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  • Mumbai’s Vanishing Hand-Painted Signs

    Long before MF Husain became a world-renowned artist, he hand painted Bollywood billboards, store banners and signs in what was then-Bombay. The influence of these street assignments are visible in his paintings too. The bold colors and brush strokes, black outlines and alphabets can be seen in most of his work, including his painting of Mahabharata, Ramayana or British Raj history. He often integrated handwritten scripts, Devanagari characters and Urdu calligraphy directly into the imagery.

    These hand-written signboards with different fonts could be seen across Mumbai’s facades. There were businesses across many neighborhoods that were dedicated only to creating such signs. They were the OG font designers and painters rolled into one. “They would create fonts depending on the brand, its positioning and something that would look nice and coherent with the signs next to it,” says type designer Tanya George. These artists created open-to-sky font galleries at every market.

    Over time, with the advent of quicker digital printing, these businesses dwindled. The art perished and so did the artists. Markets lost their creativity and soul. Everything looked flat and uninteresting.

     

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    The turn came in the early-to-mid 1990s, when digital printing — cheap, durable vinyl banners run off a machine — arrived in Indian cities. What once took a painter days of mixing enamel, sketching guidelines and filling in letterforms by hand could now be printed in hours, at a fraction of the cost. For sign-painters, this wasn’t a gradual fade so much as a rout.

    In Delhi, veteran sign painter Kafeel Ansari (the artist who created the official artwork for Fred again..‘s debut India tour) has described how the arrival of modern signage brought on something close to an existential crisis for artists like him, who feared the trade itself wouldn’t survive the shift. Many didn’t survive it: painters retrained as flex operators, moved into other trades, or simply stopped getting work as shopkeepers found it cheaper and faster to order a printed banner than commission a hand-painted one.

     

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    Over time, with the advent of quicker digital printing, these businesses dwindled. The art perished and so did the artists. Markets lost their creativity and soul. Everything looked flat and uninteresting.
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    But as analog is becoming cool again, some brands are opting for hand-painted signboards. The Bombay Sweet Shop in Byculla is one such. The big advantage is that the lettering in the Devnagiri script isn’t compromised. George explains: “Many city signages rely on older digital fonts that fail to support modern technical advancements.” They can’t properly render the connecting shirorekha or correctly place the matras.” Hand-painted is the best for that. It takes longer, but gets the job done,” adds George. Plus, just like any art or design, handmade typography has so much more character, depth, soul and joy to it. It’s also a great way to support and become patrons of an art or an artist.

    Ahead of his highly anticipated debut tour in India recently, London-based music composer Fred again, commissioned Kafeel Ahmed Ansari, a 70-year-old master sign painter based near Jama Masjid in Old Delhi, to create the official tour artwork.

    There are also brands that have preserved their painted signboards through decades. Bandra’s men’s tailor S.S Dias & Co., established in 1930, has been taking care of its wooden, hand-created signboard for several years now. The stretch alongside Colaba market still has some of these hand-painted gems.

     

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    Mumbai’s story isn’t unique — it’s part of a pattern playing out on hand-painted streets worldwide, each hit by the same arithmetic of cheaper, faster printing. In Pakistan, the ornately painted trucks that once served as rolling billboards are seeing less work, as political campaigns increasingly favor mass-produced posters over the hand-painted trucks that used to carry their messages. In Mexico City, hand-painted rótulos — shop signage built on guarded techniques passed master-to-apprentice through generations, blending muralism, typography, calligraphy and color theory — have faced an even more sudden threat: local authorities in one borough recently ordered thousands of these signs whitewashed over in the name of civic uniformity, sparking public backlash from artists and residents alike.

    The details differ — a Delhi calligrapher, a Rawalpindi truck yard, a Colaba tailor’s shopfront, but the shape of the loss is the same everywhere: a slower, costlier, more unique, more enticing human form of art being edged out by whatever prints fastest.

    The hope is that more brands and people will subscribe to designed, hand-made typography, giving Mumbai a reason to walk and watch, and its artists good livelihoods. Because that, in the end, is what makes Mumbai’s small counter-trend worth watching — not as nostalgia, but as a bet that a city’s streets read better when someone’s hand was actually on them.

  • The Rights Of Nature

    For centuries, modern law has drawn a firm line between people and nature. Wildness was dangerous, and required taming. As a result, a river could be dammed or diverted. A forest could be handed over for exploitation by companies. A mountain could be mined. Animals are treated almost as property rather than sentient beings. The term ‘natural resource’ reveals our prejudicial perception of nature as something to be ‘used’. Companies, meanwhile, could be incorporated, acquire assets and appear in court as legal persons.

    That line is getting blurred.

    Around the world, an alternative history is getting writ: wild places such as rivers, forests, glaciers and even animals are increasingly being seen as worthy of legal recognition, beyond the pursuits of humanity, a wildness that exists according to its own natural laws beyond our ken.

     

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    In India, for instance, this has led to some amount of legal back and forth.

    In March 2017, the High Court of Uttarakhand ruled that the Ganga and Yamuna rivers were in danger of losing their existence, thanks to encroachment and pollution, and were therefore extended “all corresponding rights, duties, and liabilities of a living person”; the Chief Secretary and Advocate General of Uttarakhand were chosen as the rivers’ legal custodians, and granted the standing to act on the rivers’ behalf in any legal proceeding.

    This was later overturned by the Supreme Court of India, who noted that while the protection of the Ganges and Yamuna was crucial, the assignment of personhood to natural entities required legislative, not judicial, authorization.

    Yet the idea that wildness needs protection, has continued. The Madras High Court recently invoked the ‘parens patriae jurisdiction’ and declared ‘Mother Nature’ as a ‘Living Being’ having a legal entity/ legal person / juristic person / juridical person / moral person / artificial person having the status of a legal person, with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person. This conception of nature has swelled to include water bodies, flora and fauna, forests, mountains, glaciers and air.

     

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    For many Indigenous peoples, nature has never been an inert collection of resources waiting to be extracted. Land, water, forests, animals and mountains are relatives, ancestors, beings and participants in community life.
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    These judgments are part of a much larger legal movement. New Zealand’s 2017 Te Awa Tupua Act recognised the Whanganui River as an indivisible, living whole and as a legal person. This was moored to the long struggle of the Whanganui Māori Iwi people, for whom the Whanganui is inseparable from the identity and life of the iwi. The legislation explicitly recognises the relationship between the people and the river, as well as their responsibilities towards it.

    That these judgements came about only when the threats to such natural places became untenable, speaks volumes. Legal systems are only just catching up with the ancient laws of indigenous people, who have lived companionably with the wild for centuries.

    After all, for many Indigenous peoples the land and the skies themselves are ancestors, living participants in community life. In India for instance, numerous Adivasi communities believe forests and other commons are cognate with social, cultural and spiritual relationships. Sacred groves, customary rules, community forest management and rituals are not merely expressions of modern-day environmentalism, but can be far more significant – the forest as family itself.

     

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    Examples of this are scattered across the country. The resilient Adivasi communities of Gadchiroli, Maharashtra, have come together through the unique initiative of the Maha Gramsabha, a cosmos of village assemblies that challenges extractivist development and asserts indigenous rights to forests and territory. Through collective action, they are working to protect the environment, preserve cultural identity, advance gender equality, and confront historical injustices, offering a community-led vision of a more sustainable future.

    This is only a drop in the ocean of a coexistence that unspools back centuries in India. In 1730, India’s Hindu Bishnoi community of Rajasthan, led by a woman named Amrita Devi, stood between a grove of sacred khejri trees and woodcutters looking to scythe them for the king of Jodhpur. They paid with their lives, while the king, repentant, later banned all logging.

    But critics say that modern legal personhood on its own is little more than symbolism. Other difficulties may arise. Who decides the most appropriate ‘guardian’ for the interests of any particular piece of nature? And how does one guarantee that the people appointed to the position do in fact stand for the ecosystems and not for extractive state or corporate power? Legal rights may also compete with human claims: agriculture, housing, infrastructure, livelihoods and development. Granting nature rights does not magically resolve battles over the balance of human and wildlife needs.

     

     

    There is another danger. Legal verbiage can easily divorce traditional knowledge from its cultural context and repackage it as a fashionable innovation. This is why the Whanganui example is so significant. The legislation refers not only to fraying environmental pressure but equally to a recognition of indigenous law and the empowering of indigenous communities.

    Perhaps the most useful contribution is therefore not another category of legal rights. It is a challenge to the imagination. A river need not become human in order to matter. A forest need not acquire a passport or a courtroom representative to have value. What changes when we understand these entities is far more significant: what changes is our own behaviour towards them.

     

  • The Big Screen Is Back

    We’ve heard the doomsayers often enough. Television killed the movie star, they say. Streaming services killed the Hollywood star, they say. And for a while, they were even right. Especially after Covid, the pleasure of thronging to movie theatres to watch the summer’s latest blockbuster, appeared to have drastically abated. Add to that the Hollywood staff strikes, and Netflix’s burgeoning cultural influence and there appeared to be a real crisis on Hollywood’s hands.

    And yet, even before the year dawned, 2026 heaved with possibilities, thanks in part to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey tickets selling out nearly a year before the film’s actual release.

    Predictably enough then, Odyssey was one of the big flicks that steered Hollywood to a resurgent year. But it was only one of a far larger bouquet of successes.

     

     

    Conventional wisdom has dictated that the road to the big bucks was paved with big budgets, established franchises and familiar IPs. That logic flew out of the window in 2026. Alongside Odyssey sat a bunch of unlikely winners –  from Obsession, that cost less than one million dollars to make and brought in more than four times that mount, to Backrooms, that successfully leapt from YouTube to the big screen to Project Hail Mary, a science fiction film. Spider-Man, The Odyssey, Toy Story 5, Michael and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie all grossed more than one billion dollars worldwide. Ticket sales rocketed upwards by 15%, although – tempering the ebullience somewhat – theater attendance still remained more than 20% below pre-pandemic levels, meaning that fewer people bought more expensive tickets.

    In part, this points to the fact that going to the movies has become an event in itself. Netflix, once considered the Hollywood giant slayer, has become an everyday affair, available at home to watch at our convenience. Streaming is now an unremarkable background activity: watching a show at home now competes with cooking, texting, and scrolling, draining it of the specialness it once had.

    But the movie theater is an entirely different beast. It requires preparation, planning, and time spent with friends and family; going to the picture house has become a social and community ritual in the same way it used to be for earlier generations. In a way, it holds a mirror to society’s growing restiveness with online, digital events; everything from mahjong to chess is migrating offline onto brick and mortar spaces.

     

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    And certainly people under 25 appears to be accounting for a large part of the audience, a demographic once dismissed by older generations as being nose-to-phone loners who preferred to watch films on their own at home.
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    And certainly people under 25 appears to be accounting for a large part of the audience, a demographic once dismissed by older generations as being nose-to-phone loners who preferred to watch films on their own at home. Ironically, it was this very phone-fixedness that would drive younger generations to the cinema, thanks to online communities like TikTok and Letterboxd that generated immense buzz.

    But equally, older movie-goers are thronging the halls, to watch movies like Michael, a biopic about the musician Michael Jackson that has grossed more than any biopic ever made. And films such as The Devil Wears Prada 2 drew both legacy watchers and younger, newer film-goers. Overall admissions in cinema grew across all key demographics, including younger audiences, families and culturally diverse segments. In early April, a study found that Gen Z and Millennials were among the most active moviegoers, with 92% of those surveyed saying they prefer going with others.

    None of this takes away from the existential crises that have been threatening to suffocate the industry — shrinking film budgets, say, and the very real danger of filmmakers’ decreasing faith in the medium’s viability in an era of artificial intelligence. But 2026 has proved that Hollywood is not doomed. Does it signal a lasting change or is it merely another brief respite? That’s unclear. But it does reveal that the doomsday story can be set aside for another day.

  • Rewiring The Sitar

    Not long ago, the sitar sat in a corner — heard mostly at family gatherings, spiritual retreats, or the rare recital on YouTube. It was revered, yes, but it was also remote. The kind of sound young people respected from afar while queuing up their next favourite lo-fi beat drop. But a change is underway.

    Across our Instagram reels feeds, Spotify playlists, and late-night jam sessions, Indian classical music — especially instrumental traditions like the sitar and sarod — is quietly slipping back into the mainstream. Only this time, it’s wearing sneakers and vintage tees, carried by a generation that’s less interested in preserving the past than in remixing it.

    At the center of this shift is a cohort of artists like Rishab Sharma, whose sitar-led reinterpretations of Bollywood songs and Western melodies have found surprising traction online. But Sharma is not alone. From Coke Studio India’s reimagined ragas to Gen Z creators blending classical raags with hip-hop, there’s a quiet cultural return happening — not to tradition as it was, but to tradition as it could be.

     

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    Anoushka Shankar, the most Grammy-nominated Indian woman globally, has spent her life trying to free the sitar from purist expectations, while the instrument has, in turn, carried the rhythm of her own eventful life with a quiet, determined vulnerability.

    Her latest collaboration, for example, is with Gorillaz, whose ninth album, The Mountain, features her alongside Asha Bhosle, Amaan and Ayaan Ali Bangash, and Asha Puthli. None of this detracts from the purity of the sitar.

    A Generation Looking Back to Look Forward

    Gen Z — often flattened into a monolith of short attention spans and TikTok/Instagram trends — is, paradoxically, turning to older, slower forms of expression. There’s a fascination with the analogue, the handmade, and the authentic. In a world that feels algorithmically curated and culturally compressed, Indian classical music offers something elusive: depth.

    But this isn’t your grandmother’s Bhairavi.

     

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    For Swayam Siddha Priyadarshi, a fashion-forward Bhubaneswar-born sitarist, it means blending stringent classical training with a modern stage and social media presence — which often includes his floofy cat, Poki.
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    Rather than treating classical forms as untouchable or sacred, many young listeners are pulling them into new contexts — combining sitars with synths, using tabla loops in electronic tracks, or creating Instagram reels that break down raags in casual, demystified language. They’re not gatekeeping tradition; they’re decoding it.

    And crucially, they’re asking: what does this music mean to me?

    For Swayam Siddha Priyadarshi, a fashion-forward Bhubaneswar-born sitarist, it means blending stringent classical training with a modern stage and social media presence — which often includes his floofy cat, Poki. He’s toured India, performing to sold-out crowds while also collaborating with brands like Gucci and Crocs. Strumming his sitar strings to a Harry Potter or Friends cover is as seamless as performing to a Raag Lalit.

    And for Sharma, who in 2022 became the first sitar soloist to play at the White House, his music draws from old traditions like Raga Chikitsa, or ‘Raga therapy’, an ancient practice using music to heal physical and mental ailments. Plunged into depression after his grandfather’s death, he turned to the sitar as part of his own healing — going live on Instagram and Clubhouse to play and talk through loss, imagining his grandfather still listening in. These sessions grew into a shared virtual room for grief, which he named Sitar For Mental Health (SFMH), using the instrument as his voice for the conversation.

    Decolonizing the Aesthetic

    For years, the global image of the sitar was largely shaped by a Western gaze — from Ravi Shankar at Woodstock to its psychedelic associations with The Beatles. While these moments undeniably expanded its reach, they also froze it in a frame. The sitar came to be seen as exotic, mystical, and otherworldly.

    But today’s revival feels different.

    Today it is not about exporting Indianness to a curious West, but a way to reclaim it, remix it, and root it in contemporary selfhood. When Sharma plays a Lata Mangeshkar melody on the sitar, or when a young musician sets Raag Yaman against a trap beat, they’re collapsing boundaries — not between East and West, but between what’s considered ‘high’ art and what’s emotionally resonant.

    This isn’t fusion for fusion’s sake. It’s a form of cultural authorship.

     

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    One reason classical music has historically struggled with young audiences is access — not just in terms of affordability, but cultural proximity. It’s been framed as elite, rigorous, and heavily coded. You needed to know the rules to enjoy it — or at least pretend to.

    Younger generations are uninterested in playing by those rules.

    Instead, they’re finding entry points that feel personal: short videos that explain taals in meme-speak, jam sessions that foreground joy over purity, and creators who talk openly about learning raags on the internet rather than through lineage. There’s still respect for tradition — but not at the cost of accessibility.

    It’s this shift — from performance to participation — that’s keeping the form fresh.

     

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    For Sharma, who in 2022 became the first sitar soloist to play at the White House, his music draws from old traditions like Raga Chikitsa, or 'Raga therapy', an ancient practice using music to heal physical and mental ailments.
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    What we’re seeing now is less a comeback than a recontextualization. A generation raised on hyperpop and streaming fatigue is choosing to slow down. To listen. To reorient their ears — and their identities — around something deeper than the beat drop.

    And in that act of listening, they’re also reinventing. Maybe that’s what makes this moment so compelling: it’s not about cultural preservation as duty, but as pleasure. A rediscovery of the sitar not because it’s ‘ours’, but because it sounds damn good after a long day of noise.

    From Reverence to Relevance

    Indian classical music has always been about nuance, improvisation, mood. It knows how to sit with discomfort, how to build toward ecstasy. In many ways, it’s the perfect soundscape for a generation navigating chaos, climate dread, and existential swirl.

    And so, the question is no longer whether young Indians will care about classical music. They already do.

    The real question is whether the institutions — the gharanas, the academies, the cultural bodies — will meet them where they are. Or whether, like Sharma and so many others, they’ll have to carve a new raag out of old strings.

  • Fashion Forward

    At Paris Couture Week in 2026, fashion designer Rahul Mishra used silk, dabka, zardosi, crystals and bugle beads to create fabrics that appeared like stone. With his collection Devi: The Eternal Muse, he brought ancient Indian temple sculptures to the ramp in Milan and created a memorable global fashion moment. He changed the way the world looks at Indian fashion.

    International labels have often used Indian embroidery, block printing and other textiles and crafts as embellishment. But Mishra’s trompe-l’œil couture made Indian craftsmanship and artisanship showstoppers of his collection of sharp, edgy, sculptural dresses and corseted pieces.

    Indian fashion has forever been part of larger fashion collections of international designers. These designers have rarely, if ever, attributed their inspirations to the country of origin. Ajrakh block prints, Zardosi and Aari embroidery, the Kashmiri Kalka known in the West as paisley, have been extensively used on the global stage but seldom attributed to the country of their origin.

     

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    That’s changed: the internet and social media scrutinize and recognize everything now. If it’s Indian in origin, it’s immediately called out, and the brand is forced to give its makers the recognition. Prada had to acknowledge that its sandals that cost over US $900, are the original creation of Kolhapuri craftsmen or that Madras checks have been created in India forever (the hint is in the name!).

    Such moments have been putting Indian fashion on the global map. The world now knows that India has always been a fashion-forward country. So it watches with curiosity when our designers amp these traditional arts to a whole new level.

    And in all fairness to them, they have always done that. All big Indian labels, including Tarun Tahiliani to Sabyasachi Mukherji and Rahul Mishra have employed chikankari, aari, gotapatti and other Indian traditional crafts and textiles in their collections.

    The game changer has been the corporate collaboration and backing of independent designers. Tahiliani presented a show in Milan way back in 2003. “We were inundated with orders from around the world, which we just couldn’t fulfil as we had not worked out that aspect of the business yet,” he says. But with Reliance, the Birlas and the Mahindras now in the mix, supporting the logistics, Indian fashion designers finally have the money and the know-how to scale up, and to open stores in London, New York, Dubai, Sydney and other international cities.

     

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    All big Indian labels, including Tarun Tahiliani to Sabyasachi Mukherji and Rahul Mishra have employed chikankari, aari, gotapatti and other Indian traditional crafts and textiles in their collections.
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    Equally importantly, designers are being able to experiment. Even though wedding couture still leads Indian fashion’s overseas market, it’s no longer recognized as just that. Gaurav Gupta, Vaishali S, Kanika Goyal, Amit Aggarwal are creating some cutting-edge designs that are flying off the racks alongside Gucci, Versace and Hermes.

    Mukherjee recently announced a historic collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The long-term project will have the designer reinterpreting the museum’s 5,000-year-old archive of global art into contemporary luxury pieces. The inaugural chapter, a high jewellery collection inspired by the art of the Byzantine Empire is set to debut during New York Fashion Week on September 15.

    There was a time when international celebrities flaunted Indian designs on red carpets. That was the validation the home-grown fashion aspired for, even if they, sometimes, paid the celebrities to wear their clothes. Cut to today, one of the best museums in the world has called upon an Indian talent to work with it. India is being recognized as a design powerhouse, its creators are getting their due on the global stage. This is just the beginning. As the world embraces maximalism, India, its forever champion is likely to ace the style game, of course with sophisticated, new and innovative design.

  • Is Substack The New Tumblr?

    It used to be Tumblr. Now, it’s Substack.

    For a generation of writers, artists, and internet thinkers, newsletters have become less about career growth and more about emotional presence. Once seen as a platform for serious opinion columns or journalistic dispatches, Substack has slowly shapeshifted into something softer, stranger, and far more personal, a public diary with a subscribe button.

    You can see it in the tone: newsletters that begin with “I’ve been crying all week,” or “Here’s what’s keeping me up lately.” Writers talk about breakups, creative burnout, trans identity, homesickness, and grief — often alongside music recs or meme dumps. One look and it is obvious that this isn’t traditional publishing. But it is something else of equal value. It is a vibe-driven vulnerability, delivered directly to your inbox.

     

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    In a way, this shift was inevitable. Trust in legacy social media has eroded sharply. Social media, once a home for digital intimacy, has become hyper-curated and algorithmically governed. X, owned now by Elon Musk, has pushed out many journalists, writers, and creators. Meta’s algorithmic feeds became less forgiving of organic reach for text-based posts. Meanwhile, TikTok remained mired in regulatory uncertainty across the U.S. and in India. And Tumblr is a ghost town.

    Substack, which launched in 2017 as a simple newsletter tool for independent writers, has since transformed entirely into a hybrid publishing and community platform. Today it hosts everything from personal essays and op-eds to investigative journalism and open discussion threads, magnetizing millennials and older Gen Z who still crave the old internet’s messier honesty.

    What sets it apart, though, is its core philosophy: a direct line from creator to reader, with nothing in between. No algorithm dictating visibility. No ads forced into the feed.

    And like Tumblr, Substack hosts a constellation of niche cultures. From tarot pulls and reading lists to fan fiction revivals and late-night rants, the newsletter form has morphed into an emotional archive. Some are weekly letters to strangers. Others are love notes to a former self. Few are about clicks or virality. They’re all about connection.

     

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    Unlike Tumblr though, Substack also hosts meetups. They’re quiet, low-key, almost secret affairs without the flash and flare of celebrity parties, held in intimate spaces such as bookshops and even private homes.
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    Writers are also reclaiming pace. Unlike TikTok or Threads, Substack rewards slowness. There’s no trending tab, no instant feedback loop. You send, and maybe someone reads. Maybe they write back. Maybe they don’t. The rhythm is more analog than digital.

    It’s also, crucially, a quieter space for writers of color, queer writers, and diaspora voices, those often flattened by platform incentives or forced to perform identity in extractive ways. On Substack, they can just… be. Not everything has to be a take. Some things can just be felt.

    Unlike Tumblr though, Substack also hosts meetups. They’re quiet, low-key, almost secret affairs without the flash and flare of celebrity parties, held in intimate spaces such as bookshops and even private homes. In 2025, Substack got together Nick Hornby, Hanif Kureishi, India Knight, Annie Macmanus, Dan Jones, Pandora Sykes, and Jameela Jamil in London — all of whom were given a loose theme, ‘togetherness’, to interpret as they wished.

    This was an opportunity to bring writers and readers together, one of the most special relationships that exists — and one that Substack depends on for its very survival.

     

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    This doesn’t mean Substack is perfect. Its monetization model creates new kinds of pressure: who gets paid, who stays free, who gets seen. In India, for instance, monetization complexities take on an extra layer; Substack runs on Stripe and Stripe doesn’t accept Indian accounts, except by invitation only.

    And the platform itself has been slow to reckon with its early alignment with controversial figures and libertarian free speech politics. But as a tool, it’s being reimagined from the ground up, not just as a media product, but as a cultural object as well.

    Because at its best, Substack doesn’t feel like a newsletter. It feels like a friend checking in. Like someone handing you a note in the middle of a noisy room. It may not be the internet we started with. But for those trying to write their way through this version of it, it’s something close.

  • Beyond The Bindi: Rewriting The South Asian Story On American TV

    When a girl from Canada with Eelam-Tamil roots — Maitreyi Ramakrishnan playing the role of Devi Vishwakumar — became the face of a new Netflix teen-drama series in 2020, things were about to change for the way the world viewed a South Asian person of color. They were suddenly imperfect, boisterous, and even horny. 

    The Western idea of what an Indian film looks like, has of course largely to do with glamorous song-and-dance sequences as seen in Sooraj Barjatya and Karan Johar films with star-studded ensemble casts. It’s not that Indian cinema didn’t stand for realism — it did, through the makers of parallel cinema, but that’s a story for another day. The glitzy sherwanis, the bejewelled lehengas and bindis — these are some of the things that travelled to the West, and then were reflected back to us as representation of brown people in American popular culture.

    On the other hand, there was the minority-modelesque representation that represented the South Asian populace; those who ran convenience stores, drove taxis, and for the most part, were considered to be hard-working. 

     

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    For decades, South Asian characters in American entertainment appeared as doctors, engineers, cab drivers, shopkeepers, terrorists, gurus or awkward immigrants. Their accents preceded their personalities. Perhaps the most notorious and earliest example was that of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon in The Simpsons, the Indian convenience-store owner voiced for many years by Hank Azaria. Apu possessed some admirable qualities — he was intelligent, hardworking and devoted to his family. However, his elongated surname, occupation and accent became an exaggerated representation of the Indian identity. For a generation of South Asian American children, he was among the very few Indian characters visible on mainstream television. Comedian Hari Kondabolu’s documentary The Problem with Apu demonstrated how the character’s voice and catchphrases migrated from television into school corridors, where they became tools of racial mockery. The actor Kal Penn quipped in an interview that he hates Apu, and as a result didn’t like The Simpsons. 

    Let’s move on to The Big Bang Theory. The reverie begins with Raj Koothrappali staring at Bernadette, his best friend’s girlfriend. Suddenly, the show makes room for a spectacular Bollywood-style dream sequence. Raj and Bernadette bob their heads back and forth and side to side, surrounded by dancers, singing a love song which includes declarations such as “you are my heart, my universe.” There’s even an analogy that compares romantic desire and a trumpeting wild elephant! It is colourful, theatrical and undeniably funny. Yet the sequence also encapsulates how American popular culture frequently imagined India: as a place of elephants, ornamentation, musical extravagance and unrestrained melodrama.

     

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    Yoga, meditation, henna, bindis, gods, elephants and vaguely 'Eastern' music could all be detached from their histories and rearranged into an instantly recognizable aesthetic.
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    Raj, played by British-Indian actor Kunal Nayyar, was one of the most visible Indian characters on American television during the late 2000s and 2010s. An astrophysicist at Caltech, he initially appeared to break older moulds. He was neither a taxi driver nor a convenience-store owner, but a highly educated scientist. Nevertheless, much of his comedy was built around another familiar construction of the Indian man: intelligent and professionally accomplished, yet socially awkward, emasculated and undesirable. During the early seasons, Raj experienced selective mutism that left him unable to speak to women unless he had consumed alcohol. His friendships with women were often treated as evidence of his femininity.

    Raj’s conversations with his strict parents over video calls created another easily recognizable image: the South Asian adult with no autonomy, controlled by their overbearing family. His parents monitored his finances and interfered in his search for a wife, even arranging potential matches for him. These situations reflected realities that some viewers from India could recognize, including close intergenerational relationships and parental involvement in marriage. Yet when these features were combined with his sexual awkwardness and his gullible nature, Raj appeared less like an individual, and more like a collection of attributes America had already learned to associate with Indian immigrants.

    If we were to pay attention to the comedian Zarna Garg’s material for her stand-up shows, she would likely bear many of the regressive traits associated with Raj’s parents, including includes her disdain towards her children pursuing creative avenues or dating without their parents’ permission. 

     

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    Even supposedly affectionate representations frequently relied on Orientalism. India could be admired, but as an exotic storehouse of spirituality, colour and sensuality. Yoga, meditation, henna, bindis, gods, elephants and vaguely ‘Eastern’ music could all be detached from their histories and rearranged into an instantly recognizable aesthetic. In Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, the musical number “I’m So Good at Yoga” features Valencia boasting about her physical and spiritual superiority while performing against an extravagantly “Indian” backdrop. The song is satirical: it mocks vanity, cultural consumption, and the Western transformation of yoga into a competitive lifestyle product. But the comedy still continues to draw upon the audience recognizing a bundle of Orientalist tropes. 

    There were, however, important attempts to introduce specificity into mainstream television. In 2006, Mindy Kaling wrote “Diwali,” an episode of The Office in which Kelly Kapoor invites her colleagues to a community celebration. The episode brought an Indian festival into an enormously popular American sitcom without making the occasion completely solemn or instructional. Michael Scott predictably misunderstands the celebration, comparing it to an “Indian Halloween” and performing an embarrassing song about Diwali. His ignorance, rather than the festival itself, becomes a joke. “Diwali” was significant precisely because it situated Indian culture within ordinary American life, and is now a state holiday in some states! The celebration takes place in a school gymnasium, populated by families who eat, gossip, dance, and attempt to arrange their children’s romantic futures. Kelly is neither a cultural ambassador nor an idealized South Asian daughter. She is shallow, dramatic, fashion-conscious and deeply entangled in a dysfunctional relationship with Ryan. White characters had long enjoyed permission to be foolish, selfish or strange without the burden of representing their entire race. Kelly’s presence suggested that a South Asian character might eventually receive the same freedom. The gradual expansion of South Asian creative power behind the camera has therefore mattered as much as visibility on screen. 

     

     

    Kaling’s later series The Mindy Project placed a South Asian American woman at the centre of a romantic comedy. Mindy Lahiri was professionally successful, romantically ambitious, selfish, funny and desirable. She did not exist to explain India to white audiences. Likewise, Aziz Ansari’s Master of None explored family, immigration and intergenerational differences through characters whose parents had histories and interior lives of their own. Kal Penn moved between broad comedy in Harold & Kumar and the more serious immigrant-family drama of The Namesake. These works widened the range of possibilities.

    More recent productions have gone further. Never Have I Ever places Devi Vishwakumar, an Indian American teenager, at the center of a coming-of-age story about grief, desire, friendship, family and ambition. It has also made Maitreyi Ramakrishnan a very recognizable face in American popular culture. Her character, Devi, makes terrible decisions. She is angry, sexually curious, competitive and sometimes profoundly unlikeable. But these qualities are evidence of narrative equality: she is permitted the complexity routinely granted to white teenage protagonists. The series also delves into her mother’s relationship with India and her cousin Kamala’s negotiations with family expectations. 

    In Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan, played by Iman Vellani is Pakistani American, Muslim and a superhero. Her cultural identity shapes the story, but she’s not there for the sake of diversity alone. The series incorporates Urdu, family humour, mosque life, Pakistani popular music and the historical trauma of the 1947 Partition. 

    Shows such as Bridgerton have offered another kind of intervention by positioning South Asian women as romantic heroines within genres that historically excluded them. Simone Ashley’s Kate Sharma is not merely present in the background of Regency society. She is desired, pursued and is the cynosure of all eyes within the ostentatious backdrop that is so characteristic of Bridgerton’s visual world. Such casting challenges some of the most lingering tropes associated with characters like Raj or Apu; the assumption that South Asians may be intellectually capable or comically viable, but are not capable of embodying glamour, sexuality or romantic longing.

    Progress, however, should not be mistaken for an ideal scenario. A brown character should be able to fall in love, remain single, behave selfishly, make mistakes, turn into a hero who saves the day or just disappear, if they wished to. Perhaps this enhancement in the representation of South Asians in popular culture, is closely tied to the rise of political leaders who also are flagbearers of South Asian representation — when we look at the likes of Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy and the current mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani! Representation reaches a certain level of completion when South Asians are no longer required to appear in stereotyped roles with strong accents while performing spiritual wisdom or achieving professional excellence. They can simply appear as themselves. 

  • India’s Intimate Nightlife

    For the longest time, India’s nightlife was all about scale. Think sprawling beach raves in Goa, packed dance floors in Mumbai, and clubs where the bass dropped harder than the covers at closing time. The bigger, the better. And while those spaces remain, lately, something quieter, more private, more personalized and possibly more lasting, has been taking hold. Across metros, holiday towns, and even smaller cities, a different kind of social space is rising.

    It’s a shift that mirrors broader changes in how Indians are choosing to spend their evenings. Baithaks, jazz nights in someone’s living room, tucked-away bars with no signage — these aren’t exceptions anymore. They’re the new standard for those seeking connection over chaos, curation over crowd.

    The Baithak Reboot

    Once a word for informal gatherings in Indian homes, baithaks have taken on new life. Today’s versions might look like a small gig in a garden café, a supper club in a warehouse, or a Sunday poetry reading with chai, or even, in some rare delightful cases, traditional baithaks. These aren’t events that thrive on mood. The lights are soft, the music thoughtfully picked, the conversations unhurried.

    And what makes them feel so fresh is, ironically, how old the instinct is. India has always had a culture of intimate, cultural gathering — of mehfils and jalsas and evenings that unfold slowly. We’re just finding new ways to do it again.

     

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    In Johri Bazaar in Jaipur, for instance, the four-generation Seth family recently opened their 289-year-old haveli to a small gathering that traded music for family history. Meanwhile, Baithaki Jaipur defines itself as a living library that treats each guest of honour as a kind of story-filled book, and invites approximately fifteen guests to experience each baithak.

    In Bengaluru, Marham, a poetry-and-music collective offers intimate ticketed events that feature poetry, Sufi storytelling and personal narratives, all twined into one. G5A in Mumbai, a contemporary culture center, hosts live music gigs, poetry recitals, plays and readings, all in a tiny, beautiful space. And across India, vinyl bars such as Mumbai’s Baroke have sprouted, bringing people together for an intentional, shared retro experience.

    The Intimate Dinner

    This yearning for intimacy has spilled over in the country’s dining spaces. Supper clubs are surging everywhere from Mumbai (The Find Atelier) to Jaipur (The Shared Table Supper Club), set up in homes and small, private spaces open to 10-25 people at a time. And tiny restaurants with 8 to 20 seats are creating a new kind of dining experience, where the chef, food and story take centre stage. From Bengaluru’s Guerilla Diner and Naru to Mumbai’s Papa’s and Goa’s A Table in the Hills, diners are chasing limited seats and highly focused menus.

    Why Now?

    The pandemic did a hard reset on what many of us seek from social life. Safety became non-negotiable, sure, but so did intention. Many of us came out of lockdowns with a craving for spaces that feel personal — and quieter.

    Add to that a generational pivot. For many millennials and Gen Zers, wellness isn’t limited to fitness and food anymore. It’s about mental space, emotional closeness, and slower rhythms. The classic “night out” just doesn’t hit the same anymore.

    And then there’s social media. Ironically, the more performative it gets, the more people seek what feels real — that one perfect candlelit corner, the acoustic set no one else heard, the off-the-grid party that wasn’t broadcast to death.

     

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    There’s also a shift in how we define social status. It’s more about being part of something that feels special now. Maybe even secret. The new cachet is belonging: to a circle, a vibe, a space that knows your name and your drink order. Artists are feeling it too. DJs, musicians, even chefs say they get more out of smaller rooms, everything from a deeper connection to a freer canvas. The room really listens, and that changes everything.

    For venues and hospitality folks, this vibe shift is a design brief. Instead of fitting in more tables or louder speakers, the focus is on storytelling, setting, and soul. In Goa, for example, that’s translated into villa parties, curated pop-ups, and boutique properties that double as cultural venues. It’s not about packing the house — it’s about filling it with the right kind of energy.

    From the looks of it, this isn’t just a post-COVID phase. It’s part of a larger cultural move toward reclaiming time, space, and connection. But there’s a caveat. Intimacy can sometimes tip into exclusivity. If these spaces are to thrive in the long run, they’ll need to stay open — not just to a niche crowd, but to everyone.

    For now though, the message seems to be clear: India’s social life is slowly trading the neon for the nuanced. And in that shift, it’s building something far more lasting and interesting.

  • Run, Lila Run

    There was a time when running meant one person, one pair of shoes, and one quiet road before sunrise. That version of the sport hasn’t disappeared, but it is no longer the whole story. Across Mumbai, Bengaluru, Delhi and beyond, running has turned into something closer to a movement: part workout, part social calendar, part identity.

    Running clubs in India aren’t actually new. But battered and bruised by the pandemic years, Indians began joining these clubs in droves. What better way to slip into the rhythms of a post-pandemic life than to run down a street with the buzz of a crowd filled with like-minded people, whilst pandering to the demands of fitness?

    The health benefits of running are undeniable. But for most members of run clubs, that is only one part of a far greater appeal. Those of us cocooned within our safe social circles, content to resonate within the sounds of our own echo chambers, grow to let our down our guard, the running catalysing the process of coming together in a shared experience with shared goals. Equally, the clubs function as sanctuaries for lonely people to seek out new friends, and to free all of us from the clutches of doomscrolling, at least for an hour or so.

     

     

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    This isn’t just a vibe; the numbers reflect it. An estimated 1,500 timed races held in 2025, suggest, by extrapolation, that about 2 million people participated in these races. Tied to this, India’s running gear market was valued at roughly 2.4 billion dollars in 2024 and is projected to double by 2033, driven by rising health awareness, urbanization, growing disposable income and a steady increase in marathons and local races. And informal estimates peg the number of run clubs in India at several hundred.

    Bombay Running is a good example of the growth of the run club. Its first run in 2017 drew just four people to Nariman Point. It has since ballooned to sixty participants, and offers personalized coaching, structured training plans and even its own merchandise. In this way, it has made running less intimidating to wary beginners.

    Elsewhere in the city, Striders takes runners from Dadar to Powai, while Adidas Runners runs in Bandra and marine Drive. Pinkathon, co-founded by Milind Soman, attempts to empower female runners. Run India Run operates marathon-training centers. Then there are hyperlocal groups like the Lokhandwala Running Club or the Tilak Nagar Running Club.

    Sometimes, running feels almost besides the point. Bengaluru’s Daud Run Club, for instance, draws people together for a spurt of casual runs combined with DJs that follow the group, coffee raves, post-run pickleball, even picnic runs. Similarly, 56 Run Club is run as an initiative that treats running as a starting point for a broader social life. Not only do the members run on traditional surfaces, they have even reinvented the entire format by leading a huffing-puffing group up flights of stairs in a multi-storeyed building in Bengaluru (followed by a DJ set, of course). Pune’s We Persist is redefining run clubs in the same way, by offering coffee, breakfast, live house music, DJ sets, even pop-ups all in the wake of a weekend run. Bombay Hash, part of the global Hash House Harriers network, pairs short runs with beer afterward.

     

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    Commercial interest has followed the runners. Decathlon, which entered the Indian market in 2009, now supports running and cycling communities out of its stores and partnered with 174 running events across the country in 2025 alone.
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    In fact, the japes and jollity of the social run may run counter to the serious runner’s aspirations. There is an entire Mumbai sub-reddit urging athletes to steer clear of the clubs as they are “just masti, nothing to do with serious running” (as one disgruntled Redditor put it). On the other hand, “I’m an active participant of a run club in Bombay and we meet by 6:45, have a nice warm up/ sprint session followed by the run and finish our runs by 8:15,” says another Redditor in the same forum. Different strokes for different folks.

    Where people go, commerce follows, and the run club is no exception; in fact, many partner with brands to offer running merchandise. Decathlon has partnered with 174 running events across the country in 2025 alone. Adidas hosts running groups in Bandra and Marine Drive, Nike has organized women-focused evening runs in Mumbai, and even Bumble has teamed up with Puma to turn group runs into a dating format. For these companies, sponsoring a run club offers something more durable than a one-off ad campaign: a way to become part of people’s weekly routines.

     

     

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    Platforms like the Strava app, Nike Run Club and Adidas Running have all turned individual runs into shareable data: a simple swipe of the phone immediately reveals distance, pace, elevation and consistency. Posting a 5K to Instagram or X has become its own small ritual, generating encouragement and a sense of accountability that keeps people coming back.

    The next phase of India’s run club movement is likely to be less about growing in size and more about growing in depth, building hyperlocal ecosystems where relationships are sustained rather than one-off. That could mean specialized gear designed for Indian climates, neighborhood-level funding, or infrastructure like hydration stations and rest stops that treat run clubs as permanent fixtures of city life rather than a passing trend. Whatever form it takes, the direction is clear: running in India is no longer just about the miles. It’s about who you run them with.

  • Why Bengaluru Blooms

    Every March, your feed turns pink. Streets carpeted in petals, trees bursting into colour — like someone dropped springtime straight into Bengaluru. It’s easy to think of cherry blossoms in Japan, but this isn’t Tokyo. This is Indiranagar. Or Jayanagar. Or some unassuming street corner where a Tabebuia tree just decided to show off.

    So why does Bengaluru bloom like this?

    Turns out, it’s not just luck. The city’s reputation as the Garden City isn’t just about a few parks — it’s baked into its very design.

    As the city expanded, successive rulers and administrations continued adding to this landscape. What looks today like a naturally leafy city was partly the result of generations of deliberate planning: tanks, gardens, avenues, orchards and shaded public spaces were built into Bengaluru’s growth. The city’s famous green character was cultivated long before it became a technology capital.

     

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    One of the most important early examples was Lalbagh, which harks back to the time of Haidar Ali band Tipu Sultan. Ali grew the garden in the 18th century, and Tipu Sultan expanded it, turning it into a place not simply for pleasure but for horticultural experimentation. Two mango trees still remain of those times, believed to be planted by Tipu Sultan in the 1770s. Several years later came Cubbon Park, born in 1870 in colonial Bangalore by a British commissioner of that name; it initially covered around 100 acres before pushing even further into the built city.

    Bengaluru is equally indebted to Krishna Raja Wodeyar IV, whose long reign in the early 20th century saw the birth of a further wave of parks, gardens and lakes across the city. Cubbon Park itself was formally renamed for the Wodeyar family (even though it is still colloquially known as Cubbon Park today).

    In the early 1900s, a German horticulturist named Gustav Hermann Krumbiegel — the man behind much of Lalbagh — introduced something called ‘serial blooming’. He planted flowering trees with different bloom cycles so that something would always be in flower. That’s why just as the pink Tabebuias start to fade, the purples of Jacaranda take over. Then come the flaming reds of Gulmohar in summer. It’s a quiet relay race of colour.

    Add to that Bengaluru’s mild weather, decent rainfall, and reasonably fertile soil — perfect conditions for trees to thrive. Colonial-era city planners, with their love of ornamental landscaping, brought in exotic species that adapted surprisingly well here. Over time, they became part of the city’s personality.

     

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    The city's reputation as the Garden City isn't just about a few parks — it's baked into its very design.
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    There is another reason the trees feel so deeply woven into the fabric of the city: rather than fencing them into gardens, Bengaluru’s early planners built tree-limned streets and shaded homes and institutions, softening (and cooling) a dense, urban space. The gardens and lakes, once essential infrastructure that undergirded the city, grew into its visual identity as well.

    But it’s not just about the past. Residents today still fight to keep the city green. From neighbourhood tree planting drives to citizen-led protests against deforestation, there’s a quiet but steady push to protect what’s left. And maybe part of why people care so much is because these trees aren’t just ‘green cover’. They’re memory markers. Anyone who’s lived in Bengaluru long enough has a story set under one of them. 

     

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    And the numbers explain the urgency. An IISc study found that Bengaluru’s green cover has fallen to around 3 percent of the city today, down from roughly 70 percent in 1970. Over the same broad period, the city’s built-up area expanded more than tenfold — from about 8 percent of the land in 1973 to over 93 percent by 2023.

    A galaxy of citizen-led initiatives have risen up in revolt of these numbers. Amongst the foremost is Heritage Beku, campaigning to protect trees, parks and historic landscapes. Its #KillBill campaign opposing proposed changes to Karnataka’s tree-protection legislation gathered more than 50,000 signatures. And the flowering trees themselves have become a form of cultural heritage. Heritage Beku’s own initiative, Hoovu Habba seeks to honor the city’s serial blooming cycles by hosting walks, lectures, readings etc.

    Neralu is a citizen-run tree festival held in Cubbon Park that spearheads tree-mapping drives together with tree walks, talks, art workshops, storytelling and film screenings.

    Bengaluru is abloom with similar initiatives: from Hasiru Usiru, an older environmental collective to Gubbi Labs (organizers of citizen-science tree-mapping and identification workshops) to Namma Bengaluru Foundation’s tree advocacy (in one instance, volunteers surveyed more than a hundred trees along a proposed suburban rail route to identify which could be saved from felling) and Vruksha Foundation and Parisarakagi Navu.

     

     

     

    Not every gathering under Bengaluru’s trees is explicitly about activism. Cubbon Reads, a silent reading community that meets every Saturday morning in Cubbon Park, started with six people in 2022 and has since grown into a large recurring gathering, inspiring similar reading meetups in parks elsewhere.

    The city’s blooms aren’t just pretty. They remind us of another Bengaluru — before the flyovers and the office parks, when the city was slower, sleepier, and maybe even a little bit softer. They carry a kind of nostalgia that’s hard to describe but easy to feel.

    And that’s probably why we photograph them so much. Not just because they’re beautiful, but because they feel like something we don’t want to lose. In a city that’s always rushing toward the future, the flowers are a pause button.

    So the next time you see a tree throwing pink across the street, maybe stop and look up. This didn’t happen by accident. Someone planted that, years ago, thinking it might make your day better.