foothills of what is now Meghalaya, India’s beloved Mangifera indica had been cultivated for at least four thousand years before a Westerner ever tasted it. Sanskrit texts praised it. The Buddha is said to have meditated in a mango grove.
India’s favorite fruit. Nuff said. / unsplash.com
In fact, our first hint at the sweep of the rambling Indian trade and pilgrimage routes comes via Buddhism — it was ancient Buddhist monks, on pilgrimage to Indian Buddhist sites, who funneled the fruit into South East Asia, from where it trundled into China. By the tenth century, it had made its way to East Africa, through Persia.
The Maratha rulers, too, are said to have planted the tree everywhere they went, resulting in even further dissemination of the fruit. These were a few amongst the seeds of a fruity network that began in 1575, eventually arrowing into Agra in 1580, where Emperor Akbar, fascinated by a fruit unrivalled in color, smell, and taste grew his own mango orchards and even took to pouring milk and treacle at the base of the trees to enhance their taste.
It was the Columbian Exchange that finally sailed mango seeds across the ocean to Europe in the 15th century, and later to Brazil. In every place it arrived, the mango was adopted, transformed, and made local. In Mexico, it became the bedrock of the mangonada and of street snacks dusted with chili and lime. In the Caribbean, it fermented into rum punches and stewed into chutneys. From there, it was a hop, skip, and jump to North America.
Even the colonizing British, who tilted their sturdy noses up at many Indian fruits and vegetables, could not resist the mango. As early as 1883, they were shipping Christmas hampers of mango chutney, jam and jelly from Mumbai to family and friends in the UK.
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India’s love for mangoes goes far beyond a simple summer indulgence — it’s a centuries-old obsession deeply embedded in the country’s culture, diplomacy, and history.
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In 1838, the fruit itself found itself an immigrant in London, thanks to the eccentric agriculturist Framji Cowasji Banaji who shipped a hermetically sealed basket of his choicest produce to the queen of England for a spot of diplomacy. It is not known in what state the mangoes reached England. What we do know is it would take until the early 1900s for the British in India to successfully send a large batch to the UK in good condition.
The globetrotting continued after India won its independence from the British. Back in 1955, Prime Minister Nehru sent a few mango saplings to China — a small gesture, but it said a lot. It wasn’t just about fruit; it was a way of saying, “Here’s something we love — and maybe you will too.”
Decades later, the mango in 2006, when US President George Bush visited New Delhi, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, offered mangoes to the US President, effectively ending a two-decade ban on the fruit in America.
In such a way, the mango crossed borders and bridges, linking a network of commerce whose threads stitch together millions as far away as Mexico and China, thus begging the question — how old really is globalization itself?
There’s a culture building around a form of tourism that we don’t see much in advertisements. If your hairline needs a boost, you’re likely to head to Turkey. If you want glowing glass skin, you find yourself in South Korea. If you’re hoping to perfect your smile, you’ll probably find yourself in Albania. And if you’re looking to shave the rough edges off your nose, you’ll likely be flying to India. Welcome to the world of medical tourism for aesthetic procedures.
There’s nothing really new about medical tourism itself. What has changed though are people’s perceptions of it; patients are now far more open about flying around the globe just for an elective aesthetic procedure that might have drawn frowns earlier.
But what does this mean for the healthcare profession? And how does this impact the healthcare of those who are residents of these medical tourism hubs — are they getting left behind?
Medical tourism’s new face – beauty. / www.pexels.com
Roll out the red carpet
Governments have always welcomed medical tourists, with countries opening up their borders, and private hospitals opening up premium suites. Profits soar when patients from around the world pay their bills in foreign currencies. The medical aesthetics market was estimated to stand at 82 billion USD in 2024, and is projected to double in size to 143 billion USD by 2030.
And yet, for most people the world over, even basic healthcare is expensive. For cosmetic procedures, those costs escalate further. A hair transplant costs, on average, $13,000 in the US. In contrast, a trip to Turkey, including the flights, accommodation, and the procedure itself, could cost as little as $3,400, with a reputable clinic involved. That cost driver alone can be lucrative enough for people to consider it a viable option, regardless of the risks involved.
But this isn’t a story just about Turkey. Malaysia, South Korea, Thailand, Colombia, Mexico and India are well positioned as destination countries for aesthetic medical tourists. India, for example, is doubling down on the opportunity, with e-medical visas for medical tourists in place for nearly 170 countries, and a possibility of visas on arrival in the offing.
India’s edge in medical tourism lies of course in its affordability for international travelers, including those of Indian origin residing in the US, UK and Canada — treatments typically run 60–80% less than in the US or Europe — combined with over 57 JCI-accredited hospitals. The other enormous advantage is India’s facility with English; medical staff fluent in the language are an enormous draw for Westerners, and help ease the language barrier. It’s important to note that India caters to a swathe of visitors; around 88% of arrivals are from neighbouring South Asia especially Bangladesh, the Middle East, Africa, and Central Asia.
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The country is already uniquely positioned as an aesthetic wellness destination through traditional Ayurveda and yoga retreats — Kerala, for instance, is internationally-known for its serene retreats offering holistic healing.
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The country is already uniquely positioned as an aesthetic wellness destination through traditional Ayurveda and yoga retreats — Kerala, for instance, is internationally-known for its serene retreats offering holistic healing. Perhaps it’s no wonder then that a 2023 survey found that India is ranked second and third in rhinoplasty and liposuction procedures, and is well on its way to dominate in the fields of liposuction, rhinoplasty, Botox, fillers and semi-permanent makeup.
This is further strengthened by the government’s Heal in India initiative which emphasizes the country as a premier destination for integrated and holistic healthcare, for both complex medical procedures as well as aesthetic ones. As a result, India’s aesthetic healthcare market is estimated to reach approximately US$ 3.02 billion by 2030.
A new hierarchy
The low-cost-high-convenience model to achieve a certain set of beauty standards is attractive enough for people the world over to give it at least one go, especially since this was once available only to the super rich or the celebrities. With packages and services that can manage the end-to-end coordination for a medical tourist, that level of privilege is now available to anyone who can afford it. And affording it is simply getting easier, with time.
The tide is shifting even in countries like India, where there is now a surge in aesthetic procedures away from the big metros. Tier 2 cities are slowly increasing their access to quality aesthetic health care. Perhaps there will soon come a time when international visitors will fly into Patna for its specialized liposuction services!
Sure, this is a boon for visitors, but there’s a growing concern for the residents of these destination countries and how this medical tourism boon is reshaping the face of domestic healthcare, particularly for developing countries.
The promise of affordable plastic surgery draws patients halfway around the world. / www.pexels.com
Since most of the medical tourism for aesthetic procedures is centered around private healthcare, the boost in the sector becomes lopsided, with public healthcare lagging.
Public healthcare tends to rural and urban populations at a highly subsidized rate, but is largely underfunded and as a result, suffers from overcrowding and large wait times, owing to the quantity of the population it has to service.
In Malaysia, for example, private healthcare is now reserved for the wealthy and for the tourists, while local populations must rely on underfunded public healthcare. Thailand is seeing an active brain drain from the public sector to the private sector, as doctors choose lucrative financial options over the rigor of public healthcare systems. Yes, healthcare is noble work, but privilege now dictates the quality of it.
While India’s policy push for medical tourism does emphasize on the need to safeguard domestic healthcare first, there is already a yawning economic divide when it comes to access to top-tier healthcare. Aesthetic medical tourism would be simply unthinkable for most of the population.
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The medical aesthetics market was estimated to stand at 82 billion USD in 2024, and is projected to double in size to 143 billion USD by 2030.
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Taking a Stand
Healthcare has always been a service industry. But it has also always been distinguished as a calling, or an honorable career, because of what healthcare professionals do: they heal. Much like teaching, the ‘for profit’ consideration is culturally expected to be secondary to the actual act of service they provide through their skills.
However, when profits are booming from treating patients with only vanity concerns, it begs the question – what about those without these privileges? And perhaps this is the biggest unwanted cultural shift for destination countries in medical tourism i.e. an even greater gulf between the haves and have-nots.
More people than ever before are choosing to have these aesthetic procedures. And certainly their growing accessibility is reducing the gap between the haves and have-nots in the aesthetics department. But maybe it’s time we asked if the only ones benefiting from any growing healthcare system are those who access it on-demand and not on-necessity.
It’s everywhere — in your Instagram feed, in shopping apps, on tags sewn into dresses and denim jackets. Sustainable. Ethical. Eco-friendly. These words are fast becoming fashion’s favourite accessories.
But behind the buzzwords, something doesn’t add up.
What does it really mean for a brand to be ‘sustainable’? Who decides that a shirt is ‘ethical’? And in an industry worth over $1.5 trillion globally — built on speed, volume, and low margins — how much of this heartwarming language can we actually trust?
As the world grows more climate-conscious, fashion has scrambled to clean up its image. Consumers are pivoting away from fast, cheap fashion, towards more homegrown, slow-stitched brands. But instead of fixing how their clothes are actually made, many brands have just changed how they talk about them. Words like ‘sustainable’ or ‘conscious’ get thrown around, but it’s often just clever marketing with little behind it. As shoppers, we’re left guessing — trying to make better choices, but unsure what any of it really means.
It’s time to ask: do we really know what we’re wearing?
At its core, sustainable fashion refers to clothing that’s designed, produced, and distributed in a way that minimizes harm to people and the planet. That might include everything from using organic cotton and low-impact dyes to ensuring workers are paid fair wages in safe conditions.
But there is no global rulebook, no clear-cut definition of what the term means. It’s all a bit… fuzzy. And that fuzziness? It’s exactly what allows brands to get away with saying a lot without actually doing much. They throw around feel-good words but rarely back them up. The result? A lot of bold claims — and not nearly enough proof.
This is greenwashing: when companies mislead consumers about the environmental benefits of a product or practice.
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Look for specificity — a truly transparent brand will tell you exactly what makes that shirt or dress sustainable whether it’s organic cotton, low water usage, fair wages, or all of the above.
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And it works — because we want to believe it. Consumers want a pat on the back for their choices, for choosing the $80 ‘organic bamboo’ shirt over the $10 fast fashion top from a high-street brand.
In India, with its complex, layered textile traditions, sustainability might lead to further flattening. After all, who decides what is sustainable and for whom? The tailor bent over his bandhini work, the sun-hunched cotton farmer in his fields, often have no say in what makes a garment sustainable. This division of labor and capital becomes more complicated when you glance at India’s colonial history, where tailors were often shunted into marginalized positions.
So, as someone trying to shop a little more consciously — where do you even start?
Here are a few suggestions. Avoid shopping entirely, or choose pre-loved clothing. But if you have an unbearable hankering for that cute cotton dress from that planet ’forward’ brand check for the following things.
Look for specificity — a transparent brand will tell you exactly what makes that shirt or dress sustainable whether it’s organic cotton, low water usage, fair wages, or all of the above. Look for details: what is the fabric? Who made it and are they being paid fairly? How was the material grown? How much water or energy did it consume? Are brands using leftover material effectively, or are they contributing to the enormous fashion waste problem? Are they producing vast volumes of clothes that are then discarded rather than recycled? Sometimes, there are other hard choices to be made. Cotton, for instance, is a thirsty crop, leeching water from the soil, but on the other hand, polyester is a synthetic, non-biodegradable material.
Certifications help, but even they’re complicated. Some widely-recognised ones include GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard), OEKO-TEX, and Fair Trade. But not all certifications are equal — and some are run by industry bodies themselves.
Transparency over perfection, always. Truly sustainable brands will be honest about what they’re doing and what they’re still working on. A glossy marketing video is not the same as a breakdown of supply chains and emissions — endless aesthetically-shot reels of tailors hunched over their sewing do not automatically translate to fair wages. Sometimes, it is simply clever marketing. It helps to write to individual brands and demand accountability.
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Until we have clearer regulations, global standards, and third-party checks that are genuinely independent, ‘sustainable fashion’ will remain a murky promise — one that can either mean everything or absolutely nothing.
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Touch, feel, observe. While it’s not always possible to judge quality or authenticity with the naked eye, there’s some truth to the idea that if a garment feels cheap or synthetic, it probably didn’t come from a clean, slow process.
Unfortunately, in India and globally, there’s no unified parameters for sustainable fashion. In most countries, brands can slap the word ‘sustainable’ on a tag without proving anything; regulations remain sparse. The EU has begun cracking down on misleading claims and greenwashing, although enforcement is still new and patchy. However, this is set to change come 2028, with the EU mandating a standardized digital identifier under its Digital Product Passport initiative. This is a QR code of sorts that clarifies all the details of any garment sold in the EU, and thoroughly tracks its carbon footprint. This will squarely affect the Indian manufacturing industry that supplies $7.6 billion worth of textiles to Europe. How exactly this modifies an industry often reliant on informal tailoring workshops and unregulated middlemen, remains to be seen.
But until that is set in place more fully, that means the burden falls squarely on the consumer. And frankly, that’s not fair.
Even with the best intentions, conscious shopping isn’t enough to fix a broken system. It’s not just fast fashion that’s the problem — it’s fast information, too. We live in a system where we are constantly bombarded by trends; they are far easier to push than facts, and far more profitable.
So maybe the real question isn’t “Which brand is truly sustainable?” but something deeper: Why is it so hard to know for sure?Who gets to decide what’s ethical — and who is holding them accountable?
Until we have clearer regulations, global standards, and third-party checks that are genuinely independent, ‘sustainable fashion’ will remain a murky promise — one that can either mean everything or absolutely nothing.
We live in an age where we know where our food is from, how many steps we’ve taken today, even the carbon footprint of our flights. But when it comes to the clothes we wear — the fabrics that sit against our skin every day — we’re often in the dark. That needs to change.
If we’re going to talk about sustainability, let’s demand clarity. Let’s ask harder questions. Let’s treat ‘sustainable fashion’ not as a trend, but as a responsibility — one that belongs as much to lawmakers and corporations as it does to shoppers. Let’s bring light to the label.
Your aunt sends you a devotional Reel every morning, your father has strong opinions about which YouTube finance channel to trust, and your grandfather joins Zoom calls without being asked (but he just refuses to mute himself). For years, these felt like stories from the edges of internet life. Increasingly, they are internet life.
We talk about the internet as though it belongs to the young. Every few months there is a new generation to decode, a new platform to panic about, a new slang term requiring a glossary. Brands chase Gen Z and startups chase Gen Alpha. Entire industries are built around predicting what younger users will do next.
Meanwhile, some of the most consistent growth in India’s internet user base is happening among people over fifty.
The numbers tell a partial story. India crossed 950 million active internet users in 2025, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India, with rural adoption growing at roughly twice the pace of urban areas. Age-disaggregated data is harder to come by, but the direction seems to be clear. The share of internet users aged 35 and above has been rising steadily since 2019, and demographic projections suggest that trend will continue as India’s population ages and smartphone access deepens in smaller cities and towns. The next wave of first-time internet users in India will not look like the last one. What is less discussed is what happens to a platform’s culture when so many new people arrive on it. A demographic that is older, often more patient, and frequently more purposeful about why they are there.
In India, a new kind of everyday ritual is taking root. Mornings begin with bhajans on YouTube. Then come WhatsApp family groups, a regional-language news video, or maybe a stock market explainer from a creator who uses analogies that are relatable. A Facebook birthday message for an old colleague, followed by a quick check of a government portal that someone figured out how to navigate and then screenshot for everyone else. The routine is structured, habitual, and deeply social. It is also as sticky, in its own way, as any Gen Z screen schedule.
But the motivations are different. For many older users, the internet is not primarily a place for self-expression or personal branding or keeping up with the cultural conversation. It is a tool for maintaining relationships, staying connected to family, managing practical life, and participating in communities that matter to them.
This shows up in how they behave once they are online. Older WhatsApp users, as anyone in a family group can confirm, do not just forward; they annotate. A news article usually arrives with commentary, a health tip comes with a personal observation, and good-morning messages, with their small festivals of flowers and folded hands and heart emojis, are not just broadcast content. These have quickly become a daily form of contact. Communication stays relational rather than algorithmic, and in an era when younger users often describe social media as exhausting and isolating, that is not nothing.
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The next wave of first-time internet users in India will not look like the last one.
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The effect is subtle but significant. Spaces that platforms often imagine as channels for content become, in practice, places for conversation. It’s not uncommon to see a comment section turn into a reunion or a devotional livestream become a community gathering.
Part of what is driving older Indians online is a structural shift that does not get talked about enough in digital culture conversations. The family has changed shape and technology has moved in to fill some of the gap.
Joint households have given way, across much of urban and semi-urban India, to smaller nuclear arrangements. Adult children have moved to other cities, or other countries. The Indian diaspora is large and still growing. There are over 32 million people of Indian origin living outside India, among the largest overseas communities in the world. For many of them, daily contact with parents and grandparents happens through a screen.
This creates an understated yet practical imperative. Parents and grandparents who want to stay close to children abroad need to be online. Video calls, WhatsApp updates, shared Reels, and Facebook posts that let you feel like you witnessed something have become how families stay emotionally present across distance.
Research on the lived experience of older Indians left behind by emigrating children describes something that rings true. Digital communication genuinely mitigates loneliness, but it also reveals its own limits. A five-minute call can hide a difficult day. Warmth can come through, context often cannot. Still, the alternative, sporadic phone calls across time zones, is worse. And so older adults learn the platforms, figure out video calling, join the family group, and gradually become more comfortable in digital spaces than anyone expected.
For NRI families, this is not a small thing. The grandmother who can now send a voice note and receive a photo from a birthday party on the other side of the world within minutes of it being taken is not marginal to the internet. The internet came to her.
As more older Indians come online, a small but growing ecosystem has emerged around them. Companies like Seniority, Emoha, and Goodfellows are building services specifically for this demographic, from ergonomic products and elder companionship to curated digital experiences for seniors. Healthcare platforms are also increasingly offering simplified digital flows.
Content creators are also a part of this shift. Retired teachers run YouTube channels explaining Sanskrit texts, with production values modest enough to feel trustworthy. Grandmothers share recipes with audiences spread across multiple countries. Regional-language creators discuss gardening, spirituality, personal finance, and everyday health for viewers who rarely see themselves reflected anywhere else online. Utkarsh, a Delhi-based banker told us, “I gifted my father a podcast mic for his retirement. He wants to start an educational channel to talk about finance for older people. He worked for the government for decades and wants to share his knowledge. He even has 5k followers!”
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Communication stays relational rather than algorithmic, and in an era when younger users often describe social media as exhausting and isolating, that is not nothing.
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These are not niche curiosities. Devotional content on YouTube has grown into one of the platform’s most reliably streamed categories in India. The audience for that content is not primarily young.
But there’s another side to the story as older Indians log in more. None of this is uncomplicated. They are also more vulnerable to misinformation, digital scams, and phishing attempts. They are more likely to be scammed than younger users. On top of that, platforms were not designed with their threat models in mind. Multiple studies across different countries find that older adults are also more likely to share misinformation online, often not from carelessness but from a different sense of what sharing means.
This has produced a recognizable intergenerational dynamic in a lot of Indian households. The adult child explaining privacy settings, gently questioning that viral health claim, showing a parent how to spot a suspicious link, while that same parent is sending online registration links for government schemes they figured out how to navigate, or passing along stock tips, or knowing exactly which government portal has the right form for a particular bureaucratic task. Everyone teaches and everyone gets taught. Everyone is also at least slightly exasperated.
Most Indian platforms still behave as though their user is young and digitally fluent in the way that demographic usually is. User interfaces assume a certain comfort with gesture and navigation that many older first-time users do not have. Marketing and product decisions continue to treat new users as synonymous with young users. Voice search, larger text options, simpler checkout flows, these are still exceptions rather than defaults.
The numbers suggest this will have to change. How people pay looks different in this demographic. They use less UPI, more cash on delivery, more comfort with phone-based rather than app-based transactions. How they search looks different, they tend to use more voice commands, more full questions phrased in regional languages, and less comfort with truncated keyword logic. How they decide what to trust looks different too. Platform reputation and community validation matter more than influencer endorsement.
Some companies have noticed and begun adapting. Quick commerce and delivery platforms have begun targeting older demographics with campaigns that acknowledge, rather than ignore, the learning curve. Uber’s guest-ride feature allows users to book rides for someone else. Blinkit has experimented with collaborative shopping tools that recognize that purchases are often made collectively rather than individually. These may seem like small product decisions, but they reflect a larger reality. Still, it is early and the gap between where the user base is going and where product design currently sits is wide.
India’s internet is older than it was five years ago, and it will be older still in five more. That does not mean the memes disappear or the youth platforms empty out. It means the internet becomes more genuinely intergenerational, more varied in its purposes, its languages, its habits, and its assumptions about what being online is even for.
So that aunt sending the devotional reel every morning is not a straggler arriving late to someone else’s party. She is part of one of the most significant shifts happening in Indian digital life right now, and the rest of the internet is still catching up to what that means.
In 2024, an enormous crowd sways to Prateek Kuhad’s dulcet tones under a cerulean March sky. In 2025, Jasleen Royal belted her heart out at the D Y Patil Stadium, in a soft Mumbai gloaming. In 2026, on a cool Bengaluru night, Neyhal sang soft serenades on a stage in Phoenix Market City. The connection between all three? They all opened for international superstars – Ed Sheeran, Coldplay and Michael Learns to Rock.
India’s contribution to global music for a long time was to provide a fleeting taste of its diverse soundscape before the main event took center stage. However, that function has changed in recent years, slowly transforming into something far more significant. For many Indian artists, opening for international superstars isn’t just a gig — it’s a test of talent, of taste, and, perhaps unfairly, of legitimacy.
Prateek Kuhad is one of India’s best-known singers / Wikimedia Commons
These moments are framed by the media as breakthroughs for the Indian musicians, as an indication that Indian music is at last breaking onto the international scene. Are these musical introductions more about looks than potential, though?
Theoretically, opening acts are an opportunity for audiences to discover local talent and a nod to local importance. In practice, they’re often a litmus test for whether an artist can carry the weight of audience expectation before a stadium erupts for someone else. Can they impress an impatient crowd that’s mostly there for the headliner?
It’s not just about being good — all the performers are good, perhaps even better than the headlining act. It’s about being palatable and accessible. Global enough to fit — yet distinct enough to represent something ‘authentically Indian’. That tension is both the promise and the peril of opening for international names in India. You’re seen, but are you really heard?
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Theoretically, opening acts are an opportunity for audiences to discover local talent and a nod to local importance. In practice, they’re often a litmus test: can this artist carry the weight of audience expectation before a stadium erupts for someone else?
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But where are they now? Let’s track their trajectories. Divine’s pre-Post Malone slot felt like a full-circle moment — the homegrown rapper whose music once echoed in Mumbai’s gullies now centre stage at a mega gig. But Divine was already a star. Did opening for Post change anything? Probably not.
Similarly, when Anuv Jain opened for Ed Sheeran, it sparked chatter — was his mellow, acoustic vibe a safe choice? Did it widen his base or simply reaffirm what his fans already knew?
But Divine and Anuv were already stars in India. Lesser-known performers frequently return to local circuits, their international prominence swiftly forgotten. For them, the slot turns into a line in their biography; it’s remarkable, sure, but it’s not always revolutionary.
Similarly, when Anuv Jain opened for Ed Sheeran, it sparked chatter — was his mellow, acoustic vibe a safe choice? Did it widen his base or simply reaffirm what his fans already knew?
But Divine and Anuv were already stars in India. Lesser-known performers frequently return to local circuits, their international prominence swiftly forgotten. For them, the slot turns into a line in their biography; it’s remarkable, sure, but it’s not always revolutionary.
Opening for a global name means infrastructure, press, a larger-than-usual audience. It’s a fast pass into a moment that might take years to build otherwise. But it also reveals a deeper anxiety: that Indian artists are still waiting to be validated from the outside. That recognition must come with a stamp — global, Western, verified.
The irony? India’s music culture has never been more expansive. From Tamil hip-hop to Punjabi pop, indie electronica to regional folk revivals — the real sonic revolutions aren’t happening in stadiums. They’re happening in private rooms, on YouTube, at intimate gigs where language and geography matter less than vibe.
Still, the question remains. In the end, do opening acts matter?
Yes, of course they do. But their evolving status is a mixed blessing. They don’t promise longevity; instead, they offer visibility. And whether that moment becomes a movement depends less on who you open for, and even more on the artist’s next step.
In a country as culturally dense and musically diverse as India, perhaps the real test isn’t opening for the world — it’s opening up the world to us. On our own terms.
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.
