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  • The Dream Factory

    In a rented room in Kota, Rajasthan, a seventeen-year-old from Patna is awake at midnight, studying for the Joint Entrance Examination, the brutally competitive test that is the gateway to India’s elite Indian Institutes of Technology. He has been here eleven months. His parents, a government clerk father and a schoolteacher mother, took out a loan to send him here. The coaching institute charges more than the father earns in a year. On the wall above the desk, the teenager has taped a printout. Not a motivational quote or a photograph of his family. But instead a photograph of the IIT Bombay campus. He has never been to Mumbai.

    This is not an unusual story. In many ways, it is the story of modern India. The conviction that technology is the most reliable path upward has proved remarkably resistant to contrary evidence, held so firmly it has outlasted the layoffs, the AI disruption, and every data point that complicates it. To understand why, you have to understand that the dream was never really about technology.

     

     

    The Architecture of an Aspiration

    It begins with Jawaharlal Nehru.

    After Independence, India’s first prime minister was explicit about what engineers were for. Speaking at the very first convocation of IIT Kharagpur in 1951, Nehru described the new institute as a “fine monument of India, representing India’s urges, India’s future in the making.” He had modeled the IITs on MIT after a visit in 1949, and envisioned them as the cornerstone of a post-colonial nation proving itself through technology. Engineering was not a career choice. It was civic participation.

    That idea calcified into culture. Nearly 47 percent of Indian students aspire to become engineers. The phrase mera beta engineer banega (“my son will become an engineer”) is so embedded in the cultural lexicon that it functions simultaneously as a parental dream, social pressure, and a national cliché. The 2009 Bollywood film 3 Idiots, which remains one of the highest-grossing Indian films ever made, is a firm condemnation of a contemporary education system criticized for its constrictive and stressful nature, one blamed for increasing student suicides. The film also became a sensation in China, where its portrayal of educational pressure resonated deeply with audiences. The film’s most devastating joke is a throwaway line where a pregnant woman muses that her child will inevitably be either a doctor or an engineer, depending, naturally, on the child’s gender. Seventeen years on, people still quote it. The system it critiques is still largely intact.

     

    IIT Kharagpur / in.pinterest.com

     

    The reason is not irrationality. It is history.

    The parents who pushed their children toward engineering in the 1990s and 2000s were making a rational bet. IT was one of the very few sectors in India offering global-scale salaries, relative job security, and a clear path into the middle class. Those bets paid off. A generation of engineers bought apartments, educated their children, and became the social proof that their communities needed to believe the path was real. The inheritance of ambition is not irrational. It is, in fact, quite a logical response to living memory of what worked.

    But those children, the generation now entering the workforce, are inheriting ambitions formed under different conditions. The world they are entering has AI rewriting job descriptions in real time, a tech sector that lays off thousands in a quarter and hires them back the next, and an H-1B pathway to America that is politically contested in ways it never was before.

     

    The Numbers the Dream Ignores

    2025 was one of the most turbulent years in India’s technology sector. Tata Consultancy Services cut nearly 12,000 employees. Startups shed an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 jobs. Surveys show that 67 percent of engineers fear AI will take their roles, and that 60 percent of engineering graduates are considered unemployable by industry standards. The Aspiring Minds assessment found that only around 10 percent of Indian IT graduates can write code that a machine can actually execute.

     

     

    That last number requires a pause. India produces hundreds of thousands of engineering graduates every year. The coaching industry that funnels students toward the IITs generates approximately ₹6,500 crore in annual revenue. Kota alone hosts over 250,000 students at its peak, in a city whose entire economy is built on exam preparation. And yet, a comprehensive skills assessment found that fewer than one in ten of the graduates this system produces can do basic programming.

    What the system has actually created, then, is a two-tier reality. At the very top, the IITs, the NITs, the handful of elite institutions, it produces engineers of genuine global caliber. Of the roughly one million students who appear for the JEE each year, only around 10,000 are admitted to the 23 IITs. That is one percent. Below that narrow apex lies an enormous second tier. Millions of students who attended engineering college, earned the credential, and emerged without the skills the said credential was supposed to signify. The dream is real at the top. At scale, it is largely a sorting factory.

    Even so, Kota’s enrollment bounced back in 2026, with coaching centers reporting 20 to 30 percent increases in admissions after a dip in 2023 and 2024. The dream, it turns out, is not particularly interested in the news cycle.

     

    What the IIT Produces (What It Doesn’t)

    The deepest irony of India’s tech obsession lies in the gap between what the IIT represents and what it actually delivers to the country.

    Consider the diaspora. Indians account for approximately 71 percent of all H-1B visas issued in the United States. That is 2,83,000 in fiscal year 2024 alone, compared to 47,000 for the next-highest country, China. This is a structural dominance of a specific pipeline. The rise of the Indian tech diaspora was not simply a story of individual achievement. It coincided with a period when America’s expanding software industry was actively recruiting technical talent. From the Y2K era through the dot-com boom and beyond, the H-1B visa became a key pathway into that workforce. Indian engineers became one of the largest beneficiaries of that demand. 

     

    “
    The deepest irony of India's tech obsession lies in the gap between what the IIT represents and what it actually delivers to the country.
    ”

     

    Today, Sundar Pichai leads Alphabet, Satya Nadella leads Microsoft, Arvind Krishna leads IBM, and Shantanu Narayen leads Adobe. The roster of Indian-origin CEOs at the apex of American technology reads like a convocation list.

    These figures function in India less as biographies than as parables. They are held up not as exceptions but as proofs of concept. They signal that the system works, the path is real, and the visa is the threshold. What is less visible in that telling is the scaffolding behind each success, the years in Kota, the family loans, the millions who sat the same exam and did not make it. Over time, what began as a labor pipeline evolved into something more powerful in the Indian imagination. It became evidence that the path worked.

    And then there are the harder questions the parables just don’t answer. India produces the CEOs of the world’s most powerful technology companies, but not the companies themselves. India spends 0.65 percent of its GDP on research and development, compared to 2.4 percent in China and 3.5 percent in the United States. One analysis put it plainly, ‘India’s IT industry was built to deliver software services, not to invent.’ TCS, Infosys, and Wipro, the companies that helped create that demand for engineers in India and effectively built the Indian middle class, turned Bengaluru into a global destination. But they were made for execution, not origination. They scaled what worked. They delivered what clients asked for. They optimized. They did not, for the most part, create.

    This is a direct consequence of the same cultural logic that fills Kota every year. The system that rewards exam performance over curiosity, credential over risk, and stability over failure is the same system that produces brilliant executives for other people’s companies while struggling to produce a Nvidia of its own. Liberalization opened markets, and the fastest path to growth lay in services. As one analysis observed, ‘frontier technology asks for long horizons and uncertain payoffs. It demands that money be spent before results are visible and that failure be accepted not as an aberration but as a necessary stage.’ That is beginning to change. In India’s major cities, startup failure is increasingly treated as a rite of passage rather than a source of shame. Founders now publicly announce closures, return investor money, and move on in ways that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. But a founder from Benaras tells us, “In Tier-II and Tier-III cities, the stigma still exists. It’s not as bad as it once was, but it’s there. The cultural permission to fail productively has not yet reached us. But the truth is you cannot build an Apple or a Nvidia or an OpenAI without it.”

    Why Has AI Disruption Not Changed the Math?

    Nearly 64 percent of Indian IT firms integrated generative AI tools in 2025. One report estimates that 640,000 low-skilled service jobs in the sector are at risk from automation, while only 160,000 mid- to high-skilled positions will be created to replace them. The math is not encouraging. The sector that has historically absorbed India’s engineering graduates is slowly reducing its need for exactly the kind of engineers the coaching industry mass-produces each year.

    And yet the NASSCOM numbers reveal something counterintuitive. Direct tech sector employment is projected to reach approximately 6 million in fiscal year 2026, up 2.3 percent, with a net addition of 135,000 employees. Even in a year of structural disruption and high-profile layoffs, the industry added jobs. The sector is simultaneously contracting in some roles and expanding in others, a volatility that looks, at least from the outside, like chaos, but which, over time, still trends upward.

    Perhaps that is the fact that keeps the dream alive. On aggregate, tech keeps winning. It does not win for everyone, and the cost in wasted potential, family debt, and in the most devastating cases, student lives, is enormous. But the aggregate keeps trending upward, and aspiration, once it becomes cultural and braided into identity, does not respond to individual tragedies. It responds to the aggregate.

     

    What This Has to Do With The US

    Americans are living through their own version of this story. A generation raised to believe that college was the reliable ladder has discovered that the ladder has become very expensive and leads to a labor market that no longer reliably rewards what it once did. The disruption is one American workers are anxiously tracking. AI replacing roles, the hollowing out of middle-skill jobs, and the sense that credential and effort no longer produce stability are all also already inside India’s tech sector. It’s just further along.

    What India offers, then, is a story about itself. But zoom out and it is also an early preview. The question of what happens when a society’s most powerful aspiration outpaces its economy’s ability to fulfill that aspiration. Then, it is not uniquely Indian. It is merely more visible there, more extreme, more accelerated.

     

    Vibrant Academy / in.pinterest.com

     

    No Clean Answers

    Back in the room in Kota, the teenager with the IIT Bombay printout knows, on some level, the contradictions of the world he is trying to enter. The dream is not delusional. India’s tech sector expanded from $118 billion in revenue in 2015 to an estimated $283 billion in 2025. The engineers who left for Silicon Valley and now write the next chapter of AI are not inventions. The path is real, even if it is narrow.

    The problem is not that the dream is false. It is that the dream has been scaled to serve far more people than it can accommodate. And the machinery for managing that gap, the cultural permission to try something else, to redefine success, to fail without shame, and perhaps most urgently, to build something that the world has never seen before rather than execute what others have already imagined, is still catching up.

    Until it does, the lights stay on in Kota. The printout stays on the wall.

  • How Bollywood’s NRI Fantasy Helped India Imagine Itself

    A young Indian woman stands in London, blonde-streaked hair, cigarette in hand, barely able to recall a word of Hindi. By the film’s end, she has poured her liquor down the drain, draped herself in a saree, and rediscovered her roots. That is the arc of Preeti in Manoj Kumar’s Purab Aur Paschim (1970) and it tells you nearly everything you need to know about how India once regarded its diaspora.

    Fast-forward 25 years. In Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), a swaggering NRI named Raj romps across Europe, flirts his way through Switzerland, and winds up in a Punjab mustard field. He is charming, cosmopolitan, and impeccably desi at heart. No redemption arc required for he was never lost to begin with.

    The distance between these two characters is cinematic, but it is also the story of how India reimagined itself, its relationship with the wider world, and the Indians who chose to live in it. At the heart of that story is a surprisingly simple idea: the NRI, for decades, was not a person on screen so much as a form of proof. Proof that India could travel. Proof that its identity could survive the world. What that proof needed to look like has changed enormously and tracing those changes tells you more about India than about any NRI who ever actually lived abroad.

     

    Purab Aur Pachhim / in.pinterest.com

     

    The Cautionary NRI: Post-Independence to the 1980s

    In the decades following Independence, the NRI on screen was less a figure of aspiration than one of warning. Films like Purab Aur Paschim presented life abroad as a moral test, one that many Indians were failing. Preeti, raised in London by a father who has grown contemptuous of his homeland, doesn’t merely lack Indian values. She has actively traded them for Western ones. The film’s resolution with her full embrace of Indian tradition functions as cultural restoration. The foreign land had corrupted her and only India could make her whole again.

    This was not a mere coincidence of storytelling. This reflected the anxieties of a newly independent nation still defining itself in relation to a colonial past and the cultural influence of the West. India’s socialist-leaning economy in those decades was built on self-reliance and insularity. It was swadeshi (which literally translates to ‘of one’s own country’) in both commerce and culture. In that context, the Indian who left for the West was not admirable. They were, at best, a cautionary tale. At worst, they were deserters. Academic analyses of the film have noted that earlier Bollywood treated the diaspora through what one researcher called “the disparaging gaze of a ‘deserter’.” The NRI’s potential for cultural contamination had to be contained, reversed, or punished.

     

    Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham / in.pinterest.com

     

     

    The Liberalization Fantasy: 1991 and Everything After

    Everything changed in 1991, when India dismantled its protectionist economic model and opened its doors to foreign capital, global brands, and a new vocabulary of aspiration. Suddenly, the world felt proximate. International mobility became something to chase, not fear.

    Bollywood moved quickly. Netflix’s The Romantics (2023), which features the first on-camera interview with filmmaker Aditya Chopra, offers a telling piece of context here. The son of legendary director Yash Chopra and the creative force behind DDLJ, Chopra helped redefine how Bollywood imagined the diaspora. Director Smriti Mundhra, herself an NRI who grew up in the US, describes Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ) as “a direct reflection of the diaspora and the world we live in”, noting that for her generation of Indians abroad, it was the first Hindi film that truly spoke to them. That reception was deliberate. DDLJ arrived at the precise moment when a growing diaspora audience was hungry to see itself on screen, not as a cautionary figure in need of cultural rescue, but as someone who could belong to both worlds at once. The shift was a creative decision grounded in a changed audience and a changed country.

    By the mid-1990s, the NRI had been entirely recast. Alongside DDLJ, films like Pardes (1997) and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001) introduced a new archetype, one of someone who is wealthy, globally mobile, Western in style, but irreducibly Indian in values. These characters lived in sprawling London homes and traveled freely across continents, but they wept at the sound of a Punjabi folk song and placed tradition above personal desire.

     

    “
    The NRI's potential for cultural contamination had to be contained, reversed, or punished.
    ”

     

    Crucially, scholars have observed that the two films approached this balancing act differently. Where DDLJ proposed that Indian identity was a ‘portable asset’ that could survive migration intact, Pardes suggested that cultural loss was ultimately unavoidable, only postponed. The anxiety of the earlier era had not fully disappeared. It had simply been made romantic.

    What DDLJ did, though, was shift the moral center. Raj is not rewarded for rebelling against tradition. In fact, he is rewarded for respecting it. His entire mission is to win not just Simran, but her father’s blessing. The emotional climax of the film is not a flight into modernity, it is a quest for family approval. While the geography had changed, the value system had not. The message, received by millions across India and in the diaspora, was reassuring. It said that you could leave home without losing it.

     

    What the NRI Represented to India

    To understand why this fantasy landed so powerfully, you have to understand what the NRI meant to the Indian watching from home.

    The NRI of 1990s Bollywood was aspirational on multiple levels. At the most obvious, it represented wealth and mobility at a time when international travel was still rare and ‘foreign-returned’ still carried a certain halo. But success in London or New York carried symbolic weight beyond economics alone. These were cities that occupied a privileged place in the Indian imagination after centuries of colonial entanglement. To succeed there was to answer something. But to thrive there, on your own terms, while remaining recognizably Indian, that was the deeper fantasy. The NRIs in these films weren’t aspirational because they were just wealthy. They were aspirational because they felt like vindication.

     

    Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge / in.pinterest.com

     

    This is why, as one analysis of DDLJ put it, the NRI was transformed from “the marginal outsider” into “not just a possible Indian national subject, but possibly one of its best.” In a decade when India was renegotiating its place in the world, the glamorous, rooted NRI offered a comforting narrative of national confidence.

    What these films didn’t show was equally telling. The Bollywood NRI of the 1990s never dealt with visa rejections or immigration queues. They were never subjected to racial microaggressions, or if racism appeared at all, it was cartoonishly overt, easier to dismiss than the ambient, grinding kind that real diaspora Indians described experiencing. There were no student loans, no identity crises, and no painful silences at the dinner table where one generation spoke a language the other had half-forgotten. As one British-Indian viewer told us, real prejudice “is a lot more subtle and usually communicated through microaggressions.” “It’s nothing like the cinematic version. It’s somehow worse,” they added.

    The screen NRI was not a portrait. It was a projection. And projections, by design, leave the difficult parts out.

     

    The Quiet Shift: 2010s and Beyond

    By the 2010s, the old anxieties had begun to soften. Global mobility was no longer a novelty for India’s growing middle class. International education, travel, and careers had become familiar realities rather than remote fantasies. India’s cultural confidence, its sense of itself as a significant global presence, had also grown considerably. So, aspiration no longer pointed exclusively outward.

    The films registered this shift subtly but unmistakably. English Vinglish (2012) uses America not as an ideological destination but as a backdrop for one woman’s journey toward self-worth. The question of whether an Indian woman can survive contact with the West doesn’t arise. It’s taken for granted. What the film asks instead is quieter and more personal. It asks if she can survive her own family’s indifference to who she is.

     

    “
    While the geography had changed, the value system had not… It said that you could leave home without losing it.
    ”

     

    Zoya Akhtar’s films push this further. In Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (2011) and Dil Dhadakne Do (2015), characters move through global spaces with the ease of people who have always belonged there. International mobility is neither extraordinary nor threatened. The old binary, India versus the West, tradition versus modernity, all of it seems to have largely dissolved. What remains is a more layered, less anxious understanding of identity. One that is fluid, geographically unmoored, and unburdened by the need to prove anything to anyone.

    More recently, films like Kapoor & Sons (2016) have quietly abandoned the fantasy altogether, presenting diaspora characters whose struggles are psychological and familial rather than cultural. The NRI is no longer a symbol. They are, finally, just a person.

     

    Every Era Gets the NRI It Needs

    The trajectory of Bollywood’s NRI, from a cautionary figure to a glamorous proof of Indian possibility to ordinary human beings, tracks something larger than cinema. It tracks how a country’s self-image changes as its circumstances do.

    A socialist India, slightly weary of the West and intent on self-definition, needed the NRI to be a warning. A liberalizing India, newly hungry for the world and anxious about what it might cost, needed the NRI to be a reassurance. A more confident India, less obsessed with proving herself, no longer needs the NRI to be a symbol. It can simply be a person.

    The Bollywood NRI was never really a portrait of the diaspora. It was a way for India to imagine herself and negotiate the questions that globalization was raising, all through the language of romance and spectacle. What do we keep? What do we trade? Who are we when the world comes closer? Those questions mattered enormously to a generation navigating an opening India without a roadmap, and the NRI, glamorous and rooted and improbably uncomplicated, offered one kind of answer.

    As India changed, so did the fantasy. And perhaps that is why the NRI feels less central today. Not because the films failed, but because the questions that once made the character so powerful no longer carry the same urgency. The work is largely done. The mirror has been put down.

  • Why Gen Z Turns to Social Media for Financial Advice

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

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

     

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

     

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

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

     

    “
    Formal finance still feels like a private club with a strict dress code. Social media feels like you can walk in wearing pajamas.
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    What older observers often miss is that Gen Z doesn’t treat social media advice as gospel. Many openly acknowledge the risks. They cross-check tips on Google, Reddit, or with a friend who “knows this stuff.” They follow multiple creators precisely because they don’t fully trust any single one.

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

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

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

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

    But focusing only on regulation misses the larger point.

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

     

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

     

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

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

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

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

  • When Shopping Became a Game

    Open Temu and you are not immediately asked to buy something. You are asked to spin a wheel, claim a reward, watch a countdown, and share a link. The interface feels closer to a casual game than a marketplace, where participation comes before intent and value is unlocked through progression.

    What looks like shopping is closer to training. The system does not persuade, it conditions your behaviour through participation. Temu’s rise is often explained through cheap prices and aggressive advertising, but that explanation misses what distinguishes the platform. It blurs the boundary between commerce and play, turning shopping into a system where rewards, urgency, and progression shape behaviour alongside price. What can look like novelty is better understood as a shift in how persuasion operates, embedded directly into interaction rather than delivered as a message.

    Gamification is not new, but here it is no longer a layer that separates it from other aspects of our lives. Now, it is the system. Discounts are earned through participation, progression unlocks value, and attention becomes the currency that precedes money.

     

     

     

    This works because games operate on a different logic than advertising. Traditional ads interrupt, they ask to be noticed, judged, and resisted. Games organise behaviour. Progress depends on returning, repeating, and completing actions, and over time those actions stop feeling like choices and start feeling like movement. And so when shopping is structured this way, the decision to buy feels like an end of that movement.

    Temu is not alone in this approach. TikTok Shop folds buying directly into scrolling, blending entertainment and commerce into the same gesture. Shein-style interfaces rely on countdowns, points, and reward ladders that keep users moving through the app. Even airline and delivery platforms now use progress bars, limited-time perks, and visual milestones to structure behaviour. While the specifics differ, the logic is the same. When participation comes first, conversion tends to follow.

    The mechanics are visible, often even obvious. But visibility does not make them neutral. The question is not whether users understand the system. It is whether understanding changes how they behave inside it.

     

    “
    "Traditional ads interrupt, they ask to be noticed, judged, and resisted. Games organise behaviour."
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    There is also an economic logic at work. Gamified spaces rely on users spending time, attention, and effort before spending money. Each interaction generates data, reach, and momentum for the platform. The reward might be a small discount or bonus, but the value extracted compounds. Participation drives growth, and growth strengthens the system that keeps users moving through it.

    This helps explain why advertising now looks less like persuasion and more like environment. Platforms no longer rely primarily on telling stories or making claims. They shape the conditions in which decisions are made. When those conditions feel playful, resistance softens without needing to be confronted.

    Temu’s success points to a future where retail feels less like browsing and more like progression. The store becomes something to move through rather than something to consult, and buying becomes the outcome of participation rather than its starting point.

     

     

    This does not necessarily mean consumers are being tricked. The mechanics are visible. But visibility does not make them neutral. Design shapes behaviour whether or not users are conscious of it. When shopping is structured as a game, value shifts. It is no longer only about what you buy, but how you are encouraged to keep moving.

    What Temu ultimately shows is not that people prefer games to shopping, but that the two have become difficult to separate. In a crowded digital economy, the product is no longer just the item itself, but everything moves you toward it. Advertising has not disappeared, it has been absorbed into spaces that no longer need to ask.

  • The Ragebait Economy: Why Brands Want You Slightly Angry

    On a weekday morning in New York, the subway car settles into its usual choreography. Headphones in. Eyes lowered. Everyone practises a small, private neutrality to get through the day. Then someone glances up and frowns. A poster, bold, smug, a little too pleased with itself, has broken the spell. Faces follow the gaze, a ripple of annoyance travels down the carriage, and for a moment strangers are united by a single, shared reaction.

    The ad has succeeded. Not because people liked it, but because they couldn’t ignore it.

    Ragebait used to belong to political campaigns or the murkier corners of the internet. Now it’s creeping into beauty ads, grooming brands, tech startups, sparkling-water companies, places that once sold pleasure or convenience. And that shift isn’t accidental. It’s a clue to the emotional climate of American public life, and to the new tactics brands are using to cut through a landscape thick with noise.

    Provocation has become a design choice. Marketers may not call it ragebait, but the vocabulary is unmistakable: “disrupt the scroll,” “spark conversation,” “stop people in their tracks.” It’s the language of rupture, not persuasion.

    This approach works because irritation is more legible than charm. Charm takes effort; irritation is instant. Digital platforms long ago taught brands that strong emotions travel fastest, and anger, even mild anger, generates reactions. Reactions keep content circulating. 

     

    Provocation has become a design choice | Image Credit: Anthony Hortin on Unsplash

     

    Circulation becomes visibility. And visibility is the currency that every brand is scrambling for.

    What’s new is how this digital logic is spilling into the physical world. The subway has become a testing ground for emotional disruption. You’re captive. You’re overstimulated. Your guard is down. A provocative poster doesn’t feel playful. It feels like an intrusion. And that’s precisely why advertisers place it there.

    Walk through any major American city and you can sense the shift. Once, public advertising aimed to entertain or inform. Now it often aims to interrupt. The mood mimics the internet — quick, reactive, slightly abrasive. Public space begins to feel less like a commons and more like a comment section.

    The effect is subtle but cumulative. Irritation becomes ambient. The day begins with a small jolt of friction rather than ease. Not enough to push anyone over the edge, but enough to raise the emotional temperature by a degree or two.

     

    “
    In a landscape where calm is scarce, irritation becomes oddly efficient. A shortcut to visibility. A cheap emotional spike. Brands aren’t creating the exhaustion; they’re capitalising on it.
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    This isn’t about sensitivity. It’s about the atmosphere. When brands treat everyday life as raw material for agitation, the commute becomes a site of emotional extraction. The poster isn’t merely selling a product. It’s shaping the emotional texture of the morning.

    The cost to brand identity? The strategy delivers attention, but attention is not loyalty. This is the quiet paradox of ragebait: a brand can win the moment and lose the meaning.

    If a company irritates you into remembering them, they become associated with irritation — not trust, not aspiration, not desire. Even if people don’t consciously reject the product, they mentally downgrade the brand. The emotional temperature sticks to the name.

    The long-term danger is erosion. Warmth disappears. Coherence dissolves. Consumers may recall the punchline but not the product. And gimmicks rarely scale. What provokes today becomes wallpaper tomorrow, and suddenly the brand has trained its audience to expect stunts rather than substance.

    Provocation is incredibly easy to copy and nearly impossible to own. When every brand starts raising its voice, no one stands out. The volume goes up, but the meaning drains out.

    It’s tempting to blame algorithms or generational habits, but the deeper cause is cultural fatigue. Americans are overwhelmed by the sheer velocity of stimuli — alerts, feeds, notifications, headlines, ads stitched onto every inch of public and private space.

    In a landscape where calm is scarce, irritation becomes oddly efficient. A shortcut to visibility. A cheap emotional spike. Brands aren’t creating the exhaustion; they’re capitalising on it. But desperation is not a strategy.

     

    Campaigns are being built on gentleness instead of aggression | Image Credit: Olena Kamenetska on Unsplash

    Every emotional cycle has a counter-cycle, and small signs of a cultural correction are emerging. People seek quieter retail spaces, restaurants with no screens, hotels that emphasise stillness, even “silent flights.” The desire is not only for escape but for clarity. Calm becomes a commodity.

    Some brands are already leaning into this shift. Campaigns built on gentleness instead of aggression. Long-form storytelling instead of short-term shock. A return to consistency rather than spectacle.

    The cultural pendulum is moving toward relief — brands that lower the temperature rather than raise it. Not purity, not nostalgia, but something subtler: the pleasure of not being yelled at by your own commute.

    Ragebait advertising isn’t a trend so much as a symptom. It reveals something about the current American mood: overstimulated, emotionally thin-skinned from too much noise, and increasingly attuned to disruption as the default instead of the exception.

    When public ads adopt the tone of online conflict, the boundaries between physical and digital life blur. We start to inhabit the same emotional posture everywhere — reactive, watchful, slightly on edge.

    Subways have always been cultural barometers. They show you the city’s preoccupations long before the city can name them. Today they tell us something subtle but important: irritation has become ambient. Not explosive, not dramatic, just a faint, steady buzz.

    And if that buzz becomes the norm, it’s worth asking who benefits, who adapts, and what emotional costs we’ve quietly agreed to pay.

  • The Price of Waiting: How the World Turned Time into an Experience

    For most of urban history, waiting was the one thing everyone shared. Passengers stood in the same lines, commuters sat in the same rows of plastic chairs, and departure boards dictated the same uncertain rhythm for everyone. That uniformity is beginning to fracture.

    Today, waiting is no longer just something to get through. It is something increasingly shaped, designed, and, in many cases, sold. From airport lounges bundled with premium credit cards to metro systems introducing controlled waiting zones and amusement parks replacing queues with timed entry, the pause before movement is becoming a managed experience.

    What used to be a neutral stretch of time is now one of the clearest indicators of access, infrastructure, and intent. If you want to understand how movement works today, it helps to look at how the world waits.

    The new architecture of the pause

    The contemporary airport lounge didn’t begin as a cultural symbol. Early airline lounges were exclusive spaces designed for premium passengers, offering comfort, privacy, and status. Over time, they expanded and softened, becoming more widely accessible through credit cards, memberships, and loyalty programs. Today, it is one of the most recognizable interiors on the planet. Airlines and credit-card companies market it as an experience. Carriers like Emirates and Singapore Airlines design their lounges as extensions of their brand, with curated dining and quiet zones. At the same time, credit-card networks like American Express have expanded lounge access through their Centurion Lounges, positioning waiting itself as a premium benefit.

     

     

    With its comfortable seating, muted sound, controlled temperature, and a manufactured sense of calm, these spaces are designed to interrupt the chaos outside and offer a curated pocket of time. It’s almost as if it’s telling you to step briefly into a world where nothing demands your attention (except, of course, finding your gate).

    Homes and offices around the world now borrow the same visual vocabulary with curved sofas, diffused lamps, and warm neutrals. Airport lounge style has become one of the fastest-spreading interior trends globally. The idea is not to mimic an entire airport, but to recreate the emotional tone of one particular room within it. What it signals is control. People are not trying to fill waiting time, but to shape how it feels.

    Waiting as design

    Across cities, the blueprint of waiting is being rewritten. In metros and subways, platforms are becoming cleaner and better lit, with designated waiting zones, leaning rails, screens, and soundscapes designed to reduce stress. In train stations, modernization has taken the form of lounges, rest pods, charging kiosks, and temperature-controlled waiting areas. In airports, waiting is a choreography of experience from the moment you enter the terminal to the moment you reach your boarding gate.

    Even amusement parks have reimagined waiting. Disney’s Genie+ system and virtual queues at parks like Disneyland and Universal Studios stagger entry times and replace physical lines with timed access. Attractions now include interactive corridors and pre-show environments, turning the wait into part of the experience.

    India’s hybrid waiting culture

    India is one of the few places where two modes of waiting coexist so visibly. On railway platforms, waiting is communal. People sit in clusters, vendors weave through the crowds, and time moves with a kind of ambient rhythm. Yet, at the same stations, IRCTC executive lounges now offer curated silence, plush chairs, and filtered lighting. Metros in Delhi and Mumbai have introduced premium waiting zones, cleaner seating, and digital displays that provide real-time updates, reducing uncertainty and making waiting feel more predictable. This duality is as contradictory as it is revealing. It shows a society negotiating between older collective rhythms and newer aspirational ones.

    But access to these designed forms of waiting is uneven. Premium lounges, fast-track queues, and membership-based spaces are often gated by cost, status, or access to credit systems. What looks like a cultural shift is also a stratification of experience, where some people wait in curated calm, and others continue to wait in noise, heat, and uncertainty.

     

    “
    “Lounge-core” has become one of the fastest-spreading interior trends globally.
    ”

     

    The speed of digital adoption has accelerated this shift. In India, UPI transactions now exceed 22 billion a month, reflecting how quickly everyday exchanges are completed. As payments, ticketing, and navigation move onto mobile systems, many of the small, functional waits that once structured daily life begin to disappear. What remains is not the need to wait, but the experience of it, which is increasingly shaped, designed, and, in some cases, sold.

    The American contrast

    American waiting spaces reveal a different story. Train stations like Penn Station and Union Station are being renovated, but they still reflect the practical, often underfunded and utilitarian spirit of public infrastructure. New York’s subway system remains largely uncurated. Airports, however, tell a contrasting tale. They have become stages for atmosphere. Lounge networks expand. Architectural overhauls reimagine terminals as calm corridors of motion. The divergence shows how waiting reflects not just design choices, but broader priorities around public infrastructure, investment, and who these spaces are built for.

    When waiting becomes something you choose

    As waiting became designed, it became something people began to optimize rather than simply endure. People may not choose to wait, but they increasingly choose how they wait when given the option. The shift suggests that people may not choose to wait, but they increasingly choose how they wait when given the option. Membership cultures accelerated this with their credit cards, airline apps, metro passes, and digital wallets. All of them promise smoother transitions, quieter spaces, and cleaner pauses.
    It explains why airports now compete on ambience, why metro redesigns prioritize wayfinding (clear signage and navigation) and light, why homes adopt lounge aesthetics, and why hotel lobbies resemble living rooms. Modern retail is built around ‘dwell time’. Even hospitals, clinics, and banks now redesign their waiting spaces to manage the emotional texture of the pause.

     

     

    The shared global shift

    The most striking thing is how consistent this trend is across continents. Doha, Delhi, Singapore, Tokyo, New York, Lagos, Dubai, each does it differently, but the underlying instinct remains the same. The world is redesigning its pauses. Time, not speed, is becoming the competitive edge.

    In the coming years, the biggest questions about movement may be about not just how fast we travel, but also how we spend the time before we do. Climate, migration, digital payments, urban design, and work patterns will change how cities handle the moments between motion.

  • How Translation Became the New Soft Power

    A decade ago, global entertainment followed a familiar pattern. A small group of countries produced most of the mainstream shows that traveled around the world, and most of those shows were in English. Translation existed, but it was secondary. For mainstream television and film distribution, subtitles were often treated as a courtesy and dubbing as an afterthought. Cultural influence moved outward from a narrow center, and everyone else adapted to it. This is how shows like Friends and Full House became household names across the world in the 1990s and early 2000s, building devoted subcultures far from the places they were made. 

    That arrangement held as long as distribution stayed limited and production budgets remained relatively manageable for broadcasters and studios. By the mid-2010s, both conditions started to collapse. In January 2016, Netflix expanded into more than 130 new countries in a single move, abruptly widening the potential reach of any show it carried. At the same time, the cost of producing flagship domestic originals rose sharply. Translation stepped into that pressure point, and the economics of global storytelling shifted around it.  

    Online platforms learned quickly that international titles offered a different kind of return. A series like Money Heist made this obvious. It began as a modestly performing Spanish show and was cancelled by its original broadcaster in 2017. Once Netflix acquired, translated, and pushed it across markets, it found large audiences in Europe, Latin America, and eventually Asia and the Middle East. By 2021, Netflix reported that more than 180 million households had watched the series globally. What mattered wasn’t that it became a hit everywhere at once. It was that language stopped limiting where a story could go.

     

    A still from Narcos | Image Credit: IMDb

     

    From a platform’s perspective, the logic was simple. Original shows were expensive and risky. International titles, once translated well, traveled cheaply and kept viewers engaged longer. Subtitles and dubbing stopped being support functions and became central to growth strategy. Netflix executives later confirmed this shift in scale, noting that in 2021 alone the company subtitled roughly seven million minutes of content and dubbed more than five million minutes globally. Naturally, translation budgets rose, dubbing pipelines expanded, and release schedules began to assume global circulation from day one. 

    Viewer behavior increasingly reflected this shift. A YouGov survey found that 72 percent of viewers in India were open to watching foreign-language content, while industry reports tracked rapid growth in dubbed-content consumption across streaming platforms. Estimates from the early 2020s projected India’s dubbed-content market to grow by over 60 percent as platforms expanded multilingual distribution.

     

    “
    Influence now travels through subtitlers, dubbing artists, and release schedules rather than diplomats. 
    ”

     

    That shift changed how creators worked. As translation became reliable, the incentive to mimic Anglo-American storytelling weakened. Writers and directors from the Global South no longer needed to flatten their work to feel ‘exportable’. A Korean legal drama like Extraordinary Attorney Woo leaned heavily into local workplace hierarchies, social rhythms, and cultural cues and still became one of Netflix’s most-watched non-English series globally in 2022. Nollywood followed a similar pattern. Nigerian films did not need shared history or linguistic familiarity to build viewers abroad once subtitles and dubbing lowered the barrier to entry. 

    Distinctiveness became an asset rather than a risk. Translation allowed stories to carry their own cultural density without being rewritten for an imagined global norm. 

    Audiences adapted just as quickly. Once platforms began releasing high-quality subtitled and dubbed versions simultaneously, viewers started exploring work from regions they had rarely encountered before. This shift became unmistakable between 2019 and 2021. Parasite crossed $250 million at the global box office after winning the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award, while Squid Game reached more than 1.65 billion hours viewed in its first 28 days on Netflix, becoming the platform’s most-watched series at the time. What began as curiosity turned into habit. Anime had already demonstrated parts of this shift years earlier, building massive international fandoms through subtitled distribution long before global streaming platforms consolidated.

    Viewers learned how to watch across languages. They learned to follow emotion, pacing, and genre conventions without full cultural familiarity. Demand followed, and with it, higher expectations for translation quality.

     

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

     

    Platforms responded by investing in dedicated dubbing hubs in Madrid, Seoul, Mumbai, and Los Angeles. Translation became less about literal accuracy and more about tone. Humor, timing, and emotional cadence mattered because they kept people watching. A poorly dubbed show now risked losing audiences who had learned what good translation sounded like.

    These dynamics altered the creative map. Spanish thrillers began influencing crime writing beyond Spain. Korean dramas reshaped expectations around emotional arcs and character development. Anime’s visual language informed animation choices far outside Japan. 

    This unsettled older assumptions about cultural power. English-language entertainment still commands large audiences, but it no longer defines global taste on its own. 

    Translation is not neutral and it is certainly not perfect. Context is sometimes smoothed over and meaning is often shifted. Decisions about what to explain and what to leave implicitly shape how cultures are perceived. These debates matter and remain unresolved. Even so, platforms continue to expand translation budgets because the returns are clear. Netflix’s own engagement reports show non-English-language titles now account for a substantial share of total viewing hours across regions, particularly outside North America. International titles retain subscribers, and their value compounds over time.

    What emerges is a form of soft power that operates without official choreography. South Korea’s surge in global cultural visibility after Squid Game did not come from a state-led export campaign, but from audiences absorbing language, social hierarchies, food, games, and emotional codes through a translated series they chose to watch. Influence now travels through subtitlers, dubbing artists, and release schedules rather than diplomats. 

    Translation reshaped global storytelling because it reshaped the incentives underneath it. Platforms needed scale, creators needed freedom, and audiences wanted variety that did not feel engineered. When those needs aligned, translation became infrastructure rather than accessory.

    The result is a global media environment where stories circulate with fewer gatekeepers and fewer assumptions about whose voice travels best. Soft power now grows less from dominance than from availability. It grew because translation widened access and because viewers learned, willingly, to listen across languages.

    Or, as Bong Joon-ho said when his subtitled film stood on the Golden Globes’ stage in 2020, “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”

    The industry, it seems, spent a decade turning that insight into infrastructure.

  • Mumbai: The Ultimate City of Reinvention

    Core Memory, Colaba

    1992, outside the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Colaba. I wore an oversized Fresh Prince of Bel-Air T-shirt, Nirvana blasting through a ruby-red Walkman. At the curb, a vada pav stall hissed and smoked.

    My mother, knowing my stomach too well, said don’t; my father’s nod said otherwise. I bit in anyway: chilli, potato, butter, newspaper ink bleeding into my fingertips. We walked the frontage of the Taj while they watched me take the city in.

    Bombay, because that’s the city of my earliest memories, was intoxicating even then, a place where five-star hotels and pavement stalls shared the same stretch of sea-facing road, where a kid like me could taste both in a single bite.

    That night, paying for my bravado in chilli and butter, I knew this was a core memory. Not a judgment on my mother’s caution, a reminder that Bombay rewards small rebellions, the kind that stay with you long after the moment has passed.

    That was my first lesson in Bombay: you could step between worlds here, and no one asked you to choose.

     

     

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

     

     

    Enhanced by AI

    When the World Walked In

    In 1991, India’s economic reforms swung the doors open, and the city became the stage where the new world walked in. I was still in school then, old enough to notice that the city’s soundtrack was changing, that the hum of my childhood was giving way to something sharper, more outward-looking, and unmistakably global.

    Satellite TV antennas began appearing across terraces, and by 1992, MTV India had arrived, beaming global pop culture into homes that had, until recently, been tuned to grainy state broadcasts. Advertising shifted almost overnight. Pepsi and Coca-Cola were suddenly everywhere, and international brands like Levi’s began appearing in markets like Colaba Causeway.

    MTV played grunge, hip-hop, and Bollywood remixes into the same living rooms. It felt new, slightly chaotic, and impossible to ignore. 

    Music videos changed how people dressed. Foreign soaps introduced new accents and ways of speaking. Shops began stocking brands that felt, at the time, unmistakably global. But the city didn’t copy. It adapted. What arrived foreign didn’t stay that way for long.

    Liberalization wasn’t an abstract policy. You could see it in everyday life.

    Bombay began to resemble a new India: cable wires looping across terraces, film posters layered over political slogans, a city mid-transition but entirely sure of its direction.

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

    Once you’ve watched the city take in the world like that, you start to notice how often people here are changing direction, in what they wear, what they watch, and what they begin to want for themselves.

     

    The City on Screen

    Photographs taken by the late Danish Siddiqui

    Cinema has always shaped how Mumbai sees itself. Long before I understood policy or economics, I understood something about the city through its films. Growing up, it came to me through what I watched and heard, songs, scenes, fragments that travelled far beyond the screen.

    In Mumbai, what appears in film doesn’t stay contained for long. It slips quickly into popular culture, into the music people play, into everyday references, and into the way a film lingers in the city long after it leaves theatres.

    What people watched didn’t stay on screen for long. It showed up in how people dressed, spoke, and carried themselves.

    In Mumbai, films sit close to everyday life. They influence taste, language, and ambition in ways that are easy to spot if you’re paying attention.

    New films arrive every week, part of the 1,600 to 2,000 films India produces each year, more than any other country. The industry is valued at nearly ₹200 billion, or $2.4 billion, and sells more than 2.5 billion cinema tickets annually, far surpassing Hollywood. But its influence goes beyond box office numbers.

    From Leicester Square to Jackson Heights, the Indian diaspora has carried Bombay’s cinema into living rooms and local theatres across the world. A Mumbai film screens in Toronto, a wedding sequence is remixed in Nairobi, a premiere draws queues in Dubai. Over time, these stories travel back, shaped by the audiences who watched them.

    Take Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Still playing at Maratha Mandir decades later, it became more than a blockbuster. It became a habit. Generations kept returning, a sign that in a city defined by change, the theatre could offer something familiar.

    You could see the influence in small ways. A song picked up quickly. A style repeated across neighborhoods. A line from a film turning up in everyday conversation.

    Mumbai and its cinema have grown alongside each other. One reflects the city as it is. The other quietly shapes what it becomes.

     

     

     

    Imagination for Sale

    By the 1980s and 1990s, South Bombay’s agencies were working with global clients while speaking directly to Indian audiences. Campaigns moved easily between Hindi, Marathi, and Hinglish, and began shaping what people noticed, wanted, and recognized.

    Television entered almost every living room, bringing soap operas, music videos, and commercials into daily routine. What people watched at night showed up the next day in conversation, in clothing, and in what shops chose to stock. Indian films and television also travelled abroad, reaching Indian communities overseas and extending Bombay’s cultural reach.

    Advertising didn’t create ambition here. It gave the city a new language, one people could see and respond to.

    Mumbai’s energy came from its people: Koli fisherfolk, Gujarati traders, Parsi entrepreneurs, Maharashtrian merchants and mill workers, and waves of North and South Indian immigrants. Over time, business and culture grew together until it was hard to separate one from the other.

     

    “
    From Leicester Square to Jackson Heights, the Indian diaspora has carried Bombay’s cinema into living rooms and local theatres across the world.
    ”

     

    The Many Lives of Mumbai

    Neighborhoods carry their own signals. In a members’ club in a northern suburb, film directors, screenwriters, and lyricists sit around in thick black Karan Johar–style glasses, part fashion, part shorthand for the world they belong to. In the same place, by day, a young woman works the front desk, managing members and conversations. By night, she heads to dance rehearsals, preparing for her stage debut in December.

    Across town in Kala Ghoda, Yazdani Bakery fills up each morning with bun maska and chai. The tables are worn, the pace is unhurried, and the same routines play out day after day. Some parts of the city change quickly. Others stay exactly as they are.

     

     

     

     

    Mumbai Dreaming

    What draws people to Mumbai is the feeling that you can begin again, even if you don’t fully know how.

    My flatmate trained as a behavioural economist in London, working with data sets and regression models. A few months ago, she was in Kashmir, between Dal Lake and Gulmarg, filming her first feature. That decision opened up a new way of living for her, and along the way, it set an entire chain of work in motion, from lyricists and composers to choreographers, managers, and full crews.

    And she isn’t alone. A former banker opens a restaurant. A copywriter starts a fashion label. A family-business heir picks up a camera and stays with it. People here allow themselves to try something else, and it rarely needs explaining.

    Cinema has always captured this about the city. Wake Up Sid got it right in its monsoons, its late nights, and the feeling of figuring things out as you go. It showed a version of Bombay that feels familiar if you’ve spent enough time here.

    The Coastal Road has begun to redraw parts of the city, changing how it moves and connects. Like everything before it, the city absorbs the change and keeps moving.

    Some things make sense only much later. You spend years understanding what you first felt instinctively. For me, that feeling began in Bombay, with that first bite. I’ve come back to the city because something in me was always drawn here, something I recognized long before I could explain it. Being here now, it feels less like a return and more like picking up a thread I never really left.

    Epilogue

    For Ipsitaa, Vishal, and Sayali, for their persistence, and for reminding us what this city makes possible.

  • When AI Starts Speaking in Vernacular

     Imagine a woman in a government hospital in Bhopal, or Chennai, or Patna, trying to access a medical scheme she is entitled to. The online medical portal and the information about the scheme both exist, but the interface assumes a formal, stylized version of Hindi she does not speak, or Tamil in a register that belongs to textbooks rather than the street she lives on. The system is technically functional, but for her, it is a wall. 

    This is not a story about access to technology. It is a story about whether technology, once accessed, understands you at all.

    Language, always a significant feature of AI, becomes crucial the moment it moves into healthcare, education, and public services. At that point, it helps to accelerate communication between two speakers of different languages. And yet, like the woman in Bhopal (or Chennai, or Patna), that interface does not really speak their language.

    This happens because AI is trained only on one slice of society’s communications – from textbooks to television, all of it written, not verbal. A model trained on dictionaries can translate the words, but a model trained on lived language and unscripted human experience understands what the words actually signify — useful when translating metaphors, for example. 

    At one level then, this is about linguistic irregularities. But the implications are far wider —  it becomes the means by which people are either recognized by the state or invisible to it. That gap, between words and meaning, between spoken and written language, is where millions of people fall through. It is the predictable outcome of building at speed, at scale, with the data that already exists in large quantities, which is to say the data produced by populations that were already online, in languages that were already dominant. That dominant language is of course, English. Any language model adapted from English carries its assumptions into every language database, its grammatical logic, its ways of organizing meaning, its blind spots.

     

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

     

    In India, the scale of the problem is especially enormous. With 22 official languages, and hundreds of dialects, linguistic exclusion is not a liminal problem; it is the default condition of most digital systems. The government’s Bhashini program, the National Language Translation Mission launched in 2022, is an attempt to change that. The program builds open datasets and translation tools that work directly with Indian languages rather than routing everything through English first. 

    Similarly, Sarvam AI, a Bengaluru-based company founded in 2023, AI4Bharat (built by IIT Chennai’s Research Lab) and BharatGen are building large language models trained from the ground up on Indian data, in Indian languages. 

    Karya pays rural Indian workers, many of them women in communities with limited economic opportunity, to generate and annotate language data in over fifty Indian languages. Workers own their data and receive royalties from its use. The datasets they build are the raw material from which models that understand their languages will eventually be trained.

    What Sarvam, Karya and Bhashini are building is not just a technical correction. It is an argument about whose starting point counts, and at what scale that argument matters. India has more people living outside English and standard Hindi than most countries have people. If the systems being built now the technology doesdo not account for that, they it will not fail quietly; they it will fail at population scale, in hospitals and classrooms and government offices, for decades.

    The same solutions are being looked at elsewhere, in different countries and different languages.

    In Latin America, LatamGPT, led by Chile’s National Centre for Artificial Intelligence, with support from governments, universities, and civil organizations across 15 countries, is building a model trained on Latin American data and contexts. The goal is to build systems that understand how language is spoken across a region where Spanish varies sharply by country and class, and where millions speak Indigenous languages, like Guaraní in Paraguay, Nahuatl in Mexico, Mapudungun among Mapuche communities in Chile and Argentina. 

     

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

     

    In Africa, Masakhane, whose name means “we build together” in isiZulu, is a grassroots research community working to build open, community-owned datasets for African languages, driven by the principle that Africans should own the data that represents them.

    Much of the world’s linguistic richness is not archived neatly online. It exists in oral histories, street theatre, voice notes, road signs, and the particular way a sentence gets finished in a specific neighborhood of a specific city. Turning that into training data is slow and complicated, raising questions of consent and ownership that scraping the public internet does not. Models such as Masakhane and Karya treat those questions as central rather than incidental, which is why their work is slower and messier than the dominant model, and more accountable to the people whose language it represents.

    When machines learn to understand how people actually speak, they do not just talk differently; they also listen differently. A healthcare system (such as the Microsoft-powered ASHABot) that understands colloquial Marathi can hear what a patient is actually describing. An education platform that works in Bhojpuri or Gondi can reach children in the language they think in. A government portal that speaks the way people speak can be used by the woman in the office in Bhopal, who is entitled to what it offers and should not have to translate herself to claim it. 

    The question of which languages machines learn to understand is also the question of which people the future is being built for. That is not a technical question. 

  • The Quiet Revival of Indian Folk Art

    Warli figures appear in museum gift shops in Europe, on walls at international design fairs, and in branding campaigns meant to signal ‘authenticity’ to a global audience. Madhubani motifs surface in fashion collaborations abroad, stripped of text and context, translated into mere pattern. Pattachitra turns up in curated exhibitions on ‘traditional art’, far from the communities that practise it.

    Indian folk art has always traveled. What’s different now is the scale, the polish, and the prestige of the spaces it moves through. This recent resurgence has brought visibility, funding, and institutional attention to the art form. But the artists who created them are far less visible.

    Privileged people often describe what’s unfolding as a revival. In practice, it looks more like a redistribution of cultural value where visibility increases and control diminishes. Folk art enters international circuits as a premium aesthetic, while the people who have sustained it over generations remain largely absent from the spaces that now define its worth. 

    This imbalance becomes most visible outside India.

    From 2026 to 2028, a major collaboration between the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) and the Museum of Sacred Art (MOSA) in Belgium will bring Indian folk and tribal art to Europe through at least five exhibitions a year across seven countries, including Germany, France, Italy, and Hungary. Drawn from MOSA’s collection of over 1,500 works, the initiative is framed as a celebration of ‘authentic’ traditions. It reflects a growing appetite among European institutions for Indian folk art, positioned as cultural heritage with global relevance.

     

    An art stall display with Madhubani paintings | Image Credit: Nishant Aneja on Pexels

     

    Similar initiatives are unfolding elsewhere. In London, the Runjeet Singh Gallery is exhibiting a collection of Mithila paintings acquired directly from artists in the 1970s as part of Asian Art in London. Online, international folk art exhibitions organised by foundations working with Madhubani and tribal artists have begun reaching global audiences. Warli artists such as Mayur and Tushar Vayeda have been featured in exhibitions across Europe, Japan, and Australia.

    The work is travelling widely. The terms under which it travels are less clear.

    In global exhibitions and design showcases, Indian folk traditions are often framed through curatorial language that emphasises heritage, symbolism, and timelessness. The art is presented as collective and ancient rather than authored and contemporary. That framing makes the work legible to international audiences, but it also erases the conditions under which artists might assert rights, negotiate credit, or influence how their work is reproduced.

    Warli art offers a clear example. Developed by the Warli Adivasi community in Maharashtra, its visual language of stick figures, rituals, and everyday life has become a global shorthand for ‘indigenous India’. Designers and institutions often collaborate with Indian studios or illustrators to reinterpret the style for international markets. The original artists are rarely part of those transactions.

    When artists are included, it is often through NGOs or intermediaries who control access, pricing, and timelines. While the work moves, the credit often does not.

     

    “
    Folk art is no longer confined to tourist markets or state-sponsored exhibitions. It is being absorbed into the global premium economy, where cultural difference functions as distinction.
    ”

     

    The same pattern repeats with Madhubani. Once painted on walls and floors in Mithila using natural pigments, the form is now reproduced across textiles, stationery, and décor for export markets. Attribution is frequently reduced to ‘inspired by’, a phrase that dissolves responsibility. Inspiration carries no obligation to compensate, credit, or consult.

    Artists are not unaware of this imbalance. “It’s not that people don’t want to work with us,” one Mithila painter told The Moment. “They just want us cheap. And quiet.”

    This is not a uniquely Indian story. First Nations Australian dot paintings circulate widely through international galleries and museum shops, even as the artists continue to contest how their work is licensed and reproduced. West African textile traditions like adire are globally popular as ‘tie-dye’, their origins flattened into trend. In the United States, Indigenous American motifs have long been absorbed into fashion and homeware under the banner of ‘Southwestern’ design, often without collaboration or consent.

    Across contexts, the pattern is familiar, communal art forms move easily through global markets, while the communities that sustain them remain peripheral to the value created.

    What makes the current moment distinct is the status of the platforms involved. Folk art is no longer confined to tourist markets or state-sponsored exhibitions. It is being absorbed into the global premium economy, where cultural difference functions as distinction. 

     

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

     

    There are exceptions. Some organizations insist on naming artists, negotiating fair compensation, and sustaining long-term relationships rather than one-off commissions. Groups like Dastkar and artist-led collectives have pushed back against extractive models, while newer platforms are experimenting with licensing, profit-sharing, and direct representation. But these remain marginal within a system that continues to reward speed, scalability, and aesthetic flexibility over accountability.

    The problem is not the global visibility of Indian folk art. The problem is that the structures governing its circulation were never designed to include artists as agents.

    What we are calling a revival, then, is uneven by design. The forms travel, the value accrues, but the artists remain asked to perform without power. Until that imbalance is taken seriously, Indian folk art will continue to be admired abroad while its makers remain peripheral to its success.

    Folk art is moving faster than the systems meant to protect the people who make it. That gap, more than the revival itself, is perhaps the story of this moment.