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  • The Secret Life of Influence: How Indian Cinema Shaped Hollywood

    Every so often, a film arrives that feels entirely new. But look closely, and the roots of cinematic ‘innovation’ often trace back further than the credits reveal. Cinema has always borrowed — across countries, languages, and aesthetics. Carrying echoes from one culture into another. And some of Hollywood’s most celebrated moments carry quiet fingerprints of Indian cinema.

    Cinema, after all, has always been porous — images, stories, and styles travel more easily than passports. And the exchange isn’t one-way. If Hollywood blockbusters have long influenced global filmmaking, Indian cinema has quietly shaped some of Hollywood’s most iconic moments in return. The echoes are everywhere once you start looking.

     

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    Satyajit Ray and Wes Anderson

    Perhaps the strongest homage ever paid by a Western director to an Indian one was Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Limited. Not only does the film’s score incorporate music from multiple Ray films, its closing scene directly references Ray’s brilliant, iconic film Pather Panchali. Anderson has been quoted as saying “I also saw images of Ray, and I thought, that’s what I want to be like, if I can be like that.”

     

    Kamal Haasan and Quentin Tarantino

    In 2001, Tamil cinema released Alavandhan (also called Abhay), starring Kamal Haasan in dual roles. Among its standout sequences was a surreal animated fight, where violence was illustrated rather than shown live. Quentin Tarantino later acknowledged he had seen the film and that it inspired him to create a similar animated sequence for Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) 

    What looked groundbreaking in Kill Bill was, in fact, part of Indian cinema’s experiments with form. 

     

    Bollywood’s Operatic Style and Baz Luhrmann

    Australian director Baz Luhrmann has often described Bollywood as a creative touchstone. Moulin Rouge! (2001), his kaleidoscopic musical, drew from Bollywood’s unabashed operatic storytelling. He even used the Bollywood track “Chamma Chamma” in the film’s climactic sequence.

    Later, in The Great Gatsby (2013), Luhrmann again borrowed the Bollywood sensibility of maximalist spectacle — music, colour, choreography — to heighten F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age drama. Here, Indian cinema’s influence is not covert but celebrated: Bollywood as a blueprint for cinematic opera.

     

    Echoes in Performance

    If cinema is a conversation, then acting styles are often the most intimate language of exchange. Indian actors known for their emotional precision and restraint have left behind performances that seem to reverberate, even when no formal line of influence can be traced.

    Take Naseeruddin Shah, one of the defining figures of India’s parallel cinema. In Sparsh (1980), his portrayal of a blind principal is layered with understatement — rejecting melodrama in favour of subtle gestures and interiority. In later years, critics and audiences alike have noted the resonance of such performances with international portrayals of disability, from Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman (1992) to more contemporary works. Whether Pacino ever saw Shah’s role is almost beside the point: the comparison illustrates how certain performance vocabularies travel, consciously or not, across borders. Shah himself has spoken about how Indian cinema borrows from Shakespeare and world traditions, while also offering back its own textures of realism and excess. His memoir And Then One Day reflects on this porousness of influence — the sense that no tradition exists in isolation.

     

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    Australian director Baz Luhrmann has often described Bollywood as a creative touchstone. Moulin Rouge! (2001), his kaleidoscopic musical, drew from Bollywood’s unabashed operatic storytelling.
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    Similarly, Dilip Kumar, shaped a school of acting built on poise, stillness, and reined-in intensity. His Devdas (1955) became the gold standard for romantic despair in Indian cinema, while Mughal-e-Azam (1960) showcased an imperial grandeur softened by vulnerability. Film historians often point to echoes of this style in global cinema’s most restrained biographical portrayals, such as Ben Kingsley’s Gandhi. While there’s no archival confirmation that Richard Attenborough studied Kumar directly, the comparison reflects how audiences perceive Kumar’s legacy as part of a global lexicon of gravitas and restraint.

    What these examples show is less a matter of citation than circulation. Acting styles, like stories and images, move in diffuse and untraceable ways. They inspire imitation, set benchmarks, and sometimes reappear as what one critic called “cultural déjà vu” — moments when a performance feels familiar not because of direct borrowing, but because traditions are already entangled.

     

    Beyond the Familiar Arcs

    Indian cinema’s influence on Hollywood isn’t just about specific films. It’s about aesthetic sensibilities. Where Hollywood often prizes subtlety, Indian films have long balanced excess and intimacy — a song breaking into dialogue, a close-up swelling into melodrama.

    That emotional elasticity has shaped how Western directors think about scale. Danny Boyle, for instance, leaned on Bollywood stylings for Slumdog Millionaire (2008), a British production suffused with Indian cinematic rhythms. Wong Kar-wai, though not Hollywood, has credited Bollywood’s emotional sweep as a cinematic parallel in Asia.

     

     

    Even the global fascination with song-driven narrative owes something to Indian cinema, which normalized music as plot, not ornament, long before Hollywood musicals revived the form.

    Today, Indian films are festival staples, Oscar winners, and global streamer hits. The success of RRR at the Academy Awards, Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine as Light at Cannes, and Indian thrillers on Netflix mark a new visibility. But the truth is, influence has been here all along — quieter, less credited, yet deeply woven into Hollywood’s fabric.

    As global audiences increasingly look outside the West for inspiration, it’s worth recognizing that Indian cinema has been a quiet source. Cinema has never been a closed loop. The reels spool across borders, carrying echoes of Kolkata, Chennai and Mumbai, into Los Angeles and back again. 

  • Jameela Jamil and the Evil Empire of Britain

    “British people are truly the most evil people in history. They are Thanos. Britain is Thanos. They owe 43 trillion to India. We colonized the world.”

    British actress Jameela Jamil’s most recent hot take has flown around the Internet like a tornado.

    Jamil made the remark during a podcast episode with Blakely Thornton and Justin. A bit OTT? Perhaps. Clumsily phrased? Sure. But to face days of racist backlash? To be called the Most Annoying Woman on the Internet? To be told to return to India (Jamil is British)? To be used as proof that multiculturalism has failed?

     

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    There were enough people primed to dislike Jamil even before the colonialism remark swept social media discourse; she has been barbed by plenty of criticism about hijacking the body positivity movement while being a conventionally attractive women, and even for exaggerating claims about her poor health. But it is unclear why, in this day and age, her remarks about colonial Britain are considered even remotely controversial.

    Were all British people evil? Of course not! Was British colonialism evil? Indisputably. Reams and reams of history attest to it. Old and new scholarship has substantiated the fact that at the very least, the empire was staggeringly extractive – the renowned economist, Utsa Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938 (a number that is 17 times more than the GDP of the UK today).

    And this isn’t even remotely a post-colonial idea. Strains of dissent were threaded through British politics even during colonialism, in Britain itself, (although of course they sat on the margins of radicalism, never quite converting the country to a comprehensive rejection of empire.)

     

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    The renowned economist, Utsa Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938 (a number that is 17 times more than the GDP of the UK today).
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    So why was 2026 Britain up in arms about this? Presumably, one was Jamil’s unfortunate use of the present tense, and the mixing up of ‘we’ and ‘they’ (Jamil is of course a British citizen) which she elaborates was just a conversational gambit as part of a chatty podcast rather than an academically-turgid remark.

    Some attribute this gale of rage to the fact that British pedagogy has always painted colonialism with somewhat roseate hues, casting controversial figures such as Winston Churchill as towering statesmen. In India, of course, he is looked upon with somewhat less tolerant eyes.

    The argument against Jamil appears to be that all empires are evil, and as empires go, Britain’s was the least evil, animated as it was by a desire for profit, rather than darker ambitions such as Nazi Germany’s. Critics blather that even within Europe’s imperial age, the British record was not singularly worse than that of France, they while the atrocities committed under Leopold II in the Congo stand in a category of their own.

    This is a POV that grew perhaps from a very particular way of perceiving history. Historian Priya Satia writes in her Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire, “In public memory, redemptive myths about colonial upliftment persistently mask the empire’s abysmal history of looting and pillage, policy-driven famines, brutal crushing of rebellion, torture, concentration camps, aerial policing, and everyday racism and humiliation.”

     

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    And at least some of the vitriol is not about a quibble about the scale of historical atrocities. Jamil writes on her blog that, “I was subjected to 9 days straight and counting of threats of physical and sexual violence… and the most racist abuse I’ve ever encountered. This was not just private, this was on open forums like Twitter and Reddit, and in comments sections across the net. An angry patron of right wing media, even screamed for me to “Fuck off back to India” from his car, in the street.”

    Which begs the question – who is considered truly British? Jameela Jamil was born in the UK and has Indian descent; her own parents, she claims, have faced the direct reverberations of colonialism. Does the color of her skin position her as an easy target? After all, her words were rooted in fact. Would William Dalrymple for instance, the popular anticolonial historian who resides in Delhi, be accosted by a wild-eyed Londoner, screaming at him to go back to India?

    Jamil’s innocuous remark has ironically reignited a debate on colonialism. “This chaos has unearthed damning parts of the British legacy to those who would not otherwise have known,” she writes.

    This is no bad thing. Patriotism includes having the courage to face the grimmer parts of a country’s history, to accept that it wasn’t necessarily a perfumed blossom-strewn path, that it was instead responsible for colossal bloodletting and extraordinary brutality.  As Jamil eloquently writes, “It is because I love Britain, that I can hold it to a higher standard. It is because I know we can do and be better that I do not shy away from its past. It is my forever home.”

  • When Soda Became Self-Care

    For decades, ‘health’ lived in pill bottles — multivitamins in medicine cabinets, fish oil capsules on kitchen counters. Today, that same promise has migrated into cans and bottles lining supermarket shelves. Health has found its way into your beverages and water. 

    Amongst the biggest names? Pepsi launched its first Prebiotic Cola in the traditional Cola category in 2025. It tastes just like the cola you grew up drinking — sugary, crisp and bubbly. But let’s just say that your classic soda got a bit of a health kick, now claiming to contain only 5 grams of sugar, 30 calories, no artificial sweeteners and 3 grams of prebiotic fiber. This move isn’t new in the ‘functional beverages’ category, but the fact that a legacy brand decided to throw its hat in the ring, is a marker that ‘functional’ has gone mass. It also signals a bigger global shift in how health is consumed today.

    Closer to home, Paper Boat launched its Zero Prebiotic Soda in June 2026. The promise (and premise) is the same; health via no added sugar, no aspartame, and 5g of fibre for gut health.

     

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    The fact that a legacy brand decided to throw its hat in the ring, is a marker that ‘functional’ has gone mass.
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    Functional drinks today sit at the crossroads of psychology, economics, and culture. From AG1’s powdered supplement with 75+ vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and superfoods to Gatorade’s ‘super hydration’ lines and sodas that promise gut health, focus, or calm, the category has grown into a multi-billion-dollar industry. Behind these numbers is a deeper story: consumers aren’t just buying hydration; they’re buying health, identity, and reassurance in a can or powder.

    Analysts peg the global functional drinks market at around $150 billion today, on track to nearly double by 2030 — growth that explains why legacy giants like Pepsi and Coca-Cola are racing to repackage sodas with ‘better-for-you’ labels. The real traction, though, has come from buzzy new subcategories: in the U.S., so-called ‘gut-pops’ like Olipop and Poppi moved more than $800 million in retail sales last year, proof that fiber-fortified colas have shifted from niche wellness aisles to mainstream fridges. Gillian Anderson has her own brand brilliantly called G Spot. Even Kin Euphorics, Bella Hadid’s co-founded brand of non-alcoholic, adaptogen-packed blends sells not just a drink, but a new kind of nightlife ritual. It taps into the ‘sober curious‘ movement while the adaptogen market itself is forecast to reach more than $20 billion by 2030. At the top end sits AG1 (Athletic Greens), now valued north of a billion dollars, its subscription model turning micronutrient blends into lifestyle identity. 

     

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    How Functional Drinks Became a Thing

    Gatorade’s invention in 1965 at the University of Florida is often seen as the foundational moment for the category. A team of researchers formulated the drink to help football players avoid dehydration during scorching games.

    Fast forward to 2007, and Coca-Cola’s $4.1-billion acquisition of Glacéau (the maker of Vitaminwater) marked the first major corporate embrace of functional drinks. Suddenly, the beverage giants were not just making sodas, but buying into enhanced waters that offered vitamins, minerals, and lifestyle promise.

    These weren’t isolated moments—they were the story-behind-the-story. Gatorade demonstrated how beverages could solve a physical problem. Vitaminwater showed that selling wellness could also be selling identity. Together, they paved the way for what we now call ‘soft wellness’: functional drinks that blur the line between health category and cultural lifestyle.

     

    Equity Contrast: Traditional Functional Beverages Left Behind

    Across cultures, fermented and functional drinks like Mexico’s tepache, India’s jeera soda and nimbu pani, and Korea’s sikhye have quietly done what billion-dollar startups now market as breakthroughs: nourish, refresh, and comfort. 

    In Mexico, tepache has been around since pre-Columbian times — a tangy, gently fermented drink made from pineapple peels, raw sugar, and spices. It was never meant to be fancy, just something fizzy and social to share on a hot day.

     

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    Analysts peg the global functional drinks market at around $150 billion today, on track to nearly double by 2030 — growth that explains why legacy giants like Pepsi and Coca-Cola are racing to repackage sodas with “better-for-you” labels.
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    India, meanwhile, has its own roster of everyday coolers. Jeera soda, the unofficial digestive of summer afternoons, starts with a spiced syrup of roasted cumin, black pepper, and chaat masala, splashed into a glass with lemon, mint, ice, and topped off with soda. Then there’s nimbu pani — the most democratic of them all. Fresh lemon squeezed into cold water, a little sugar, a pinch of black salt — as common in household kitchens as it is at roadside stalls. Ironically, it now comes back to us in plastic bottles as PepsiCo’s Nimbooz, marketed like a modern invention. And in Korea, sikhye — a sweet rice-malt punch — has for centuries played the double role of gentle digestive and post-meal dessert.

    This idea of drinks as healthful continued into colonial India, whence Britishers turned to fizzy flavored waters in an attempt to deal with the ravaging stomach turmoil they had to deal with. Some sodas were advertised as brightening complexions while simultaneously soothing upset stomachs, a perennial English complaint.

     

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    The Broader Cultural Bargain

    The irony is striking: what people grew up drinking casually at home now often returns repackaged as premium ‘heritage’ wellness. Turmeric milk becomes ‘golden latte’ in Brooklyn cafés; nimbu pani comes back as a ₹40 bottled lemonade. The question isn’t just whether these drinks work, but who gets the credit, capital, and cultural recognition for knowledge that has always existed in the margins.

    Functional drinks reveal a broader cultural bargain: we’ll willingly pay premium prices to sip reassurance. This market doesn’t just sell hydration — it sells carefully curated identity and emotional comfort, branding our health anxieties into bottles. It tells a vivid story: some traditions get repackaged into profits, while others quietly sustain community without recognition.

  • The Web is Talking to Itself

    The internet was built for people. Increasingly, it serves machines.

    From the beginning, the Internet was premised on one simple assumption: that people were using it. Then came the bots, the AI agents, the web crawlers.

    The Dead Internet Theory, a conspiracy that emerged on obscure message boards in the late 2010s, claimed that governments and technology companies had quietly replaced ordinary internet users with bots, leaving a web populated largely by artificial activity. It was almost immediately poohpoohed, of course. But it proved unexpectedly prescient.

     

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    This year, we have reached the turning point. Cloudflare, perhaps the most prominent connectivity cloud company globally, recently reported that automated requests now account for more than half of the activity passing through its network. More recently, Web security firms have documented rapid growth in AI agents. There’s now a giant uptick in fake followers on social media sites. Influencers themselves are sometimes entirely fake. Is this perhaps the future of the Internet then?

    Five years ago, such traffic barely existed. Today, thanks to AI, it is almost taking over!

    A user asks a question, receives a summary, compares products or books a reservation, and this is done without ever visiting the sites that supplied the underlying information. The work still depends on human intent, but the actual visit no longer does.

    For decades, digital publishers and e-commerce platforms relied on a straightforward chain: a visitor arrived, viewed advertisements or products and generated revenue. AI agents break that chain. They consume computing resources, bandwidth and content, yet generate neither ad impressions nor loyal readership. This shifts the bedrock of economics on which the Internet used to run.

     

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    Cloudflare, perhaps the most prominent connectivity cloud company globally, recently reported that automated requests now account for more than half of the activity passing through its network.
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    Expectedly, publishers have begun responding. Some have pursued litigation or licensing agreements with AI firms whose models rely on their reporting. Others have blocked AI crawlers altogether. Still others are experimenting with charging AI companies directly for access, accepting that future readers may arrive not as people but as software representing them (a generational shift in itself).

    The same forces are reshaping the supply of information.

    Search-engine optimization had already encouraged publishers to produce ever larger volumes of keyword-rich content. Generative AI has reduced the cost of doing so to almost nothing. AI can produce endless listicles, summaries, social-media posts and copy of every kind – simply for other AI to consume.

     

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    And what of us? The users for which this was all built? How can we trust the content that we consume online?

    The obvious answer of course, is to turn analog, reverting to physical dictionaries and encyclopedias for research. But that is only a part-solution, for an increasingly connected online world. Another answer might be to hunt for spaces that are largely inaccessible – to machines, of course, but also to humans. People increasingly trust closed-door spaces such as invitation-only Slack communities, private Discord servers, paid newsletters and group chats. This represents a striking reversal of the internet’s original logic that democracy and ease of access was the web’s greatest strength.

    This doesn’t mean of course, that the internet is really ‘dead’. Billions of people continue to read, argue, shop and create online every day.

    Every era of the internet has been defined by its dominant user. In the 1990s, it was the individual browsing webpages. In the 2000s, it was the search engine indexing them. In the 2010s, it was the social-media feed organizing attention. The next era may belong to software that reads, shops, negotiates and decides on our behalf.

    The internet was built on the belief that someone, somewhere, was looking at a screen. Its next phase will depend on a more difficult question: how to build a profitable web when, increasingly, something is looking instead.

  • Rooted in Place

    Perhaps one of the most exciting parts of planning a holiday is choosing where to stay — scrolling through photos, reading reviews, and deciding which place deserves your precious downtime (and your Instagram feed). But today’s discerning travellers, armed with disposable income and well-stamped passports, want more than just a room with a compelling view — they’re chasing stories. Travellers today want a narrative behind the hotel they’re staying at versus 1200-thread-count sheets. 

    Where you stay often becomes how you remember a place. A cold chain hotel could be anywhere in the world — but a 19th-century haveli with sun-dappled courtyards, or a hillside retreat made of local slate and pine? That’s where travel shifts from itinerary to immersion. As India’s travel culture matures, the idea of luxury is evolving. It’s no longer defined by size or splendour alone, but by a sense of story, sustainability, and rootedness. The country’s boutique hotels are at the centre of this quiet but powerful transformation.

     

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    In Rajasthan, heritage havelis — former merchant and royal homes in their heyday — are being restored to new life as boutique hotels. Properties are giving visitors the opportunity to enter history without giving up contemporary comfort. Here, hand-painted frescoes, jharokhas, and courtyards aren’t done for show — they are maintained with love, providing a genuine sense of place. The restoration of these havelis is a sentimental sustainable model infusing economic vitality into old buildings without sacrificing their cultural backbone.

     

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    At the Sawantwadi Palace Boutique Art Hotel, not only do the erstwhile prince and princess (Lakham Khem and Shraddha Lakham Sawant Bhonsle) run the hotel, they're also trained chefs spooning plate after delicious plate of traditional Konkani food, while simultaneously reviving the ancient card-playing art of ganjifa.
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    This change is not exclusive to palace towns. In the Himalayas, hotels such as The Grand Dragon Ladakh are redefining conscious luxury. The hotel combines local architectural styles with low-density development, embracing native materials such as slate, wood, and stone. The outcome? Spaces that resonate with the natural and cultural cadences of their surroundings, instead of disturbing them.

    Others hire local chefs and artisans, providing guests with not only a meal or a room, but an exchange of cultures. At the Sawantwadi Palace Boutique Art Hotel, not only do the erstwhile prince and princess (Lakham Khem and Shraddha Lakham Sawant Bhonsle) run the hotel, they’re also trained chefs spooning plate after delicious plate of traditional Konkani food, while simultaneously reviving the ancient card-playing art of ganjifa.

    The modern boutique hotel in India has also become a platform for local storytelling. The Kin in Mumbai replaces the standard reception desk with a concept store, selling curated art and crafts. With fresh flowers sourced from Dadar Market and the retro elevator it contributes to the story of the city it inhabits.

     

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    Sustainability, too, is more than a buzzword. Travellers today are not content with surface-level experiences. They’re seeking cultural resonance — whether it’s a cooking class with a Rabari woman, a nature walk to identify medicinal plants, or simply sipping tea on a haveli terrace where time lingers in sandstone carvings. It’s become less about excess, more about essence.

    In this new ‘blueprint’ for Indian hospitality, boutique hotels are portals into the soul of a place. With each check-in, luxury is being re-written — it is personal, sustainable, storied, and deeply, unmistakably local.

  • The Sky is the Limit

    Not long ago, artificial intelligence-powered robots was something out of sci-fi movies or tech journals. Today, it’s part of everyday life. It helps you unlock your phone with your face, reroutes your maps during traffic jams, flags fraud at your bank, and nudges you into watching just one more episode on Netflix.

    Now, it’s eyeing your dinner.

    In cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, food delivery giants like DoorDash are testing small AI-powered robots — think knee-high pods that roll along sidewalks and deliver meals with zero human contact. They’re packed with cameras, GPS, and real-time traffic data. The idea? Cut down last-mile costs, rely less on gig workers, and serve up something futuristic.

     

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    But anyone who’s been to Tokyo won’t find this surprising. Japan has long been ahead when it comes to blending tech with hospitality. Ramen shops with vending machine menus, lattes poured by robot arms, sushi zipping past on conveyor belts — all part of the norm. It’s efficient, it’s clean, and it works because the system around it does too.

    Now picture India.

    Delivery here isn’t a streamlined system. It’s controlled chaos — a world powered by jugaad, short-cuts, phone calls, and street-smart delivery guys who know exactly how to find your door, even when Google Maps gives up. It’s a human-driven operation that thrives in a landscape of broken lifts, unmarked buildings, narrow gullies, and peak-hour madness. 

     

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    In Gurugram, groceries are already being hotfooted by drone, helping to reshape last-mile logistics.
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    Could a robot handle that? Let’s tackle both sides of that question.

    First, there’s the question of infrastructure. Many Indian cities barely have sidewalks — and when they do, they’re often uneven, broken, or blocked by everything from carts to cows. In such a situation, a robot might find the streets easier to navigate than a human being (and emit less carbon while doing so). On the other hand, a delivery bot that cruises down Mumbai streets might get stuck, lost, or simply draw a curious crowd.

    Then there’s trust. Unlike in the U.S., where many consumers are used to dealing with automated kiosks and smart locks, India’s tech comfort zone is developing — especially when it comes to robots showing up at your gate with your biryani. This is where government regulations need to step in

    And then there’s something harder to measure — culture. In India, delivery isn’t just a transaction. It’s a tiny act of familiarity. Maybe it’s the delivery guy who knows your gate code or brings extra ketchup because you always ask. That’s not something a beeping box can replicate.

     

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    Does that mean AI has no place in Indian food delivery? Not at all. In fact, the march of the drone has already begun. Across parts of urban India, drones are already ferrying medicines, diagnostics, parcels and e-commerce shipments up and down. In Gurugram, groceries are already being hotfooted by drone, helping to reshape last-mile logistics. Plans are in the offing for Bengaluru, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune and Hyderabad to follow suit. This was only a matter of time; India’s online food delivery market is expected to swell to USD 27 billion by 2030.

    So is your paneer tikka safest in the hands of someone who knows how to dodge a pothole and charm a security guard, or in the arms of a drone soaring over the streets? The pavements may not be ready yet, but the future is already on its way.

  • A Note from Our Founder

    Dear Reader,

    I was in a restaurant in New York, the Brooklyn Bridge in the background, talking with the owner of a small Jaipur-inspired café and bakery in Brooklyn. We spoke about the city that had inspired her space, the flavours and memories she wanted to bring into the neighborhood, and about her own visits to India over the years. Then she paused and asked me something I wasn’t expecting.

    “Can I ask you,” she said. “What do Indians think about us here in the U.S.?”

    I know I sat there quietly for a moment before answering. For as long as I could remember, it had been Indians wondering what the world thought of them. Here was someone asking the opposite. It stayed with me long after the conversation ended.

    In fact, that conversation stayed with me through the rest of the week, a week spent meeting founders, journalists, academics, artists and readers across the United States. We spoke about everything from technology and business to books, cities, culture and the future. Yet time and again, our conversations found their way back to India.

     

     

    What struck me was not just that people were interested in the country. It was how thoughtful their questions were. People wanted to understand the forces shaping India today, why they mattered and what they might mean for the rest of the world. I found myself answering remarkably similar questions in very different rooms, which made me realise just how widely that search for context was shared.

    That café conversation was one version of a question I heard again and again in different forms. Another came from a finance professional who spent his days analyzing markets and his evenings writing a newsletter for South Asian professionals. As we talked about childhood summers with his grandparents in Mumbai, evenings on Marine Drive and the city he remembered growing up in, I realised how easy it is to carry an image of a place long after the place itself has moved on. Today’s India cannot be understood through those memories alone. It has evolved quickly, often in surprising ways, even for those of us who live here.

     

     

    I also met people of Indian origin whose relationships with the country reflected very different lives. Some traveled back every year and spoke about it with the familiarity of someone who had never really left. Others admitted they had begun paying closer attention only recently, prompted by India’s growing presence in conversations about business, technology and culture. A few were simply curious about everyday life here that rarely makes international headlines. What united them was a desire to understand the country as it exists today through its people, ideas, creativity and contradictions rather than through headlines or inherited assumptions.

    One conversation wasn’t about India at all. It was about whether someone living in the United States would make room in their daily reading for a publication that was based in India. She landed somewhere unexpected: that she had spent her life reading about the rest of the world from the West, at a time when India’s place in that world had grown too large to keep reading about it only from the outside. That told me more than any answer I could have given her. The Moment is our answer to that same imbalance.

     

     

    By the end of the week, I found myself reflecting on what all of those conversations had in common. For a long time, India was often seen as a country the world looked at. Increasingly, it feels like a country the world is looking to. That shift is playing out across technology, entrepreneurship, entertainment, design and culture, and I suspect we’re only beginning to understand what it means.

    That is the thinking behind The Moment. Our starting point is India, but our ambition is much broader: to understand the world from here. The stories that will define the coming decades will not belong to one country alone. Many will begin here, be shaped by what happens here, or reveal something important about the world through an Indian perspective. Those are the stories we intend to tell, with the context, judgement and craft they deserve.

    Thank you for reading. I am grateful you are here at the beginning of this journey.

    Until next time,
    Priyam Sharma

  • What Is India Listening To

    India is a country where a single playlist can get all states nodding along to the same song. Walk into a nightclub in Mumbai or a college fest in Kochi, and the odds are decent that at some point the DJ will reach for the latest Punjabi bop. What’s more, audiences will probably demand it.

    Even though Punjabi is the mother tongue of merely 2.74% of Indians, it has flooded the country’s playlists and Diljit Dosanjh is likely the reason why. He is the first Punjabi artist to play Coachella, and has collaborated with Sia and Camilo; such cross-pollination has helped knuckle Punjabi music into the global mainstream. Karan Aujla represents the next wave, matching hip hop to bhangra, reflecting the country’s global aspirations and growing confidence in the world. Western music had been seeping into India for decades; recently only though has regional music accepted it with quite so much elan.  Between them, the two have turned Punjabi music from a regional taste into one of India’s most successful exports.

     

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    Part of the appeal is portability. Bhangra is a bop! And Indians love to dance; rhythm crosses language barriers more easily than lyrics do. Long before streaming existed, Punjabi songs already travelled through weddings and diaspora networks in the US and the UK; infrastructure that no other regional tradition possessed in quite the same way.

    Punjabi pop’s success echoes the trajectory of K Pop, another regional industry that outgrew its borders. It is no accident that young, well-traveled, global Indians meet BTS and Diljit Dosanjh in the very same scroll.

    If Punjabi music conquered India’s public spaces, singer-songwriters such as Anuv Jain and King have taken its private ones. Some of the country’s most interesting acts are scattered around India, defying (as P Pop is) the dominance of Hindi music: a rapper from Shillong, an artist from Arunachal Pradesh who slides between English, Hindi and Nyishi in a single song, a Delhi collective that fuses Punjabi folk with metal. Clearly, Mumbai is no longer the heartbeat; the filaments of the music industry have spread, reflecting a growing urbanism away from the major metros. While alternative and indie acts were always part of college festivals and music festivals thanks to MTV and its local equivalent, Channel V, they’d never quite achieved mainstream success. For this, we must thank streaming services that have democratized the music landscape to some extent.

     

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    Karan Aujla represents the next wave, matching hip hop to bhangra, reflecting the country’s global aspirations and growing confidence in the world.
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    For decades Bollywood accounted for roughly four-fifths of all music consumption in India. Its dominance is waning slowly, its share of the pie slipping to around two-thirds, eaten into by non-filmi streaming platforms and artists. Still, some of this year’s biggest chartbusters came via the film Dhurandhar: The Revenge (released in the last weeks of 2025), a jingoistic mass entertainer that held up a mirror to a masculinist section of Indian society.

    The same streaming platforms that broke Bollywood’s monopoly on taste have also proved useful to ideologues. Alongside the love songs and wedding anthems has grown an ecosystem of ‘Hindutva pop’, a genre that does exactly what its name suggests i.e sings about Hindu identity and majoritarian politics reflecting this wider shift in Indian society. This is a genre that is no longer confined to small towns in traditional Central India; it racks up millions of views on Youtube and is even played at official government ceremonies.

     

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    Back at the party, the music plays on. Bollywood songs will remain fixtures of Indian celebration for years yet; cinema is too deeply stitched into the culture to vanish overnight. But the balance has tipped. Indian music increasingly resembles not a single canon curated in Mumbai, but a federation — Punjabi pop, acoustic singer-songwriters, regional rap, ideological anthems — all competing for the same thumb on the same scroll. The center has not disappeared. It has merely lost its monopoly on what the nation hears.

  • The Rise of the Two Internets

    There was a time when the internet felt endless.

    Ask a question, and Google gives you answers. Articles, opinions, forums, expert takes — all just a click away. It felt like a digital town square where knowledge moved freely, and anyone could join the conversation. But lately, something’s changed.

    The web is no longer the open library it once was. Search results are increasingly cluttered with AI-generated filler — content that sounds right, but says nothing. The same recycled summaries echo across hundreds of sites, while the real stuff — the thoughtful, original, deeply human stuff — slips further out of view.

     

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    So Where is it Now?

    It’s behind the paywall. In private communities. In newsletters you actually want to read. In Discord servers, closed forums, Patreon pages, and subscriber-only Substacks — places where people still talk like people, and curiosity still feels alive.

    And at the heart of this shift is Gen Z. They grew up on the open internet — Reddit rabbit holes, Tumblr threads, chaotic TikToks. But now, they’re curating their own corners of the web. Tired of misinformation, noise, and the flattening effect of algorithms, they’re turning to private spaces.

    It’s happening everywhere. In the US, niche creators are building micro-communities around everything from climate optimism to indie fragrance. In India, creators producing content in Tamil, Bengali, and Marathi are building powerful subscriber bases around hyper-local content. And in China, where gated platforms have long been the norm, ecosystems like WeChat offer a glimpse into what the rest of the world might look like next.

     

    “
    At the heart of this shift is Gen Z. They grew up on the open internet — Reddit rabbit holes, Tumblr threads, chaotic TikToks. But now, they’re curating their own corners of the web. Tired of misinformation, noise, and the flattening effect of algorithms, they’re turning to private spaces.
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    Take the writers who’ve started deliberately opting out of SEO altogether by skipping keyword optimization, ignoring Google-friendly headlines, sometimes even asking not to be indexed at all. It sounds counterintuitive until you see the logic: a smaller, more devoted readership that pays and shows up is worth more than a large, anonymous one that clicks and leaves. What they’re looking for isn’t reach, it’s return visits from committed readers.

    And yet, we know that an internet organized around paywalls and invite-only servers is also, by definition, a less accessible one. The open web’s promise was that knowledge shouldn’t depend on who you know or what you can afford; it was the great democratizer. Retreating into private spaces risks quietly recreating the very gatekeeping the internet was supposed to avoid. The trade-off is real: what’s gained in trust and depth may come at the expense of reach and equal access.

    Brands are catching on. The old SEO playbook is losing relevance. What matters now is not how many people you reach, but how deeply you connect. And over the next year, we’ll see more communities — not just audiences. More trust — not just traffic.

    The internet’s new frontier isn’t louder. It’s quieter, more intentional, more human. And it’s already here.

  • A Movement Without Borders

    On 20th July, a group of people made their way towards Union Square in Manhattan in the evening. They were placard-carrying members of the Indian diaspora, wishing to express their solidarity with the students protesting in New Delhi against the Indian education system. 

    Close to their meeting spot, stands a statue of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi that is 8 feet tall. It was installed in 1986. It makes one think — how common are Gandhi’s statues in the very visible world of global cities? Gandhi stands and sits in Johannesburg, Beijing, Hiroshima, London. Do protests that align with his political beliefs remain confined within national borders or do they have offshoots across the world? Why do Indian protests now have audiences and participants across continents?

    Diasporic protests by themselves are not a new phenomenon, but it is worth asking questions about the issue that triggered the protests in July 2026. That is because it reveals the aspirations of a subset of the Indian population, in this case, the youth of the country. Many of these are students and on the verge of entering the workforce. 

     

    New York came out in support of Indian students. | David Sathuluri

     

    This is a generation that still somehow managed to find reasons for laughing, although they were peddling in the grim business called dissent. The Gen-Z population (people born in the years between 1997-2012) has been labelled as a generation of ‘unserious’ people, yet who are not afraid of tackling serious issues, the likes of which include demanding accountability from the government. 

    But what about their friends and family who have now moved abroad? How do they respond to events in the mainland?

    The date for a peaceful walk from the Jantar Mantar to the parliament had been decided upon well in advance. People were asking for the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, for his lack of oversight on the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), which decides whether young students can qualify to study medicine, and become doctors in the future. When word spread in May 2026 that the question paper had been leaked, and the test would be conducted again, it left a tremendous impact on the lives of the aspirants. There were more than twenty aspirants who died by suicide.

    To voice their support for the movement, some people decided to fly to New Delhi from other parts of the country, and some from outside the country. For those who couldn’t travel, their current place of residence became the site of protest.

     

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    These protests also highlight the efficacy of those who can demonstrate support for the cause in lieu of being physically present at the site.
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    In New York City, on 20th July, that venue was Union Square — a protest initiated by Hindus for Human Rights, an organization based in Washington D.C. It was possibly a deliberate decision to have Gandhi in the backdrop as members of the Indian diaspora convened to speak about the situation unfolding in India. After all, Gandhi was known for preaching the ideals of non-violence during India’s fight for independence from British colonial rule.

    “The beauty of the current youth uprising in India is that it brings together those who love Gandhi, those who love Ambedkar, those who love Bhagat Singh,” says Sunita Vishwanath, the Executive Director of Hindus for Human Rights.” Rather than these historical figures forming lines of division between us, the protests have truly united us.”

    Unlike the protests in New Delhi and other Indian cities, people showed up in limited numbers. But what propels these individuals to align their timing with Indian protests, and show up when there is such a massive geographical divide between Indian cities and their locations? Vishwanath suggests that the diaspora never stopped following Indian news from close quarters, and that inspiration to join protests transcends borders. The compression of distance is also carried through fervent discussions on mediums such as Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp, through which people receive real time updates.

    These are individuals who have retained their Indian citizenship, or they have Indian roots which they feel strongly towards. After all, one of the catalysts of the movement, Abhijit Dipke, was residing in the US, when he decided to come up with a satirical page named the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP). 

    These protests also highlight the efficacy of those who can demonstrate support for the cause in lieu of being physically present at the site. This includes online work — creating educational content on the political history of India, reminding people of their constitutional rights, and for some people in the comment section, one can also find tips and tricks to protect themselves from the harmful effects of tear gas.

     

    The Internet has become a crucial tool for the dissemination of information to the diaspora. | David Sathuluri

     

    There is also a deep-seated curiosity about who is funding the protests. The answer might be people galvanizing support for the movement by sending food and supplies through quick commerce delivery apps such as BlinkIt. It’s coming from those people who are employed and have disposable income. Many millennials have also offered to arrange for flight and train tickets for those who wished to travel to the capital of India, but lacked the means to do so.

    Even as we reside in different parts of the world and the country, several gaps in understanding and communication have been bridged through social media. People are no longer relying on traditional media outlets in India for news, but are watching developments unfold on their phone screens. 

    Turning up for protests felt necessary because people care deeply for the homeland they (or their parents) once lived in; through these moments of solidarity, one finds a way back home. With the Indian diaspora scattered across various parts of the globe, and their need to express a connection with their erstwhile homes, the Indian protest could truly be considered to be a protest of the world.