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  • A Note From Our Founder

    Dear Reader,

    During my recent weeks in London, I kept coming across chess clubs, literary gatherings and talks that seemed to be as much social occasions as cultural ones. What struck me was how many people arrived on their own. A shared interest was reason enough to turn up and spend an evening among strangers.

    Now, back in Mumbai, I see the same impulse taking on the character of the city itself. Silent-reading groups meet in neighborhood parks, creating pockets of collective quiet in a city where both space and silence are scarce. Elsewhere, bars are becoming lecture rooms for an evening, with strangers gathering to hear people speak about philosophy, neuroscience or urban life. Even a morning coffee can become an occasion to dance. In each case, you can walk in by yourself and already understand what has brought everyone together.

    The pandemic may have accelerated our appetite for gathering, but it is the fact that these communities have endured that interests me. Several years on, what are we still looking for?

     

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    It made me think about something very basic: we have always needed other people, even as the ways we meet have changed. Technology has helped us overcome distance for centuries. What feels different now is that it can generate our words and images, make recommendations for us and, increasingly, act on our behalf. Much of this genuinely excites me. It also makes me wonder how much of our thinking and attention we want to hand over.

    Most of these activities do not require company. People read by themselves every day. They dance in their own homes, drink coffee in solitude and play chess against computers. Philosophy, too, can be pursued privately. Yet we continue to seek out other people with whom to do these things.

     

     

    At a silent-reading group, everyone can disappear into a different book while remaining aware of the people around them. Across a chessboard, you respond to the decisions of another mind. Dancing changes when other people are beside us. Coffee, one of the most ordinary parts of a day, can become a reason to stop and talk. A lecture held in a bar turns an ordinary night out into a conversation about ideas. 

    These experiences ask for our attention in a way that is increasingly rare. They are difficult to hurry, and perhaps that is part of their appeal.

    The return to paper books, wired headphones and simpler phones may belong to the same impulse. So might the decision to turn a screen grey. These choices simply make it easier to remain with one thing for a little longer.

     

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    None of this is an argument for turning away from technology. The Moment is a digital publication, created to carry ideas between India and the world, and technology allows us to encounter lives and perspectives we might never otherwise know. For me, the question isn’t whether to use it. It’s what I want it to do for me, and what I’d still rather do myself.

    The way we meet will keep changing; it always has. But however much the world changes, we continue to find our way to one another.

     

    Until next time,

    Priyam Sharma
    Founder & Editorial Director
    The Moment

  • The New Face Of Indian Beauty

    Twenty years ago, India was at the cusp of change, particularly in the beauty and luxury space. International heavyweights such as Chanel, Jimmy Choo, and Gucci were entering the country, transforming luxury retail. Estée Lauder Companies also entered the scene around the same time, with its first MAC cosmetics store opening in Mumbai in 2005. Simultaneously, the Indian economy was booming. India was recording GDP growth at a pace reportedly second only to China, giving Indian consumers the joy of spending on products that had previously been out of reach.

    Indian brands, too, were preparing themselves for a surprise takeover.

    One such brand was Lakmé, part of Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL), which benefited from both its heritage and a deep emotional connection with Indian consumers. Named after a 19th-century French opera, Lakmé was, in fact, the jewel in HUL’s crown. It had strong brand equity, category-leading innovation, a disproportionate market share, and enviable unit economics. At one point, it was the country’s largest manufacturer of lipstick and foundation, generating margins of 75–80%, compared with 30–50% across many of HUL’s more traditional FMCG categories.

    It had iconic products, from long-wearing lipsticks manufactured in Italy by Intercos to kajal pencils made by the German manufacturer Schwan-STABILO. It had India’s most recognizable supermodels as its ambassadors. We also had Lakmé Fashion Week, one of the country’s most influential fashion platforms.

     

    Even 20 years ago, Indian beauty had enormous creative ambition, although the broader global business mindset had yet to catch up | Cover image and image (above) courtesy: Namrata Nayyar-Kamdar

     

    Lakmé was racing towards becoming India’s first truly global beauty powerhouse. But the view from the Anglo-Dutch board of Unilever seemed to be that Lakmé only deserved its status as a local jewel and did not have the legs to stand alongside global brands such as Revlon (now bankrupt), Maybelline, or L’Oréal. There simply wasn’t a belief that an Indian beauty brand could command the same cultural distinction internationally.

    With hindsight, the brand had everything going for it, except conviction and confidence.

    The truth is that while leadership at brands like Lakmé was hugely ambitious, their mental model of a prestigious global beauty brand was still overwhelmingly Western. Paris, London, and New York enjoyed a kind of legitimacy that Mumbai and Delhi did not. Imported products signaled aspiration, and even Indian businesses had internalized some of those assumptions.

    In 2026 though, India is being viewed as one of the world’s most exciting consumer economies for beauty and luxury. In March, Estée Lauder Companies took full ownership of Forest Essentials, cementing its conviction in the enduring appeal of Indian luxury beauty. Not long before that, Unilever Ventures doubled down on the category, leading a $3 million seed round in clean fragrance brand Secret Alchemist. Elsewhere, newer entrants such as Korea-inspired ClayCo and boutique, influencer-led brand Inde Wild have continued to attract attention and capital.

    Several factors have contributed to India’s growth story. Key among them are rising consumer literacy, increased disposable income, and improved supply chains, all of which have given Indian brands an edge.

     

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    In 2026 though, India is being viewed as one of the world’s most exciting consumer economies for beauty and luxury. In March, Estée Lauder Companies took full ownership of Forest Essentials, cementing its conviction in the enduring appeal of Indian luxury beauty.
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    The Indian beauty consumers we encounter today are a far cry from the ones we spoke to during Lakmé’s heyday. They are increasingly sophisticated and can discuss ceramides, peptides, barrier repair, retinoids, skin cycling, and trends with a fluency every bit as global as that of their counterparts in the West. They discover products simultaneously through Instagram, Reddit, dermatologists, creators, Nykaa, and other platforms. Their reference set is no longer simply Indian versus foreign. It is the best product they can find, wherever it comes from.

    The supply side has also transformed.

    A couple of years ago, I began building a beauty business in India and was advised more than once that, to retain a premium positioning, I should manufacture internationally. The implication was that Made in France or Made in Korea would somehow be more desirable than Made in India. But the brand had already been conceived in the UK, and I had years of experience with both British and European manufacturing capabilities. I felt confident in questioning these negative stereotypes, and I was glad I did.

    My team and I vetted several global manufacturing facilities and ultimately decided to manufacture in Mumbai, which was better for our carbon footprint, too. Nothing I saw in India led me to believe we were in any way inferior to the entrepreneurial ecosystems elsewhere. In fact, quite the reverse — India has some of the best scientists, clinical-testing laboratories, manufacturers, packaging suppliers, digital agencies, and home-grown beauty brands.

     

    India’s beauty manufacturing facilities on par with global standards | Image courtesy Plenaire

     

    The biggest shift, however, has been a psychological one.

    India is ushering in a moment wherein when both Indian entrepreneurs and consumers no longer see themselves at the periphery. This shift is now tangibly reflected in how they present themselves. They don’t shy away from wearing their culture on their sleeves. That confidence is apparent in segments well beyond beauty, including technology, fashion, wellness, hospitality, food, design, and independent creative businesses.

    They have evolved into more nuanced versions of what global Indian culture can be: not quite desi, not Western either, perhaps sitting somewhere in the middle.

    The first generation of Indian brands seeking global relevance often had to translate themselves for an international audience. The emerging generation appears increasingly comfortable doing something more original: building from an Indian point of view without making its Indian-ness the entire point. They have become the new coveted sweet spot for consumers and investors.

     

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    India has some of the best scientists, clinical-testing laboratories, manufacturers, packaging suppliers, digital agencies, and home-grown beauty brands.
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    The challenge now is converting that confidence into enduring institutions and brands. Global relevance in beauty will take more than a handful of successful international launches or strong domestic scale. It requires distinctive intellectual property, thoughtful product and design, a point of view that can resonate beyond the home market, and the discipline to build over decades rather than through opportunistic funding cycles.

    New India is definitely coming into its own. We are no longer operating within a beauty or cultural ecosystem defined or gate-kept by the West. We are creating our own ideology, with over a billion upwardly mobile customers to speak to.

     

    Estée Lauder Companies bought the Ayurvedic Indian brand, Forest Essentials in 2026. | Image courtesy Forest Essentials Instagram.

     

    Most importantly, we are moving from being a market that global culture comes to towards being one of the places global culture increasingly comes from.

    The question, then, is not whether India can produce the next generation of globally relevant brands. The question is how we capitalize on this moment.

    The author worked as Senior Brand Manager, Colour Cosmetics and Skincare at Lakmé, Hindustan Unilever, and then as Director at Dove and Lumene. She is the founder of British clean skincare brand Plenaire, which recently launched in India.

  • India Runs On The WhatsApp Group

    Every morning begins in the same way. We open our WhatsApp groups to check the organic vegetable vendor’s latest list of fresh vegetables, then slip into the Seafood Store chat group to browse what the fresh catch of the day is. Meanwhile, we’re scrolling through the neighborhood group to see if anyone has commented on whether that new coffee shop is worth a visit, and asking the repairs group whether anyone knows a good plumber who can stop by urgently to fix a kitchen leak.

    That the WhatsApp group has infiltrated every part of Indian middle class life is indisputable. Everyone from the fruit vendor to the deli down the road to office colleagues to civic affairs officials to dodgy political parties have taken up residence there. Not a day goes by when at least one group isn’t consulted for something.

     

     

    But perhaps the biggest example of how influential the WhatsApp group has become was a Mumbai court case in 2026. The city’s High Court settled a question that would have sounded absurd even ten years ago: can you lose your job for starting a group chat? A professor at a Mumbai social-sciences institute had been asked to retire after he created what his administrators called a parallel WhatsApp group. The court quashed the order, holding that forming such a group without the employer’s permission is no grounds for removing someone from service.

    That a dispute over a group chat reached a high court says something about how much weight this little green and white sphere now carries. In India, a WhatsApp group is not a feature. It is infrastructure, it is an emergency alert system, the town crier, the shopping mall; in short, it is the diary of our days.

    It’s easy to see how we got here. The app is completely free, needs only an internet connection, and has an easy, intuitive interface that both kids and the elderly, rural and urban communities can easily pick up. The app itself has at least 200 million users in India, in spite of occasional clangour about security lapses. Besides, smartphone ownership climbed steeply, and over nine in ten of those phones come with the app pre-installed.

    And although the app was already a mainstay in the country, the pandemic ratcheted its use up by several levels. Each apartment building and society had its own group, vendors began sending out weekly alerts when they sent out their food trucks, and home chefs began their fledgling businesses in the same way, forking out brownies and bisibelebaath with equal vim.

     

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    WhatsApp has also become an archive. Indian culinary knowledge has long been spoken rather than written, held by people who rarely blog and are rarely asked to document anything.
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    The WhatsApp group does have some murky affiliations, and is known for being manipulated by political parties for misinformation and hoaxes. Yet its everyday use transcends that.

    Store owners have used it to build community and trust amongst their customers. Homemakers are encouraged by its ease of use to start fledgling catering businesses from the comfort of their own kitchens. Animal welfare groups have their own chats, reaching out for help whenever they need fosters or financial assistance or even just someone to keep an eye out for someone’s escaped doggy. Schools connect with parents through it. And during Covid, the group was a lifesaver. Literally. People desperate for oxygen cylinders or out of stock medicine reached out to others on the chat, who helped them the best way they could.

    WhatsApp has also become an archive. Indian culinary knowledge has long been spoken rather than written, and for an older generation unaccustomed to jotting every detail down in books, the family group becomes an easy way to share.

     

     

    None of this comes without a negative side. Hoax health remedies circulate in health groups whose gullible members treat them as credible. Daily good-morning greetings, jokes, and videos annoy busy but inundated users. Photos and videos gobble phone storage, so some members quit groups when their devices fill up, while others buy new phones just to stay in. Organizers chafe at size caps when demand is enormous, and some find unsolicited sales pitches pushed on to them far more intrusive than a post on Instagram.

    Which brings us back to the professor. His crime, in the eyes of his employer, was gathering people without asking. But gathering is what Indians have always done, at wells, tea stalls, temple steps, and panchayat meetings, and the group chat is simply the newest place to do it.

  • The Argumentative City

    Paintings of Rabindranath Tagore, Jibanananda Das, and Kazi Nazrul Islam hang on the side of the hall. The blades of gigantic fans move the soupy air around the room. The waiters, all dressed in white with elaborate hats on their heads, move around jotting down orders from customers. Cigarette smoke lingers in the air. Groups of chattering college students walk in, and so do elderly regulars who come to reconnect with old friends and talk politics. Animated discussions fill up the two levels of the Indian Coffee House, a place where the adda still thrives.

    Adda culture likely took root in the city well before the 20th century, gaining greater strength in the century that followed. In Kolkata, the term does not refer to conversation alone — it is a cultural institution, a philosophical exercise, an unhurried meeting of minds wherein politics, poetry, cinema, and revolution are dissected and surveyed over endless cups of coffee, or tea. Mind you, the coffee itself is terrible.

    But how did this unique ritual of collective rambling take root in the city’s soil, and what forces have nurtured, sustained, and threatened it through the shifting tides of time? To understand adda, one must trace the historical currents that forged modern Kolkata’s intellectual awakening. Bengal’s early embrace of modernization and Western education opened intellectual floodgates unlike anywhere else in British India. Propelled by early access to modern schooling and tutelage, a nascent Bengali intelligentsia began to engage critically with colonial modernity. A monumental milestone in this trajectory was achieved when Satyendranath Tagore, the elder brother of Rabindranath Tagore, passed the rigorous Indian Civil Service (ICS) examinations in 1863, becoming the first Indian to enter the hallowed ranks of the ICS. This achievement shattered the glass ceiling of imperial administration, signaling that the colonized subject could match, or even master, the intellectual rigor of the empire.

    This early hunger for knowledge gave rise to epochal institutions. The establishment of the Hindu College in 1817, which later evolved into the legendary Presidency College, provided fertile ground for free-thinking, radical ideologies, and literary brilliance. Young minds were nurtured under the fiery influence of tutors like Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, as they learned how to question dogma, tradition, and authority. Soon, the whole College Street area transformed into a sprawling educational and intellectual zone.

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    In Kolkata, the term does not refer to conversation alone — it is a cultural institution, a philosophical exercise, an unhurried meeting of minds wherein politics, poetry, cinema, and revolution are dissected and surveyed over endless cups of coffee, or tea.
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    Flanking the iconic boulevard alongside Presidency were other premier institutions like the Sanskrit College (established in 1824), the University of Calcutta, Hindu School, and Hare School, along with a labyrinth of second-hand bookstores that earned the area its informal name, Boi Para — the neighborhood of books. As students, poets, and revolutionaries spilled out of classrooms and lecture halls, they needed a theater to test their ideas. Enter the culture of the coffee house. While initial iterations of adda found homes in private drawing rooms (baithakkhanas) and roadside tea stalls, the Indian Coffee House on College Street is considered the epicenter — or at least popular memory suggests as much. Here, hierarchies dissolve, as people from different walks of life and varied socio-economic backgrounds gather to chat.

    This spirit of animated discourse is not confined to coffee houses alone. In Amitav Ghosh’s popular novel The Shadow Lines, the enigmatic character Tridib is constantly seen at tea stalls and street corners, effortlessly regaling an eager audience with his far-flung, cosmopolitan tales that bridge continents and histories. Tridib’s wandering, mesmerizing conversations are the literary embodiment of adda in its purest form — unstructured, deeply imaginative, and transcending immediate spatial constraints. Indeed, adda unfolds across myriad geographic and architectural sites across the city. It thrives on the concrete roak (the elevated front porches of traditional Bengali houses), along dusty roadside benches, and on the breezy lakesides of South Kolkata as dusk settles over the city.

    Yet, is this phenomenon uniquely Bengali, or merely a localized manifestation of a universal human impulse? Satyajit Ray, through his cinematic explorations, interrogated this claim to regional exceptionalism. Through his last film, The Stranger (Agantuk), Ray might have subtly argued—or through Utpal Dutt’s character’s cosmopolitan lens suggested—that Bengalis are not entirely unique in their penchant for endless intellectual posturing; the ancient Greeks, too, gathered in agoras (public spaces) to argue philosophy, politics, and art. Human beings have always sought out spaces to talk for the sheer joy of congregating.

    Even today, Kolkata’s adda retains a stubborn, daily vitality, albeit amongst a demographic that doesn’t identify itself as Gen-Z or Gen Alpha. But they are there all right — morning walkers flock to their favorite neighborhood tea stalls after their rigorous rounds of walking around local parks or lakes are over, trading political gossip, medical woes, and cultural commentary over steaming cups of tea served in disposable clay bhaars. That these morning rituals continue regardless of the weather proves that this practice has stood the test of time. But only so far.

    “
    While initial iterations of adda found homes in private drawing rooms (baithakkhanas) and roadside tea stalls, the Indian Coffee House on College Street is considered the epicenter — or at least popular memory suggests as much.
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    Contemporary realities pose perils to this cherished culture. In an increasingly fast-paced, hyper-capitalist world, adda is susceptible to discontinuity. For the uninitiated or the hyper-pragmatic individual, it can easily be misread as an unproductive indulgence in unstructured time, associated with a stereotypically laid-back, unhurried Bengali lifestyle. And as successive generations of young people leave the city in droves, migrating to distant tech hubs across the country and global capitals in search of better career opportunities, the demographic bedrock of the adda is shifting. When the opportunity arises, this culture is sometimes replicated overseas, as people from the same city seek each other out — though considerable time now goes into simply settling on a day and a venue.

    Adda itself is increasingly monetized, as new forms of intellectual soirées are organized—whether through supper clubs or lectures delivered inside a bar. There, one is certain to meet like-minded people—those who have willingly chosen to pay for an intellectual pursuit. However, in these rooms, the socio-economic lines that adda once blurred become sharply defined again.

    This exodus raises existential questions: Will adda survive the onslaught of digitalization, atomized lifestyles, and generational displacement? Or will it fade into a nostalgic memory, preserved only in old sepia photographs and the echoing refrains of Manna Dey’s song? He was perhaps ahead of his time.

  • A New Library For The Indian Landscape

    Ram Chandra Guha’s Environmentalism: A Global History turned out to be a sensation, in 2000. It contained important insights on the waves of environmentalism and ecological consciousness. In the years since, fiction as well non-fiction writers like Neha Sinha, Sheela Tomy, Arati Kumar-Rao, Shubhangi Swarup, and Amitav Ghosh with books like The Nutmeg’s Curse and The Great Derangement have set the scene in India for vital climate and ecological writing. Their work has resulted in a change in how environmental literature is penned — from a dry sociological critique to an urgent, evocative cultural movement.

    This has paved the way for contemporary voices to alert readers about the crisis of our flora, fauna, and landscapes in ways that are deeply personal. Most of us, while thinking of the natural world, can identify the names of a few plants, birds, or talk about the free-roaming animals on our streets. However, there are tree species whose names we don’t know, there are bird species we might spy; and not just the usual crow or pigeon our eyes are accustomed to seeing.

     

     

    Eleven years ago, The Guardian pointed out that nature was being purged from the  Oxford Junior Dictionary. Language is responsible for moulding our perception. If a species lacks a name in our everyday vocabulary, it effectively ceases to exist in our consciousness. This linguistic erosion might also reflect a physical one. As urban development projects and housing requirements devour green corridors and industrial milestones pose a threat to ancient ecosystems, our collective vocabulary has simultaneously shrunken into a language that favors ‘indoors’. A phenomenon such as climate change is often discussed in apocalyptic, abstract terms — melting glaciers, rising levels of carbon footprints, and global temperature changes. Yet, the true grief of the ecological crisis lies in the silent disappearance of a local butterfly species, the felling of an uncelebrated avenue tree, or the drying up of a seasonal wetland behind a housing colony. 

    Perhaps in a bid to combat this alienation, contemporary Indian literature is undergoing a green shift. Through imaginative storytelling and intimate prose, they are rendering ecology as something palpable, emotional, and deeply personal. Two striking examples of this cultural shift are Janice Pariat’s highly thought-provoking novel Everything the Light Touches and Yuvan Aves’ contemplative non-fiction collection Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary. 

     

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    By shifting the scale from global catastrophe to local wonder, Aves makes environmentalism feel less like an overwhelming burden. Instead, it reads like an act of falling in love with our immediate backyard.
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    Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches is a masterclass in how fiction can bridge the gap between scientific names and emotional ecology. The novel weaves together multiple narrative threads across centuries and geographies. It follows the journey of four people who share a love for travelling and ecology. Pariat’s brilliance lies in her refusal to treat nature as a passive backdrop. Forests, plants, and rocks are active participants — they hold their own memories, and of course there are folktales that have historically ascribed them feelings and purposes that are more complex. Through her words, readers are invited to unlearn a purely utilitarian view of the earth. By framing ecology through narrative fiction, Pariat makes complex philosophical and environmental ideas accessible to the masses. Readers do not need a degree in botany in order to wrap their heads around the consequences of deforestation. She refrains from italicizing words while writing in the Khasi language, but she provides explanations for the same nonetheless, to demonstrate how natural phenomena are communicated in the state of Meghalaya. ‘Lap mynsaw, for example, refers to ‘rain that is fraught with danger. It is sudden, strong and comes at you from nowhere.’ 

    Yuvan Aves, on the other hand, grounds his writing firmly in the visceral, tactile present through meditative non-fiction. Located primarily in the vibrant, humid landscapes of South India, Aves’ Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary is an invitation to slow down, look around, and listen. He writes about places such as the Kotturpuram Urban Forest, the Pulicat Lagoon, the Perumbakkam Marsh, the IIT Madras Campus, and the Thiruvanmiyur Beach, and the natural beings he encounters in those zones. The intertidal zone, which refers to the dynamic space where the sea meets the land, serves as a powerful metaphor for human existence in Aves’ work. It is a borderland of constant flux, teeming with alien yet wondrous life: crabs, molluscs, algae, and shorebirds that most urban commuters walk past without a second glance. Aves does not write as a detached scientist; he writes as an intimate observer, deeply humbled by the non-human entities he encounters.

    His meditations challenge the human-centric bias of our daily lives. Through prose that is both poetic and grounded, Aves urges readers to develop a localized ecological literacy. He throws in Tamil phrases such as thelivu naatkal, which refers to ‘clear days’, used by fisherfolk although he is equally interested in using the scientific names of things wherever applicable. He reminds us that paying attention to a single rock pool along the Coromandel coast can unlock a universe of ecological dependencies. By shifting the scale from global catastrophe to local wonder, Aves makes environmentalism feel less like an overwhelming burden. Instead, it reads like an act of falling in love with our immediate backyard.

     

     

    What unites writers like Pariat and Aves is their ability to make environmentalism palatable without diluting its urgency. For decades, ecological discourse in India was largely confined to policy papers, journalistic exposes on industrial pollution, or dense academic monographs. While vital, these formats often fail to capture the general public’s imagination.

    The new wave of Indian nature writing bridges this gap by infusing ecology with a narrative intimacy, wherein the loss of biodiversity is translated into human and non-human stories that one can relate to. There’s an attempt to immerse readers in the sensations associated with the natural world: the sound of winds, or the smell of damp earth, or even invoking knowledge that is considered to be artisanal. Aves, Rao and Pariat all make use of the vernacular frequently. 

    After all, reversing the purging of nature from our dictionaries requires a deliberate cultural effort. We need to pay attention to folktales. Such writing demands that we look up from our screens and learn to recognize the names of the trees shading our streets, the migratory birds resting in our local parks, and the fragile ecosystems surviving on the sides of our expanding concrete jungles. 

  • The Levelling Up Of Life

    On a Thursday evening in New York, someone opens Netflix looking for something to watch. Instead, the home screen suggests a game, a bright, playful icon tucked between dramas and documentaries, as if it has always belonged there. Across the world, a commuter in Seoul opens a banking app and is greeted not by her balance, but by a progress bar. In London, a coffee chain asks customers to “level up” for better rewards. In Bengaluru, a learning app congratulates a student with animations once reserved for arcade victories. None of these people are “gaming” in the traditional sense. Yet, all of them are moving through systems built to feel like games.

    Why is this happening? Well, perhaps somewhere along the way, companies stopped competing for attention and began competing for participation. The shift isn’t only technological. It’s also cultural, a quiet collapse of passive life, and the rise of interactive time.

    For decades, entertainment relied on one-way flow with shows to watch, news to read, apps to scroll, and products to buy. But the ground beneath that model has been thinning. Streaming growth has slowed, social media has grown noisier, and content alone no longer holds people the way it used to. When stillness stopped being sticky, companies looked to the one space where engagement never dipped: games.

     

     

    But this was not limited to video games alone. It was more about the logic behind them, the sense of entering something, influencing it, and perhaps earning your way through it.

    To understand why this logic spread so quickly, it helps to remember where gaming comes from. Long before it became entertainment, gaming began as simulation. Early computer programs used to teach systems, model outcomes, and explore possibilities. By the arcade era, games had become communal, a place where people gathered the way older generations gathered around cinema. By the 2000s, games grew beyond being pastimes. They became their own worlds with rules, progression, lore, and communities. For Gen Z and Gen Alpha, games became the architecture of childhood with Minecraft servers, Roblox economies, or Fortnite concerts.

    So today, when a chain like Pret A Manger in London uses levels and perks in its subscription program, or when a digital-first bank in Seoul rewards customers with streaks, badges, and animated progress bars for saving and spending, companies are tapping into the first language of the generation they want to keep.

     

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    The New York Times discovered that people return more faithfully for Wordle than for news, with over 10 million daily players and millions of subscribers on Games bundles, a phenomenon so large that NYT’s “gaming wing” is now one of its most powerful digital engines.
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    Another reason the shift has accelerated is simply that everything has an app now. From cafés to classrooms to pharmacies and even banks, nearly every service lives behind a download icon on the same device, the smartphone. And apps don’t survive unless they are opened. Gamified mechanics like streaks, levels, badges, and challenges became a reliable way to pull people back in, sometimes every day. What began as game design has quietly become the operating system of app-based life. So now, beyond the downloads, companies also want rituals.

    Once game logic escaped the gaming industry, it moved fast. Netflix hired game designers to rethink what a story could be. The New York Times discovered that people return more faithfully for Wordle than for news, with over 10 million daily players and millions of subscribers on Games bundles, a phenomenon so large that NYT’s “gaming wing” is now one of its most powerful digital engines. Airlines reshaped loyalty programs into tiered quests where every mile moves you toward a higher status. Fintech apps like Monzo, Nubank, CRED, and Groww used streaks, milestones, and XP-like progressions to teach people to save or pay on time. Even meditation platforms, designed to slow people down, added stars, badges, and daily rewards.

    It wasn’t enough to capture attention anymore. Companies wanted to structure it.

     

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    Globally, the pattern is unmistakable. In South Korea, GS25 convenience stores run rotating app-based challenges to pull customers back in. In Brazil, Magalu built a digital ecosystem where every purchase advances you through tiers. In India, education apps like Byju’s and Cuemath normalised progress maps and trophies, making study habits feel less like effort and more like advancement. These are signs of a new cultural baseline of a life delivered through mechanics.

    Another reason this resonates is that people already live inside metrics. We count steps, track sleep, monitor screen time, measure productivity, and watch our daily averages shift like weather. Gaming logic didn’t introduce quantification; it simply made quantification feel rewarding. When every aspect of life is scored, charted, or compared, levels and streaks don’t feel foreign — they feel familiar.

    Part of the appeal is structural. Games offer clarity with their rules, goals, and feedback in a world where clarity is scarce. When work feels unstable, when public life shifts weekly, when the economy feels like weather, a system that rewards completion feels strangely comforting. Even a tiny gesture like collecting a point or completing a streak can feel like reclaiming a fragment of control.

    And another part is emotional. In uncertain times, micro-moments of agency matter. A streak becomes stability. A task completed becomes momentum. Progress — even artificial — becomes a soft form of reassurance.

     

     

    But there is also a lineage here. Cinema has experimented with immersion for decades. Disney built entire universes long before digital platforms existed. You could find their immersive worlds on your GameBoys or PlayStations. But cinema offered entry without agency. You stepped into a world but could not move inside it. Games changed that. They turned world-building into something participatory. What companies want today is the cinematic expansiveness of Disney combined with the interactive grammar of games.

    While a thousand shows can entertain you, perhaps only a game-like system can involve you. And so, this is the deeper cultural shift, a move from watching to entering.

    Economically, this makes perfect sense. If the 2010s ran on attention, the 2020s run on engagement loops. Participation produces more sessions, more loyalty, more data, and more predictable revenue. It transforms users from audiences into ongoing actors from customers who visit to players who return. Progress is a powerful retention strategy, streaks are stronger than notifications, and a sense of advancement outperforms any advertisement.

     

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    Participation produces more sessions, more loyalty, more data, and more predictable revenue. It transforms users from audiences into ongoing actors from customers who visit to players who return.
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    But there is a cost. When every service asks you to participate, autonomy blurs. When every action earns a reward, desire becomes guided. What begins as play can harden into protocol, the less interesting parts of a game can often feel like chores disguised as quests. The risk isn’t that life becomes gamified. It’s that life becomes the grind.

    And yet, beneath this shift sits something more generous. Participation, at its best, is a form of meaning-making. To move inside a system and feel it move back, even in small ways, is to feel less like a spectator in your own life. A Wordle streak becomes a form of morning ritual. A savings milestone becomes reassurance. A progress bar becomes a quiet reminder that movement is possible.

    Maybe that’s why this moment doesn’t feel fully dystopian or celebratory. It simply reflects a truth about how people want to move through the present. If life must be navigated, people want some say in how.

    Games understood that long before the rest of the world did. Now the world is borrowing the insight. And perhaps that is why so many companies are becoming gaming companies. Not because they want us to play more, but because they sense what people are seeking. If the future is interactive, maybe it isn’t because technology demanded it. Maybe it’s because people did.

  • Old Is The New Young

    Rufus Sewell cast as Mr. Bennet in Netflix’s new Pride and Prejudice — alongside Olivia Colman as Mrs. Bennet — is a small but telling detail in a much larger cultural churn. Even in an adaptation built around five young sisters and their paramours (suitable or otherwise), the platform picked a charismatic and striking-looking older pair to play their parents, rather than casting them aside as insignificant.

    The same curious thing is happening on screens everywhere. Airport displays are full of retirees solving murders, sixty-something spies returning to the field, and older women taking down crime rings or starting over in unexpected ways. The Thursday Murder Club sits beside Lessons in Chemistry. Harrison Ford headlines a comedy. Helen Mirren anchors a Western period drama. The older protagonist has become the star of the moment.

    Is it nostalgia? Is it just sentimental? Or is it a long-overdue correction?

     

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    For decades, popular storytelling treated youth as the only place where ‘real life’ happened. Films revolved around chosen ones, coming-of-age arcs, twenty-something prodigies, star-crossed lovers who had to figure everything out by 30. The assumption was simple: youth is the site of possibility, middle age is the plateau, and old age is the epilogue.

    But the 2020s would rewrite that scripture. People are living longer, working longer, divorcing later, moving cities later, and falling in love again later. The timeline stretched, and with it, the idea of when a life can turn. A late-life beginning no longer feels symbolic, it feels honest. Reinvention in your sixties fits the era more closely than reinvention at twenty-two.

    There’s also a cultural fatigue at play. Younger generations came of age in a world that promised everything and delivered volatility instead. Millennials did all the ‘right things’ and still hit economic walls. Gen Z is already exhausted by the pressure to optimize for every moment of youth. A 70-year-old woman who decides to rewrite her life feels strangely relieving, a reminder that time isn’t a race and that agency doesn’t expire.

     

     

    Experience, too, has regained its value. In moments when institutions feel unreliable and expertise is constantly questioned, competence looks almost radical. The older protagonist becomes a sort of anchor, someone who knows how to navigate uncertainty because they’ve lived through several versions of it. The Old Man works not just because Jeff Bridges plays a former operative, but because the story assumes that resilience grows with age, not despite it.

    Equally important is that the shows and films themselves range across genres, rather than confining themselves to any one. Netflix’s A Man on the Inside, with Ted Danson as a widowed retiree who goes undercover as a detective in a retirement home, returned for a second season in November 2025. John Lithgow starred in Jimpa (2025) as an older gay man providing a safe space for his nonbinary grandchild. In 2026, came The Boroughs, a sci-fi series set in a New Mexico retirement community, with Alfred Molina as a grieving widower alongside Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, Denis O’Hare, Clarke Peters, and Bill Pullman. The Marlow Murder Club joined The Thursday Murder Club, Hacks, The Diplomat, and Only Murders in the Building as shows offering nuanced portrayals of aging.

    There have been no dearth of awards either. At the 2026 Academy Awards, 75-year-old Amy Madigan won her first Oscar in 2026 for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Aunt Gladys in the horror movie Weapons. The same year, 75-year-old Stellan Skarsgård won a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor for Sentimental Value, about an older man’s complicated relationship with his adult daughters — signs that honest portrayals of older characters with sharp edges are being rewarded as well.

     

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    Economics has shaped this shift as well. Streaming platforms discovered that older viewers are their most dependable audience. Cozy mysteries exploded into global phenomena. Stories led by women over 50, once treated as niche, now draw mass audiences. Markets tend to follow attention, and attention has drifted upward in age.

    But beneath all of this sits something more cultural. For a long time, age, especially for women, was treated as disappearance. Past 40, characters were relegated to sidelines as mothers, mentors, or even cautionary tales. Today’s stories push against that. They suggest that visibility can expand with age rather than contract. They reframe later life as another act, not the closing credits.

    Of course, the trend comes with its own risks. Some portrayals romanticize older characters the way earlier eras romanticized youth, turning them into quirky sages or charming eccentrics rather than complex people. Representation can flatten just as easily as it can liberate. But even with these tensions, the shift feels significant.

     

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    For a long time, age, especially for women, was treated as disappearance. Past 40, characters were relegated to sidelines as mothers, mentors, or even cautionary tales.
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    Maybe the rise of the older protagonist has less to do with age and more to do with possibility. The world no longer follows a neat sequence of education, career, marriage, children, and retirement. Life loops, pauses, restarts, and detours, sometimes many times over. A sixty-year-old detective solving crimes with friends in a retirement village feels right for a culture where everyone, young or old, is trying to work out what comes next.

    The stories we tell about age reveal what we believe about time. And right now, the culture seems to be saying that life does not stop being interesting once it becomes experienced. It might become interesting because it is.

    Perhaps that’s why these protagonists resonate so widely. They widen the horizon. They stretch the idea of when a person can begin again. And in a moment when so many people feel stuck, that stretch feels like hope.

  • Beyond The Big City

    For years, India’s cultural scene seemed to revolve around a few obvious cities: Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, usually. Now, that map, once so sharply etched, is blurring.

    Take Guwahati, for instance. Guns N’ Roses will take the stage there later this year, followed by Gorillaz in 2027. Post Malone performed last year. Or take Kochi instead, now an international contemporary art destination thanks to its Biennale. Meanwhile, writers are flocking to writers’ retreats in hill stations such as Satkhol and Panchgani. Khoj’s itinerant programmes have moved between cities including Delhi, Mysore and Kolkata, creating opportunities for experimental art outside the usual institutional circuits. For those with a creative bent of mind, the tug of peaceful, fog-shrouded verdant landscapes is strong, offering something a smoke-choked, trafficked city never could.

    These are not isolated incidents. Bundled together, they gesture at a larger shift, that India’s creative life is beginning to move beyond the cities that once seemed to have a monopoly on it.

     

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    These fresh geographies are equally magnets for entrepreneurs. According to DPIIT figures, 51% of recognised startups are now based in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, while hiring in these regions is growing faster than in metro centres, a signal that India’s entrepreneurial energy isn’t confined to the big names anymore. Take KDEM’s Beyond Bengaluru Startup Grid, an alliance of tech clusters in Mysuru, Mangaluru and Hubballi that runs “Techceleration” expos and mentorship events. This is tech made for local ecosystems, rather than simply an extension of metro incubators.

    Then there are cultural initiatives that use place itself as part of the creative experience. Pop-up cultural nodes such as Preet Nagar, a refurbished literary township in Punjab, revive multicultural gathering and creative practice in a setting that feels intentional, physical and richly layered.

    The same siren call pulls the entertainment industry. In cities like Surat, Jaipur, Mysuru and Guwahati, the appetite for live experiences, from stand-up comedy and college festivals to indie music nights and international concerts, is growing. Platforms such as TribeVibe and Sunburn are taking concerts and shows into cities that were once peripheral to the live-events circuit.

    Think of Ajmer, not as a stopover on the Jaipur route, but as a place of possibility, where you wander into a courtyard gallery, find a café crowding poetry nights, and book into artist residencies fostered by the local arts council. While this may look like a flavour of nostalgic rebranding, it is actually a rethink of what creative geography can look like. But this is more than simply about feeling a vibe. There are hard numbers baked into these decisions.

     

     

    Affordability is a large part of the equation. Salaries can be 25–30% lower and rents around 50% cheaper than in metros, making coworking spaces, studios, cafés and creative venues more sustainable.

    Then there is the talent reversal. Professionals are returning home, and they are bringing ambition with them. TeamLease has estimated hundreds of thousands of tech professionals working in Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities, including places such as Indore and Kochi. The result is an ecosystem where people can build companies, creative practices and communities without necessarily relocating to one of the country’s established hubs.

    And finally, there is community. State-backed clusters, Smart City investments and networks such as TiE Mysuru are building infrastructure around existing local talent. Cultural organizations and independent initiatives are doing the same thing from the other direction, creating spaces where writers, artists, entrepreneurs and audiences can find one another.

     

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    What emerges is a cultural vernacular that does not need to imitate the metro. It can be deeply local while remaining porous to the world. An outsider does not necessarily arrive as a tourist passing through, but as someone invited into the visible fabric of the place.

    That is perhaps the most interesting part of the shift. Cultural exchange is no longer always about taking local ideas to a global city. Increasingly, people are travelling in the opposite direction, towards places where local histories, landscapes and communities become part of the creative process.

    Of course, this does not mean that the metros are being displaced. They remain major centres of capital, institutions, media and opportunity. And this is a very good thing. A more decentralized system allows different parts of the country to develop in organic ways, rather than stamping every cultural hub as a version of Mumbai or Bengaluru.

    The metros still matter. But the future of culture in India may already be happening on main streets, in converted havelis, hilltop writing retreats, local coworking hubs and concert grounds in cities you once simply passed through. And that is a different kind of map altogether.

  • Playing The Game

    What is the magic ingredient that can turn some innocent basketballs, footballs and a hockey stick into an acrimonious debate about women, beauty and sport? Why, it’s the actress Sydney Sweeney of course.

    The latest campaign for sports prediction company (a euphemism for a betting platform) Novig, features Sweeney, appearing in various states of undress while pretending to play different sports. The gear mentioned above is strategically positioned to cover her body. The joke, apparently, is that she is interested in “just sports”: no clothes, no distractions, just the game.

    Actual sportswomen did not find it funny.

     

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    Former NCAA gymnast Gracie Kramer responded on social media with a video of herself flipping, running, boxing and playing soccer and baseball, writing: “This is what a woman in sports looks like.” Australian swimmer Lani Pallister posted footage of her training, racing and collecting medals. Boxer Skye Nicholson told Sweeney to “stop sexualising women in sport.” Sprinter Amy Hunt, speaking to the BBC after competing at the Ultimate Championships, pointed to Melissa Jefferson-Wooden’s 21.47-second 200m victory and said: “21.4. Muscles. Hard work, blood, sweat, tears.”

    Recently-retired Olympic champion Ariarne Titmus was more direct. She called the campaign a “kick in the face” to women who have dedicated their lives to their sport and questioned why women’s bodies are still being monetized and sexualized in sport.

    The anger was palpable and understandable. Women athletes have spent decades fighting to have their bodies seen not as beautiful objects but as instruments capable of extraordinary physical achievement. Female gymnasts have consistently pushed back against regressive game rules that require scanty uniforms. Across sports, women have had to negotiate an uncomfortable double standard in which their bodies are scrutinized almost as much as their performances.

     

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    Sweeney, however, is hardly an accidental participant. She approached Novig, has a financial stake in the company and has publicly defended the concept as playful and intended to “put the focus entirely on sports.”
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    Then there is the larger question about beauty standards themselves. Sweeney is a blonde, blue-eyed, conventionally attractive woman whose genes have been brought up in an earlier, equally questionable advertisement for jeans in which she starred. That ideal has long been privileged by mainstream culture, while larger bodies, darker skin and features outside Eurocentric beauty standards are often nudged to the sidelines as less desirable. Critics have pointed out that celebrating Sweeney’s appearance as the central attraction of a campaign about women and sport sits awkwardly within that history.

    And Sweeney herself is hardly a naive bystander. She approached Novig, has a financial stake in the company and has dug her feet in the ground over all the criticism. All this is true.

    Still, there is something strange about how much oxygen we are allowing a silly ad that has clearly been made to create a kerfuffle.

    Let’s be very clear. Sydney Sweeney has not set women’s sport back; she can’t. All she has done is make a provocative endorsement for a gambling company (a questionable choice in itself). The women responding to it are absolutely brilliant, competing at the highest levels of their sports, breaking records, winning medals, training through injuries and building careers across disciplines.

     

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    The ESPN Body Issue, which featured nude male and female athletes, understood something that has entirely evaded this campaign. Those photographs worked because the body was evidence of what an athlete could do. The stars of those pages showed off a multiplicity of body types by athletes of various races. Whether they were handsome or beautiful was besides the point; what they looked like was strong.

    The women responding to Sweeney are saying the same thing; that their bodies are remarkable because of what they can do, not what they look like.

    And perhaps that is where the conversation should end. Sweeney is young and beautiful and she uses it to great advantage. She is also an adult who has every right to participate in whatever ad campaign she chooses. Equally, all criticism of that campaign is legitimate. But women’s sport has become far too significant to let a gambling advertisement define the conversation around it.

    The real story is the woman running 200 meters in 21.47 seconds. The gymnast throwing herself through the air. The swimmer training before dawn. The boxer stepping into the ring. The athletes who have spent their lives making their bodies stronger, faster and more capable. They are the ones really worth caring about.

  • Singh is King (Of Acid House)

    When you think of Indian classical music, you probably imagine something serene — a sitar playing a meditative raga, maybe the slow build of a Hindustani aalap at dusk. What you don’t expect is a psychedelic, squelchy synth line pulsing beneath a centuries-old scale. But in 1982 Bombay, that’s exactly what one man tried. Charanjit Singh, a Bollywood session musician with a flair for experimentation, released an album called Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat — and in doing so, he may have pioneered a genre the world wasn’t ready for yet.

    At the time, the album flopped. No one knew what to do with it — not disco fans, not classical purists. But decades later, crate-diggers and electronic music historians rediscovered Singh’s record and realised something wild: he had used the exact same gear that would later define acid house in mid-80s Chicago — the Roland TB-303 bass synthesiser and the TR-808 drum machine. Singh wasn’t trying to mimic the West or chase a trend. He was trying to modernize ragas for a disco-loving generation — to experiment with form, technology, and tradition on his own terms. 

     

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    So what exactly is acid house? It’s a subgenre of house music born in Chicago clubs in the mid-80s, defined by its hypnotic loops, minimal vocals, and that iconic “squelch” created by the TB-303’s modulating filter. Phuture’s Acid Tracks, Sleezy D’s I’ve Lost Control, and Armando’s Land of Confusion became underground anthems, laying the groundwork for a rave culture that would soon ignite across the UK and Europe. It became the sound of warehouse parties and underground rebellion. To say that Singh discovered this sound years earlier, on another continent, layered with classical Indian melodies, feels both poetic and wildly prescient.

    Today, Gen Z is in love with ragas all over again. They’re listening to Rishab Sharma on Spotify. They’re making “morning raga” playlists for their mental health. During the pandemic, ragas were hailed for their healing powers, and now they’re turning up in techno edits, Boiler Room sets, and Instagram Reels. There’s a sense that something ancient has been reinvented, but Singh’s story reminds us that maybe we’re just looping back. Light in the Attic is reissuing Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat by Charanjit Singh, a foundational album for the genre of acid house.

     

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    decades later, crate-diggers and electronic music historians rediscovered Singh’s record and realised something wild: he had used the exact same gear that would later define acid house in mid-80s Chicago — the Roland TB-303 bass synthesiser and the TR-808 drum machine.
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    That’s what music does. And that’s what culture does too. Every generation thinks it’s cracked the code, found something new, created the moment. But more often than not, it’s a sample. A remix. A rediscovery.

    Artists like Glass Beams are reviving Singh’s spirit — combining South Asian instrumentation with analogue synths and desert funk — creating a full-circle moment where the East-West fusion isn’t just aesthetic, it’s sonic history.

    Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat is a case study in how cultural innovation can be missed when it emerges outside the West. Singh was ahead of his time — not just technically, but philosophically. He believed ancient music could be modern. That ragas could dance. And that synthesizing old and new wasn’t dilution, it was evolution.

    In a world obsessed with musical novelty, Charanjit Singh reminds us that the future often lives in the past. You just need the right ears — or the right algorithm — to hear it.