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  • The Payment Revolution Was Not Televised

    It is a Wednesday morning and Salim has not carried change in three years.

    He runs his autorickshaw through the western suburbs of Mumbai, and at the end of every ride, his passenger does the same thing. They open a phone, point it at the small printed QR code taped to the back of the front seat, and pay. No fumbling for change, no negotiation about whether he has a fifty, no waiting while someone searches a bag for coins that may not be there. The money arrives in the driver’s account before the passenger has even put their phone away.

    The driver is not an outlier. Across India, a country that ran almost entirely on cash a decade ago, this is often how transactions happen now. From fancy city restaurants to shops in towns that may not even have a bank branch, people now turn to digital payments.

    This happens through a system called UPI or Unified Payments Interface. It is a real-time, instant payment system that allows you to transfer funds between bank accounts using a smartphone, QR code, or virtual ID. By the end of 2025, UPI was processing 21.6 billion transactions in a single month.

     

    In 2025, India saw 21.6 billion UPI transactions across the year | Image Credit: Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

    That scale marks a shift. UPI has grown beyond a new system or a policy success into an infrastructure that has become invisible through use. What was once an alternative to cash is now the default layer through which everyday transactions move. At the same time, other markets, including the United States with the launch of FedNow in 2023, are only beginning to build comparable systems. The question has quickly shifted from whether digital payments will take hold to what happens once they already have.

    The story of how this happened begins on the night of November 8, 2016. Prime Minister Modi appeared on television at eight in the evening and told the country that its two largest currency denominations, ₹500 and ₹1000 notes, the currency of vegetable vendors and domestic workers and small shop owners, would cease to be legal tender at midnight. Four hours’ notice for 86 percent of the cash in circulation. The lines outside banks began forming before dawn and did not shorten for weeks. The human cost was real and the politics remain fiercely contested. But in the space that the absence of cash opened up, something else took hold. UPI had launched just months earlier to modest interest; suddenly it had the entire country’s attention, not because it had been marketed well, but because there was nothing else to turn to.

     

    “
    The payment revolution was not televised. It happened in the hands of hundreds of millions of people who needed it to work.
    ”

     

    To understand what UPI is, it helps to understand what it is not.

    It is not an app. Google Pay and PhonePe and Paytm all run on UPI, but UPI is the infrastructure beneath them. The system was built by the National Payments Corporation of India, a non-profit backed by the Reserve Bank of India. It is open to anyone, owned by no one, and available to every bank, app, and fintech company that wants to build on top of it. Any two banks can talk to each other through it and any two apps can transact across it. The system does not privilege one platform over another, which means competition happens in the services built on top of it rather than in the rails themselves.

    What it does is simple. It lets anyone send money to anyone else, instantly, from one bank account to another, using only a phone number or a virtual ID. It works across platforms, banks, and users. For those without smartphones, it works through a basic menu system accessible on any mobile phone, the kind that has been around since before the internet was in everyone’s pocket.

    In 2023, the United States launched FedNow, its long-awaited instant payment system, welcomed as a significant modernization of American financial infrastructure. By the time it arrived, there was a gap in the two markets that is worth understanding, because it did not happen by accident. The United States built its financial infrastructure around private competition, mainly card networks, fintech platforms, and bank-by-bank systems, a structure reflected in services like Venmo, Zelle, and Apple Pay, which operate within proprietary or limited networks rather than a unified public rail.

     

     

    Venmo works within Venmo, Apple Pay works within Apple’s ecosystem, and Zelle works between participating banks. Each is a private solution to a public problem, capturing value for its owner and excluding users not already inside the system. The result is a patchwork that works well enough for most people most of the time. But its gaps fall hardest on the people least able to navigate around them.

    What this looks like in ordinary life is harder to convey in numbers. It looks like the domestic worker who receives her salary at midnight on the last day of the month, transferred in seconds, without her employer needing to find an ATM or her needing to be present to collect it. It looks like the small textile shop in Surat whose owner now has a complete digital record of every transaction, with a credit history where none existed before, which means access to loans previously unavailable to businesses like his. It looks like the teenager splitting a food delivery order with four friends, each paying their share in under thirty seconds, none of them thinking of it as a financial transaction at all.

    The friction of cash, the exclusion of people without banking relationships, and the invisibility of small economic actors to institutions that allocate credit, was a structural condition shaping which transactions were possible and who could participate in which economies. While UPI did not dissolve that structure, it changed who is visible inside it. The domestic worker with a transaction record is now legible to a bank, visible in data in a way she was not before. The textile shop owner exists, financially speaking, in a way that his years of cash dealings never allowed. Legibility is not equity, and visibility is not access, but you cannot begin to participate in a formal economy that has no record of your existence, and for millions of people, UPI created that record for the first time.

     

    “
    While UPI did not dissolve that structure, it changed who is visible inside it.
    ”

     

    None of this is without complication. The same infrastructure that processes Salim’s fares also creates a permanent, state-accessible record of every payment every Indian makes. India still lacks comprehensive data protection legislation that would give citizens clear rights over this information. Who can access transaction data, under what conditions, with what oversight, these remain contested and unresolved, and the scale of the system makes the stakes of those questions large.

    There is also the question of cost. UPI’s zero-fee model for small transactions drove adoption, but running the infrastructure is not free, and where that cost falls, and who decides, are governance questions the system’s success has deferred rather than answered. And then there is the more enduring concern, the one of an infrastructure that does not flatten inequality by existing. It changes its shape. The textile shop owner has a credit history now, but does that translate into a loan at a fair rate? That depends on systems well beyond UPI’s reach.

    The payment revolution was not televised. It happened in the hands of hundreds of millions of people who needed it to work, on a Wednesday morning when a man in an autorickshaw stopped carrying change and did not miss it.

    It was scanned, though. It was absolutely scanned.

  • Fashion’s Borrowings Across Borders

    For centuries, Kolhapuri chappals have been the footwear of Maharashtrians. In 2019, they were formally given a Geographical Indication stamp, protecting their heritage and regional identity. In 2025, they walked the Prada runway.

    The sandal seemed unremarkable at first glance: slim leather straps, clean lines, a muted palette that matched Prada’s minimalist ethos. Yet, for many Indians, its outline was unmistakable. Prada didn’t acknowledge its lineage, sparking immediate backlash about the absence of credit. Within days, the Italian fashion house issued a rare apology.

    And yet the Prada episode was not an isolated misstep but part of a much older story. Fashion has always transformed everyday cultural objects into global commodities, sometimes with credit, often without. Each time, the same questions surface: what separates appreciation from appropriation? And perhaps more urgently, who profits and who disappears in the process?

    A century before Prada’s sandal, the couturier Paul Poiret introduced a Parisian craze around ‘harem pants’. The billowing trousers, derived loosely from Middle Eastern and South Asian silhouettes, were marketed as revolutionary, liberating women from corsets and skirts. French society debated their propriety; critics called them scandalous. But the scandal made Poiret a celebrity. The garment’s layered histories, its regional makers, were left out of the conversation altogether.

    Half a century later, American counterculture reached for similar vocabularies. Hippies adopted kurtas, Nehru jackets, and, most iconically, paisley — a motif with its own long, winding journey: once a Persian boteh, then woven into Kashmiri shawls, later mass-produced by Scottish mills, before being rebranded as a universal symbol of bohemia in 1960s USA. To wear a paisley shirt in San Francisco was to signal rebellion; to weave one in Kashmir was to survive an economic system that commodified the work as ‘exotic’.

    In 2019, Gucci marketed a $790 turban on Nordstrom’s website. For Sikh communities in the US and abroad, the sight was painful: a sacred article of faith rebranded as novelty accessory. Nordstrom pulled the listing after backlash, but the incident underscored how cultural symbols are emptied of meaning when filtered through retail systems. Similarly, in 2026, Ralph Lauren sent models down the runway wearing silver jhumkas, immediately sparking criticism about ‘whitewashing’ brown cultures.

    The tension, then, isn’t simply about ‘borrowing’ or ‘stealing’. It’s about who gets to be remembered as visionary and who gets left as background. Poiret is remembered as an innovator; the hippies as style revolutionaries. The artisans and cultures whose forms they borrowed were simply treated as raw material. 

     

     

    Not Just the West

    It would be easy to frame cultural appropriation as a simple story of the West stealing from the Global South. But the truth is more complicated, and less comfortable. 

    Even within India, fashion replicates the same hierarchies. Mirrorwork from Kutch, bandhakala from Odisha, or phulkari from Punjab reappear in luxury collections on Mumbai and Delhi runways. These traditional crafts are recast as ‘contemporary Indian chic’, while the artisans themselves remain invisible. A couturier’s reinterpretation will be hailed in fashion glossies, while the cluster that keeps the tradition alive is relegated to the backdrop. 

    Bollywood, too, has been a major appropriator. Costumes borrow freely from regional dress — the nauvari sari of Maharashtra, a nine-yard drape designed for ease of movement, or the phanek of Manipur, a handwoven wraparound skirt with deep cultural and ritual significance. Restyled for spectacle and glamour, stripped of context, what was once an everyday identity marker becomes either caricature or fleeting ‘trend’.

    The erasures deepen with caste and community. Dalit and indigenous aesthetics — tattoos, beadwork, woven textiles are sometimes lifted into urban ‘boho’ fashion without acknowledgement. What appears as edgy styling in a Mumbai boutique is the same design that is stigmatized when worn by its origin community.

     

    “
    It’s tempting to keep asking the familiar question — was this respectful, or was it offensive? But that binary feels increasingly inadequate. The more urgent question is: what structures exist to ensure visibility, credit, and compensation travel alongside the aesthetic?
    ”

     

    Indian fashion too has long absorbed silhouettes from elsewhere. Our own luxury houses borrow freely from Western codes of chic: tuxedo tailoring, Art Deco embellishments, the ‘little black dress’. The difference of course, lies in the power dynamics. Across geographies, the story repeats: sacred or everyday dress becomes exoticized, repackaged, resold — with the origin community forced to fight for recognition as custodians rather than decoration.

    Making the case for cultural sensitivity isn’t just an Indian or South Asian problem of course. In Mexico, the Mixe community has repeatedly pushed back against designers lifting their traditional blouse patterns without consent. In Nigeria, Yoruba adire — the indigo-dyed resist textile now displayed in global museum shows and reimagined on luxury runways — still leaves its makers with fragile livelihoods. And in Morocco, the caftan drifts in and out of Western trend reports as “boho chic,” stripped of its grounding as a living garment tradition. 

    All of which underscores the deeper point: appropriation isn’t solely about geography — East vs. West, North vs. South. It is about power. Who gets to transform a craft into couture, and who is left unnamed in the process? Who crosses borders freely, and who is told their dress is “too ethnic,” “too traditional,” or “too niche”?

    Cultural ‘homage’ isn’t always doomed to misfire. Done with care, collaboration, and credit, it can open doors rather than close them. Dior’s 2023 show at Mumbai’s Gateway of India, for instance, wasn’t perfect — some critics noted the spectacle outweighed the storytelling, but it did something rare: it placed Indian craft on a global luxury stage, with artisans visibly acknowledged in pre-show materials.

    Smaller labels like Raw Mango and Pero set a different precedent: naming weavers, spotlighting craftspeople in campaigns, and making sure the ‘handmade’ isn’t just marketing gloss but a living partnership.

    Elsewhere, designers like Stella Jean have built collections around collaborations with artisans from Haiti to Burkina Faso, ensuring royalties and credit flow back to the communities whose work inspires the clothes. In menswear, labels like Wales Bonner and Bode have shown how heritage can be central, not ornamental — drawing from Caribbean tailoring or American workwear without reducing them to moodboard aesthetics.

     

     

    A portrait of Nigerian textile designer Chief Nike Davies-Okundaye | Image Credit: foluartstudio on Instagram

     

     

    It’s tempting to keep asking the familiar question — was this respectful, or was it offensive? But that binary feels increasingly inadequate. The more urgent question is: what structures exist to ensure visibility, credit, and compensation travel alongside the aesthetic?

    Homage is not about moodboards or polite footnotes. It’s about contracts that outlive a season, royalties that flow beyond the runway, and credits that show up not just in show notes but on the product tag. Imagine a Kolhapuri sandal carrying the name of its maker as proudly as the house that sells it.

    Fashion has always been about circulation — of cloth, of silhouettes, of symbols. But circulation without recognition is erasure. The industry doesn’t need to stop ‘borrowing’; it needs to start acknowledging that such ‘inspiration’ comes with responsibility.

    Because in the end, the Kolhapuri is not just a sandal. The turban is not just a headpiece. The paisley is not just a motif. They are cultural legacies — reshaped, rebranded, resold. And each time they travel, they tell us less about the garment than about the hands we choose to see, and the hands we don’t.

  • The Politics of a Flatbread

    When is a roti not just a roti?

    Rolled out every day in kitchens across the Indian subcontinent, the roti has traveled around the world. It moved with merchants, sailors, immigrants, and indentured labor — its shape gently shifting with every border it crossed. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, after the abolition of slavery, Britain sent over 1.3 million Indian indentured laborers to far-flung colonies — about 145,000 to Trinidad alone between 1845 and 1917. Alongside clothes and keepsakes, they carried recipes and muscle memory: the instinct to make something familiar in an unfamiliar land.

    In the Caribbean, that meant lentils — giving rise to dhalpuri, roti stuffed with split peas and blistered on a hot stove. In Singapore and Malaysia, Tamil Muslim immigrants stretched wheat dough into flaky roti prata.  In some ways, the roti becomes an edible testament of who migrates, how they adapt, and whose foodways get preserved or erased. Even Mexico’s tortilla, though corn-based, echoes roti’s logic of adaptability: a flatbread shaped by the land it’s made on. What this really shows is that roti’s evolution has always been tied to power — who moves, who adapts, and whose foodways get preserved or erased. What this really shows is the flatbread’s evolution has always been tied to power — who moves, who adapts, and whose foodways get preserved or erased.

     

    Sliced beef and vegetables on a tortilla | Image Credit: Los Muertos Crew on Pexels

     

    Today, Indian cuisine means different things in different kitchens in different parts of the world. In London, it may appear on a posh tasting menu; in Trinidad, in a lunchtime wrap sold by a street vendor; in Kuala Lumpur, on someone’s breakfast table. That Indian food has carved inroads into most countries is indisputable.

    Yet, in some Western dining spaces, while Indian flavors are reframed as modern or refined, there is often little acknowledgement of their history. British chef Tom Kerridge’s £28 butter chicken, for instance, became a talking point because of how casually it detached a dish rooted in Delhi dhabas from its cultural context. For many, the issue wasn’t the reinvention — it was the idea of presenting it at a luxury price point without any real nod to where it came from. 

    Of the few Michelin-recognized Indian restaurants in the world, many sit outside India — a reminder that global prestige often arrives only when Indian cuisine is filtered through Western institutions. For instance, the UK has multiple Michelin-starred Indian restaurants. Meanwhile, India itself has none; the Michelin Guide still doesn’t operate in the country.

     

    “
    Of the few Michelin-recognized Indian restaurants in the world, many sit outside India — a reminder that global prestige often arrives only when Indian cuisine is filtered through Western institutions.
    ”

     

    Not that borrowing is a one-way street. Indian chefs reinterpret French pâtisserie, Japanese matcha, and New York bagels, layering their own stories onto global cuisines. The question isn’t whether adaptation is allowed — it’s whether the origin story stays visible, and whether those who shaped a dish have a seat at the table.

    The flavors may be the same, but the reception rarely is. Upscale restaurants serving ‘elevated Indian street food’ often draw critical attention, while dhabas offering similar dishes are rarely spotlighted. Part of this is access — who can secure prime real estate, hire PR, or design spaces that match fine-dining expectations. Part of it is perception: dishes become more ‘approachable’ when plated minimally, spiced subtly, and narrated through a Western frame.

    The commercial landscape mirrors this. On supermarket shelves, boutique spice brands continue to favor polished packaging over conversations about sourcing and credit. The market for Indian packaged foods and spices has grown rapidly, with diaspora-led brands driving global curiosity. Those who control the narrative often control the profits, too.

     

    A serving of soft-shell tacos | Image Credit: ROMAN ODINTSOV on Pexels

     

    But these tensions exist within the diaspora as well. A Trinidadian dhalpuri won’t taste like a Punjabi roti, yet both carry the same emotional resonance for those who grew up eating them. Authenticity becomes a question of belonging rather than purity: who decides what counts, and what gets preserved?

    In the end, roti’s story isn’t about drawing hard lines between ‘authentic’ and ‘changed.’ It’s about recognizing that every flatbread — whether folded around curry in Trinidad, flipped in a Malaysian street stall, or plated in a New York bistro — carries the imprint of the hands that made it and the landscapes it travelled through. The challenge is making sure those hands and landscapes aren’t forgotten when the dish arrives at the table.

  • The Rise of Sober Curiosity in Urban India

    For much of the past decade, alcohol functioned as shorthand for social fluency in cities around the world. Rooftop lounges in Mumbai, weekend brunches in New York, and club nights in Madrid were as much about signalling ease as they were about what was in the glass. To drink was to belong. To refuse a round, even for personal reasons, often came with questions.

    That assumption is beginning to loosen, though not everywhere, and not in the same way. Among Gen Z, shifts in drinking habits and social rituals are becoming more visible. This change is not about wholesale teetotalism. It is about curiosity and choice.

    In recent years, a growing number of people globally have begun questioning their relationship with alcohol. Not by quitting outright, but by asking smaller, situational questions: Do I actually want a drink tonight? Do I need it to socialize? To unwind? To feel like I belong? This orientation has come to be known as sober curiosity, a loosely defined movement that encourages moderation, intentional drinking, or opting out altogether, without moralizing abstinence.

    In the United States and Europe, sober curiosity emerged largely as a response to excess. Youth drinking declined, wellness culture took hold, and the pandemic reshuffled ideas of productivity and self-care. Choosing not to drink became associated with control, mindfulness, and even moral clarity.

     

    A coffee rave underway at Corridor Seven Coffee Roasters in Nagpur | Image Credit: Mithilesh Vazalwar on Instagram

     

    India’s version looks different. For much of the past decade, alcohol in India’s major cities also functioned as a social shortcut, but under different conditions. Drinking was not just about taste or leisure. It was about urban fluency. To drink was to signal modernity and belonging in spaces that were already classed, gendered, and regulated.

    Now, across metros and increasingly in tier-2 cities, young professionals are opting out of alcohol situationally rather than ideologically. They are skipping rounds without apology, leaving earlier than expected, or choosing only daytime socializing. This is not prohibition, and it is not a backlash. It is conditional participation. Alcohol is no longer an automatic assumption for a social hang. 

     

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    Across cities like Pune, Indore, Nagpur, and parts of Mumbai, early-morning 'coffee raves' are drawing crowds that once would have gathered at nightclubs.
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    Globally, this behaviour fits under the banner of sober curiosity. In India, it arrives with complications. Unlike Western markets, where sobriety often signals restraint from abundance, India’s relationship with alcohol has always been uneven. Large sections of the population abstain for religious, cultural, or economic reasons. What is new is not sobriety itself, but who gets to frame it as personal choice. 

    In English-speaking, urban spaces, not drinking is more acceptable now. That shift is visible in the market. India’s non-alcoholic and zero-proof beverage industry, valued at roughly ₹1.37 lakh crore in 2023, is projected to cross ₹2.10 lakh crore by the end of the decade. Bars in Mumbai and Delhi now offer zero-proof cocktails priced like their alcoholic counterparts, complete with garnish, glassware, and ceremony. The point is not abstinence. It is equivalence. You can opt out without opting out socially.

    But the more revealing shift is not happening in bars. Across cities like Pune, Indore, Nagpur, and parts of Mumbai, early-morning ‘coffee raves’ are drawing crowds that once would have gathered at nightclubs. Loud music, packed dance floors, caffeine instead of alcohol, and an exit time before noon. Similar sober daytime parties exist in New York or London, but in India their appeal is structural. They replace nightlife rather than supplement it. They fit around long workdays, shared housing, family expectations, and cost. 

    This is where India diverges sharply from Western sober-curious narratives. The appeal is not only wellness or mindfulness. It is also efficiency. Alcohol costs time. Hangovers interfere with already compressed schedules. Late nights disrupt routines in cities where commutes are long, private space is scarce, and burnout is ordinary. In this context, sobriety reads less as self-denial and more as control. Not drinking is not about virtue. It is about being functional.

     

    A bottle of Pomegranate Kombucha | Image Credit: Shannon Nickerson on Unsplash

     

    Choosing not to drink is celebrated when it appears intentional. It is far less visible when abstention is expected or imposed. Women in India have long navigated sobriety without praise. Working-class abstention has rarely been framed as lifestyle. The current moment becomes visible largely because a certain class or caste can afford to turn moderation into identity.

    That tension is what makes India’s sober curiosity worth paying attention to. This is not a wholesale rejection of drinking culture. Alcohol remains central to many social scenes. What is changing is the default. Refusal no longer requires justification everywhere. Social life is slowly learning to accommodate absence.

    It reflects a change in how people gather, celebrate, and belong. In a culture where participation has long demanded conformity, opting out without disappearing is a meaningful shift.

  • Gold Standard: Why India’s Obsession With the Metal Still Glitters

    You’ve probably seen it before, perhaps at a family wedding or on one of those inevitable afternoons spent sifting through your mother’s old sarees. Nestled inside a fading velvet box is a necklace: heavy, intricate, and unmistakably gold. It might have belonged to your grandmother, who wore it on her wedding day before passing it on to your mother, who cherishes it for the memories it holds in addition to its karat value. Because in India, gold has never been just adornment — it’s emotional security shaped into metal.

    In a culture where daughters traditionally leave their family home after marriage, jewelry has been one of the few forms of wealth that is supposed to remain entirely theirs. Gold becomes a safeguard you can wear in joy and sell in crisis, a portable inheritance passed through generations.

    That emotional weight has been put to the test in recent years. In 2024, gold prices in India smashed records, crossing ₹1 lakh per 10 grams for the first time — hitting ₹1,01,350 — amid a mix of global uncertainty, inflation, and currency volatility, and they stayed close to that peak into mid-2025. Yet instead of dampening enthusiasm, demand remained unshaken. This steep rise held true even in 2026, up until the government doubled the customs duty on gold, in an attempt to reduce forex — much of India’s gold is imported. 

     

    Image Credit: Freepik

     

    In the West, a diamond might say ‘forever’, but in India, gold says ‘for every moment that matters’. It is woven into the rituals that mark life’s milestones: newborns receive tiny bangles, brides in Kerala are layered in kilos of gold, and during Diwali, shopfronts glitter with coins and chains. Across the country, a woman’s jewellery is her streedhan — legally and culturally hers, even after marriage. And for generations, this was the only wealth women legally controlled. Asia now accounts over half of global gold jewelry demand, with India among its biggest drivers.

     

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    Even global luxury brands are reimagining gold through South Asian aesthetics; French maisons have introduced designs echoing filigree, jali work, and vintage coin pendants — proof that the allure travels well.
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    This bond with gold isn’t only symbolic. It’s practical. In rural and semi-urban India, gold loans remain one of the fastest, most trusted ways to raise cash — no paperwork, no questions. A single bangle can cover school fees. A pair of earrings can fund surgery. The Reserve Bank of India notes that gold-backed loans form a significant share of short-term liquidity in the country. Even the smallest piece — a nose pin worn by a domestic worker, a threadbare bangle on a labourer’s wrist — is beauty, dignity and safety net.

    India’s gold story is echoed across Asia. Chinese families gift gold during Lunar New Year as a blessing for prosperity, and Vietnamese weddings often include gold jewelry, symbolizng stability and honour. Across the region, gold isn’t just ornament; it is security, inheritance, and a cultural shorthand for familial continuity. In South India’s temples — from Tirupati to Padmanabhaswamy — tons of donated gold lie in vaults, much of it given not by kings, but by everyday devotees offering a sliver of personal wealth to the divine.

    What’s remarkable is how this attachment to gold has adapted without losing relevance. Today’s brides may not want the heavy, rigid sets of their mothers’ era, but they still want gold — just in forms they can wear beyond the wedding day.

    “I wanted something I could wear again, not just lock away,” says Zenia, 28, who paired her grandmother’s ornate gold choker with a hand-embroidered gara saree at her Parsi wedding. Instagram is now filled with side-by-side photos of brides alongside their grandmothers, the captions celebrating ‘tradition meets modernity’. Jewelers report rising demand for lighter pieces — stackable chains, coins, vintage-inspired designs — that carry heritage without feeling locked in the past. Even global luxury brands are reimagining gold through South Asian aesthetics; French maisons have introduced designs echoing filigree, jali work, and vintage coin pendants — proof that the allure travels well.

     

    Image Credit: Lara Jameson on Pexels

    India’s households hold over 25,000 tonnes of gold — more than what most central banks keep in their vaults — a quiet sign of how deeply people here trust tangible wealth over markets or digital assets. And more than 60% of that demand still comes from weddings.

    That’s the quiet truth beneath the glitter: when families pass down gold, they’re passing down more than wealth. They’re passing down memory, meaning, and a promise that some things — no matter how the world changes — will always hold value.

  • The Serial Connection: Why African Audiences Can’t Get Enough of Indian TV Melodrama

    On weekday evenings in Lagos, Dar es Salaam, and Nairobi, living rooms flicker to life with the faces of Indian television stars. Not Bollywood blockbusters or slick Netflix thrillers, but family sagas, slow-burn betrayals, and long-lost twins reunited after years of presumed death. Shows like Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, Jodha Akbar, and Kumkum Bhagya are being watched and deeply felt across Africa. Dubbing them into Swahili, Hausa, or Amharic makes them legible, but it also makes them intimate. Characters speak in familiar rhythms, kinship terms translate cleanly, and emotional beats land without the friction of subtitles.

    Indian soap operas, with their high-drama arcs and intergenerational moral tensions, have found fertile ground across African markets for over two decades. The connection is as much about language or geography as it is emotion. Where Western programming often values irony, detachment, or realism, Indian serials offer something else entirely. It offers its own kind of sincerity. Grand declarations of love, devotion to family, and a clearly marked moral universe in which tradition wrestles with modernity (and usually wins). It is a recognition of shared social rhythms, an affection for the dramatic, and an understanding of generational duty that travels easily across continents. What once felt like a quiet, enduring exchange is now entering a new phase, defined by scale, localisation, and co-creation.

     

    A still from Iss Pyar Ko Kya Naam Doon or Strange Love

     

    For many African viewers, this familiarity runs deep. Research on audiences in Ghana has found that Indian films and television have remained popular for decades, in part because of their emphasis on family, morality, and emotional intensity, themes that closely align with local storytelling traditions. Scholarly work on media circulation in West Africa similarly notes that Indian film and television cultures have long been embedded in everyday life, from music and performance to communal viewing practices, often reinterpreted through local contexts rather than consumed as foreign imports. This cultural proximity is visible in everyday ways too, with Indian television actors occasionally engaging audiences in local languages like Twi, reflecting how deeply these shows have entered public life.

    For many viewers, these stories feel deeply familiar, with characters often compared to figures within their own extended families, and conflicts echoing everyday domestic life. But how did we get here? The pipeline was first laid by satellite television in the early 2000s, with networks like Zee World and StarTimes curating dubbed Indian serials for African audiences. What began as an experiment became a mainstay. Today, Zee World broadcasts across dozens of African countries, with Indian serials frequently occupying prime-time slots. These syndicated imports have since evolved into a full-scale distribution system, with Indian networks operating across multiple markets and languages, embedding themselves deeply within local viewing ecosystems.

    Indian soap operas’ resonance has quietly built a new kind of cultural alliance. For a country often preoccupied with Western recognition, the impact in Africa offers a different model, one in which India is not a junior partner in a global entertainment order, but a storyteller with its own gravitational pull.

     

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    The pull can be powerful enough to shape life choices. Shiv, who grew up in Tanzania, told us, “My grandmother initially refused to move from India. She didn’t know the language, didn’t think she’d have a community, and just did not want to start over in her retirement.”

    “Then she learned her favourite serials would be on television there. She moved. Those shows became a bridge. They became a way to connect with strangers in grocery store lines and on park benches, a shared script that made a foreign city feel familiar to her.”

    The influence moves through audiences as much as it moves across screens. Across African markets, viewers engage with Indian television in ways that extend beyond viewing, reinterpreting characters, storylines, and cultural cues within local contexts. Online fan communities dissect plotlines, swapping predictions and reactions in real time. In places like Ghana, elements of Indian fashion and ceremony have begun to appear in urban weddings. Historical and academic research in places like Ghana shows that Indian media has long been absorbed into everyday cultural life, particularly through music, performance, and communal viewing practices.

    There are, of course, questions of context. Indian shows are deeply heteronormative, and often reinforce caste and class hierarchies. But in many African markets, these nuances translate differently, or are reframed entirely. What gets transmitted is the emotional architecture of duty, longing, family loyalty, and the weight of history. The viewers tend to adapt these values, not adopt them. So, they localise them and make them their own.

     

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    As streaming platforms take centre stage, the model is evolving. Shows like Anupamaa and Yeh Rishta Kya Kehlata Hai are now available online, extending their reach beyond traditional broadcast. But the shift has also changed its scope from just influence. In some cases, it has begun to move into direct adaptation. Pavitra Rishta, for instance, was set to be reworked with African broadcasters into a locally produced series featuring actors from Kenya, Ghana, and Nigeria, retaining its core storyline while translating it into new cultural contexts. Across the industry, this signals a shift from export to collaboration, where storytelling formats are no longer simply transmitted, but rebuilt.

    The world we live in is often fixated on the Emmys, Oscars, and Rotten Tomatoes scores. But the India–Africa soap opera connection is a reminder that influence does not always wear prestige. What we are seeing is a reinvention across markets. Sometimes it wears sindoor, cries in temple courtyards, and cuts to commercials just as the truth is about to be revealed. It is messy, emotional, and deeply effective. But more importantly, it shapes global taste, one slow zoom at a time.

  • The Rise of the Bandra Girl

    She’s walking her dog in Dior slides. Sipping iced matcha through a glass straw. She has Pilates at 7am and still makes it to Soho House by sunset. She doesn’t need a job. Her job is being herself, or at least a version of herself that fits neatly inside Instagram’s soft-focus universe. Or at least that’s what the memes suggest.

    In Mumbai, she’s the Bandra Girl. In New York, she’s the Brooklyn Girl. On the internet, she’s everywhere.

    The Bandra Girl began as a joke, a shorthand for a very specific kind of girl with a very specific kind of privilege in one of Mumbai’s most gentrifying neighbourhoods. But like most jokes the internet finds useful, she didn’t stay contained. She spread. The caricature softened, flattened, and then hardened into something else entirely.

    But that shift matters more than one thinks. Because the Bandra Girl is no longer just someone we laugh at. She’s someone we recognize, replicate, and sometimes even aspire to. A soft-lit fantasy of privileged urban womanhood that feels effortless and endlessly watchable.

     

     

    Why does she go viral? Why do we keep reproducing her in memes, reels, Pinterest boards, and lifestyle content? Why is there a Bandra Girl and a South Delhi Girl and a Brooklyn Girl, but no Nalasopara Girl, no Vikhroli Girl, no Bronx Girl?

    The answer has less to do with humour and more to do with how platforms reward familiarity.

    Algorithms are built to amplify what is instantly legible and widely palatable. The Bandra Girl fits that slot perfectly. She’s stylish but safe. Privileged but non-threatening. Posh, yet familiar enough to feel attainable. 

    Repetition does the rest. The more recognizable the archetype becomes, the more the algorithm rewards it. Familiarity turns into circulation, and circulation into desirability. Over time, what began as a stereotype acquires cultural authority.

     

    “
    That’s what makes the Bandra Girl more than a punchline. She isn’t a real person, and she isn’t a villain. She’s a composite, shaped by repetition and reward.
    ”

     

    But like most internet aesthetics, this one is deeply rooted in classism.

    She can be a meme because she’s also a moodboard. Her minimalism, her matcha, her quiet (or very loud) luxury are all underwritten by money. The internet knows how to romanticize her because it already believes her life is worth romanticizing.

    You don’t see memes about the Nalasopara Girl because the internet doesn’t know how to aestheticize working-class femininity. It doesn’t know how to filter it into something aspirational. This is why the Bronx Girl aesthetic on TikTok is overtaken by the Brooklyn Girl look, even though both are real places, full of real women. One fits neatly into vintage lenses, curated mess, and algorithmic warmth. The other doesn’t fit that fantasy.

    Every global city produces its own version. The Shoreditch Girl. The Marais Girl. The South Delhi Girl. These figures aren’t real women so much as cultural shorthand. They help platforms learn what ‘cool’ looks like, what desire looks like, what a commodified version of womanhood should resemble.

    And when culture is built through curation, only certain lives survive the edit. The kind that looks good in natural light. The kind that can be parodied without discomfort. The kind that doesn’t ask for too much space.

     

    Image Credit: marrosassv on Instagram

     

    That’s what makes the Bandra Girl more than a punchline. She isn’t a real person, and she isn’t a villain. She’s a composite, shaped by repetition and reward.

    What began as a joke has acquired authority. Not because it’s the most accurate representation of urban life, but because it’s the easiest one for the internet to recognize, amplify, and sell.

    The Bandra Girl doesn’t reflect who we are. She reflects what platforms know how to see, what advertisers know how to package, and what culture has learned to reward.

    Everything else remains present.

    It just doesn’t make the edit.

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