We might be underestimating just how significant it is when schoolchildren across the country start protesting about the lack of basic infrastructure. Their complaints precede politics and focus on things central to their prospects in life. There is nothing abstract about these issues, nor can their contentions be challenged when the visual evidence is overwhelming. What they are seeking is accountability, which in the Indian context is an elusive commodity.

At one level, their demand is basic. People elected to power need to be answerable to those who voted for them. Isn’t that what democracy is supposed to be about?

And yet, in India, accountability is difficult to contrive. Power is answerable only to a higher authority and not to an internal sense of responsibility. Which is why bureaucrats and politicians do not overly concern themselves with answering to the people they are meant to serve, but to their bosses who control their destiny.

Which is why a tyrannical boss who terrorises his subordinates feels no embarrassment in turning into a wriggling quiver of jelly when speaking to his own boss before them. The rules are clear; the contract has no hidden clauses: power needs visible submission. And this form of accountability looks upwards, not downwards.

Since it is possible to win elections through identity politics or large direct transfers of grants and subsidies, the system offers little incentive to become accountable to the people who vote.

This is why, despite all the visible surface change in the country, some foundational realities do not change. Rural schools are abysmal, public health facilities pitiable, new roads get built with a flourish and collapse even more spectacularly. In urban areas, sanitation is poor, flooding common and the air poisonous.

More importantly, the system is self-sealing and immunises itself against change. Attempts at reform end up being co-opted. A brave officer here, an honest politician there gets either subsumed or neutralised.

When the new begins to look too threatening, the past is not afraid to use force. We saw a recent example where a Khap Panchayat decided to confiscate the phones of all the girls in a village and smash them in public. This is blatantly illegal and unconstitutional, but in our social structure there is very little that can be done about it. The girls are meant to be the ‘responsibility’ of the community; it exercises ownership over them in the name of values. They have to submit to their parents, who in turn have to submit to the village elders. External agents like the police come from the same world and accept most of its rules. The possibility of change is foreclosed.

Which is why the current protests by children across the country stand out as being different. So far, we have had the past trying to shape the future and finding that it could not escape itself. Every attempt to change things has ended up being a new version of itself.

This is the future trying to shape its own reality. And here, being children is a huge advantage. They are insiders who as yet do not know better. They cannot easily be accused of being mouthpieces for other people’s agendas, nor of being funded by Soros. They are raising issues that directly concern them and are almost impossible to refute or discredit.

Being insiders matters. External influence in India is neutered or domesticated till it becomes an extension of the past. The young come from within the culture, speak in its idiom and carry with them a hope for the future.

Yet, in spite of being insiders, they still carry a distance, a temporal one. They have not fully absorbed the past; they have not as yet become instruments of it. They are able to see what is wrong without knowing that it has always been this way and that this is how things are meant to be. They are able to view the present more clearly and critique it with greater innocence.

Their power comes from their status as children, something even our current discourse, which finds ways to demonise critique, has not been able to devalue. But what has made them significantly more powerful is the smartphone. With it, they can present unimpeachable evidence. Their faces tell a story that no second-hand report can hope to match. They become incontrovertible witnesses who can ask questions that cut through the barriers constructed against asking questions.

Questions lead to more questions. A video that gets traction encourages children from other regions to tell their own stories of neglect. The state is caught in a bind: if it does not react, the anger grows; if it does act, it proves that such protests are effective and encourages more people to come forward.

When the future demands accountability, it goes beyond political parties. While the current protests seem to be against the party in power, their significance goes deeper. They are taking aim at the current idea of politics itself, one that has created a system immune to the needs of people.

There is reason for hope just as there is reason for cynicism. We are seeing something genuinely new, but Indian society is especially good at making something new an extension of the old.

But never before have the people asking for change been too young to be part of the old arrangement. Perhaps that means something.

Evidence suggests that news channels in India are a declining force. Viewership numbers are down, ad volumes have fallen sharply, financial performance is suffering and we have seen some well-publicised layoffs. This is not surprising for a variety of reasons – in large part the channels themselves are to blame for this given their disdain for journalistic norms and their loose relationship with truth, but it is also true that increasingly, people, particularly the young, prefer to get their news from social media.

But there is one important qualification. While channels are not being viewed in the same numbers, content from the channels gets wide circulation. In the form of clips. Social media is awash with clips from news shows. Clips showing anchors being overdramatic or being stumped by participants, politicians stumbling on camera, and strong rebuttals by spokespersons of different political parties – it is as if the channels have a far more robust afterlife than what transpires in the studio.

What is interesting is that the choice channels make to present their news in a theatrical, over-the-top manner to attract viewers is precisely what makes them work as clips. The same intensity which drew viewer interest becomes a reason for viewer derision. From being objects of authority, the clip converts anchors into objects of ridicule.

The same thing happens with politicians. From being statesmen, they get seen as specimens. Like a mischievous child wriggling to get free of its mother’s arms, the clip wants to break free of shackles imposed by its original structure and delights in its freedom. There is a sense of playfulness about the clip, an unruly sense of glee at being able to invert the parental intention.

In that sense, the clip has become the most important way of consuming news. Not being locked into a specific time band, clips run free, appearing on our feeds as the algorithm sees fit. Clips usually have two elements – the content and the framing. In some videos the image speaks for itself – a politician stumbling, a school that is decrepit, a road that has more potholes than pathway, flooding in large cities and so on. But a lot of clips create meaning through the framing. A politician getting emotional on camera has one intended meaning, but when it is framed by a laugh track or a funny song, the meaning inverts. Here the clip gains a form of autonomy as a vehicle for creating meaning.

The clip is a double agent working against the very material it is born out of. In many cases, meaning migrates from the content to the framing. in the original content, both are supplied by the creator. But a clip discards the original framing and substitutes it with its own. This is what distinguishes it from an excerpt, which strives to maintain the intention of the original. Its original ancestor was the soundbite, which understood the power of compression. But the soundbite was always locked into its context; its role was primarily amplificatory.

There is another element that determines how viral a clip becomes. The context in which it is received and the mood of its audience are what influence its reach and circulation. A clip with compelling content framed well may not circulate that much if the ambient mood of the audience is not receptive. The reason why particular kinds of reels are doing well now has to do with what many people want to hear. A few years ago, the same clip could have vanished without a trace.

Eventually the algorithm promotes what works. And in doing so, it accelerates and deepens the reach. This in turn provides incentive for other creators to make similar content. People with strong feelings who thought they were alone suddenly discover that they are not, and there is a rush of new voices that were hesitant to express themselves.

The power of the clip is its ability to circulate at great speed and expose hypocrisies and failures; its great danger is that it can be used to manipulate, to edit out context in a way that is actively misleading. Its power lies in the fact that it is visual in nature, which carries with it a presumption of truth, but equally it is never the whole truth.

Which means that any form of speech is a potential landmine. Any slip of tongue can be disproportionately damaging. What part of it will be clipped and make the rounds is difficult to tell. The usual caveat to that is that the life of any content today is extremely short and the attention cycle moves on. But this is only partially true, for some classics never go out of circulation. Also, if the combined weight of individual clips is in one direction, then an environment of a certain kind gets built. A mood gains momentum.

We seem to be seeing some evidence that this is happening today. The government’s ability to control the narrative through a docile mainstream media is being subverted, ironically, by using material from the same channels but to deliver the opposite effect. For news channels it is doubly worrying, for their content is being circulated without any commercial advantage in a way that makes them look foolish. And nothing punctures authority more than being made to look ridiculous.

No society approves of abuse. And yet, it exists in every culture. Not only that, society seems to need abuse as an institution, otherwise it wouldn’t be so universal and timeless. Interestingly, there isn’t too much inventiveness when it comes to the people mentioned in these abuses. Mothers, and in India, sisters become the butt of so many of them.

Arguing, as was recently done, that abuse is ‘against culture’ is almost precisely wrong. Abuse arises only from culture. No young person has learnt these words from Instagram. They have picked them up from their parents’ generation, from walking around in the street, from overhearing older people talk. Abuse always originates from within and is, ironically, a map of what a culture holds to be most precious.

And what a culture places at the pinnacle of what it finds worth profaning tells us a story. Mediaeval Christendom’s worst oaths had to do with blasphemy because God sat at the centre of what could not be touched. In India too, we show a great deal of sensitivity to any perceived slur involving God. But the most common abuses across languages, from Hindi to Russian to Arabic to English itself, return repeatedly to the same motif: a slur directed at female relatives, particularly the mother.

There is a reason societies gravitate to this. Every society places some relationships beyond the ambit of desire. Civilisation is built on the idea of certain things being taboo. And an accusation involving a sexual relationship between forbidden figures like the mother and sister is not just an insult; it is a violation that is foundational. It is what leads society to locate desire outwards rather than inwards and enables the formation of alliances, obligation and society itself. This is why cultures that might be very different otherwise agree on this.

Abuse has, over time, evolved other functions. It is used for emphasis, to accentuate a point. Something is effing great or effing boring. It is also used as punctuation to hold a sentence together. One can overhear conversations that are essentially a string of abuses peppered with some normal words. And then, of course, an expletive is sometimes used as a sign of admiration. Someone can be a shrewd so-and-so.

In all these cases the profane is domesticated in a way that doesn’t cause offence. Between friends, it is a sign that the relationship is strong enough to survive its use. It is, in fact, a certificate of closeness.

There are two dimensions to the phenomenon of abuse – the words themselves and the manner of their use. The first is cultural in nature. This decides what is deemed too sacred to speak ill of. That is why cultures pick the same set of figures – gods, mothers, and sisters. The other dimension is social. That decides who has the permission to use the abuse. Not just ‘what is said’ but ‘who said it to whom’

The latter is what explains why many people would flinch on seeing a fifteen-year-old girl direct these kinds of words at the seventy-five-year-old Prime Minister of the country. Even to people who are not supporters of the government, there is a sense that a line has been crossed. Something fundamental is being violated.

When a young girl uses these words, she is doing much more than violating a norm. She is changing the rules of the game. An arrangement that we had all tacitly accepted is suddenly being overturned.

When abuse happens along the direction of hierarchy, it evokes comment but does not become a matter of national outrage. Men routinely abuse women on social media in the vilest terms; it is now seen as a matter of routine. We have all seen videos of Noida aunties letting loose against their help. These are things we disapprove of as signs of bad behaviour, but it stops there.

Arguably that is one of the functions of abuse, one reason why it survives in societies. It provides a deterrent to overturning hierarchies. Abuses are never literally meant; their role is to act as a form of warning for people to know their place.

In this particular instance at least three kinds of hierarchies were simultaneously violated – age, gender and power distance. Age is a potent source of hierarchy but not more so than gender. Abuse was always meant to be channelled through women, not by them. Mothers and sisters were the fodder men used to wage their verbal battles with each other to protect their egos. Women were the currency of abuse, never their source.

This was embedded in the reaction to these words; he did not describe the protestors simply as citizens. He spoke of ‘our daughters’. The phrase is not merely descriptive. It is rooted in the idea of paternal oversight. It locates an individual within a larger social order with clearly marked expectations and boundaries. The word comes with freight attached and harvests outrage effortlessly.

Abuse that shows deference for more rooted hierarchies we can live with, but one that challenges those is difficult to accept. Some hierarchies are just too deeply internalised. This is why even many people who are opposed to the government found it inappropriate. Their political opinion told them one thing while social conditioning overruled that instinct. The source of the cultural shock was not so much the abuse which is familiar. It was whose mouth it came out of, which is not.

And we can sense it. We see it in the energy on social media, in the new kind of voices that are emerging. It is possible that the CJP movement may eventually be remembered not for what it demanded but for what it unlocked.

What we are seeing today seems to be a change in how power is responded to. Historically in India, democracy stopped where power began. In a lived sense, power bestowed a kind of immunity on those who had it. The idea of accountability has existed in concept, but rarely in practice. If your village lacked teachers or a bureaucrat demanded a bribe, there were rarely any consequences. We accepted it as the way the system works.

What we are seeing today is accountability beginning to be experienced as a right. The demand for the resignation of the education minister was, shorn of its political surround, an acknowledgement that power must be held to account when it fails. And we are seeing echoes of the same insistence in other walks of life as people whip out their phones and record the many lapses in governance all over the country. It showed a generation that a phone used at the right moment could do something a complaint filed in triplicate never could: convert a private humiliation into a public event.

What this does is to first recognise that business as usual will not be accepted. It doesn’t mean that things will automatically change. The bribes may still continue, and official apathy may not budge. But even in that case, something has still changed. Lapses are being put on record. The action of complaining is not lost in the wilderness; it finds an audience who validate it, circulate it and give it their endorsement. It encourages others to share their issues in turn.

What this is doing is to build a constituency of disappointment. It is a multiplicative act, this sharing of an individual experience. It is a form of contagion; one act travels to the next so easily. There is a collective sense of catharsis in seeing how others share the same frustrations as one does. Dissatisfaction multiplies vicariously.

And the other thing it reconfigures is fear. The state has always been feared, and in the last few years, this has been a noticeable feature of our polity. Aided by mainstream media, there has been a general sense that it is unwise and even dangerous to voice criticism of the powerful publicly. This movement has begun to change that. What we are seeing is the fragmentation of fear; more people begin to come to the fore, which in turn encourages even more people. Fear isolates while social media aggregates.

Action taken against protestors does potentially retard this fragmentation, but there comes a point when this action itself becomes a spur for more defiance. That is the call the state has to make, and which it is currently struggling to do, unsure whether the old grip of fear still holds or has already been broken.

The current movement is helped by the fact that their protest is tailor-made for social media. The content is not only heartening for the viewers but also entertaining in its own right. And this generation uses its grammar effortlessly, unlike the official narrative, which struggles to use it. Which is why it speaks in a way that confounds the powerful who have never been spoken to like that before.

And this medium allows for a certain kind of memory. Earlier institutions decided what deserved to be recorded as public memory. Now people are doing so. Which is why when the state tries to put out a narrative, there is an alternative record that disputes it. Take for instance the government’s attempt to make the abusive language used by some protestors as a peg. The trouble is that there is abundant evidence that the primary use of abuse has been by the government’s own supporters, which they have deployed particularly against young women.

The other pushback we are seeing is against mainstream media. Having lost its credibility as an impartial keeper of the public record, it finds itself caught in a bind. Having chosen a side, it cannot now backtrack for risk of losing the audience it has. The more it doubles down, the further it pushes itself into a corner, and the more disconnected it risks becoming. Their problem is compounded by the fact that they are no longer necessary gatekeepers; news does not have to get routed through them.

Democracies have, in India, been synonymous with elections. But elections happen only occasionally. What this movement has underlined is social media’s power for democracy to become continuous rather than episodic.

It is always possible to overstate the importance of any current event. One doesn’t know what the final destination of this movement will be or whether there will be a destination at all. But something significant has changed, and that feels unlikely to reverse itself. The younger generation have always known about the power of their smartphones, but this is the first time they have experienced what it can do in the political arena. Having tasted this power, there is no going back, no matter who is in power. The vote remains occasional; the voice no longer is.

The students won. The government had to yield, which is by itself quite remarkable. But perhaps the most remarkable thing on display is the character of this generation that is revealed. Something new, something quite radical, was witnessed in the last few weeks.

Over the weekend I happened to catch Danish Husain’s riveting performance paying tribute to the poet-lyricist Sahir Ludhianvi. While watching it, a parallel narrative began forming in my head. I was marvelling at how similar the feelings Sahir gave voice to were to the memes and reels filling up Instagram over the examination leak issue.

This is surprising for, at one level, there is no comparison. Sahir was part of an India imagining itself into existence, grappling with what values it wanted to embrace. His worldview was wrapped in socialist idealism and was part of an organised ideological structure. The students at Jantar Mantar and beyond come from a completely different India, one brought up on Instagram and algorithmic feeds.

And yet they seem to be cut from the same moral cloth. They appeal to the same first principles. What they were asking for was similar --basic fairness, the need to be heard, for the powerful to hold their own to account. While they are angry, they speak with hope and joy, and a good bit of mischief too.

Which is strange, for we live in truly cynical times. And Gen Z was thought to represent the very worst instincts of the times. It has typically been described as one lacking in belief or ideology, being entitled and self-absorbed, lacking political instincts or even a desire to engage, and relentlessly performative.

This easy stereotyping does not take on board the context in which this generation was born. My generation came from a time when the rules were largely fixed: birth-determined identity, what we studied, whom we married, and how we spoke to elders. We were born with a rulebook in our mouths, and being young meant taking a few half-hearted swipes at it.

For this generation, there are no rulebooks. Virtually every foundational concept has been transformed beyond recognition. Money has become a whisper of digital intent; work has detached itself from the office; success from age. Identity has to be built pixel by pixel as audiences have turned into broadcasters, and relationships live on a new planet.

It is true that every new generation sees itself as being at odds with the earlier one. In this case, there is more than enough reason to feel that way. Not only have the building blocks changed, so has the way the mind processes the world. Time itself feels different; infinite knowledge is a click away, and even intelligence can be summoned at will.

There is another factor at work here. The only government most of them have known is this one. For them this is the only order they have known, the only system they have been subject to. The direct experience they have is only of the last decade and a half. The past exists for them as history, not memory. And they are less willing to accept what is wrong with the country’s systems than earlier generations were.

And the protest was about education, which is the emotional lifeline of the country. It is difficult to overstate what education means in India. It is the most visibly advertised product in the country. People spend years preparing for exams; coaching has spawned not only countless centres but also an entire town in Rajasthan where it is the primary commercial activity. Families rearrange their lives around examinations; ‘board years’ are like a form of tapasya for the entire clan.

When such a critical mechanism itself appears compromised and no one seems to care, the sense of betrayal is acute. It also brings into focus a series of other absences, other failures: the absence of institutional integrity, the blatant self-serving nature of politics, the easy manipulation of people on divisive axes. Anger moves from a point to being a large circle.

The resulting frustration has been expressed through a uniquely Gen Z mode: memes, cheeky songs, satire and ridicule. And they spare no one. Nobody is exempt from being mercilessly mocked. However, there is no mistaking the simplicity and urgency of the message. Look the truth in the eye. Do not evade. Do not try and discredit those who question you using the power you have. In their first-principles clarity, these are the sentiments that seem to be aligned with those of the earliest days after independence.

If Sahir’s generation was guided by a well-formed ideology and established frameworks, this generation has found them on its own, which is why its mode of expression is so fresh and unique. They use no existing political templates, no tired ideological slogans. Which is why the state finds itself at a loss in terms of a response.

The other important thing to note is that, contrary to what was believed, this generation showed no hesitation in acting rather than merely reacting. They did not sit behind the safety of their screens; they put themselves at risk. They faced police action of a severe kind without retreating.

The mistake was ours. What we saw in this generation as an absence of conviction was, in fact, a refusal to act on other people’s experiences and to speak in secondhand language. It was assembling its beliefs based on direct encounters with a world whose meanings were themselves changing. They were discovering their own truths for themselves. What looked like a void was, in fact, a workshop. When the time came, the generation stepped up.

Prayer is everywhere. It begins the school day, and it ends the political speech. It hovers with fervid anxiety in the waiting room outside an operation theatre and catches at the throats of millions who watch a World Cup final. It slips out unannounced when the traffic light turns red and you’re late for a meeting. We offer it before exams, before take-offs, and even before unlocking the results page that we hope won’t crash.

India is a deeply religious place, and prayer is an integral part of all religions. Heads are bowed to the almighty, and prayers are muttered as a matter of ritual. We put it down to faith and belief. Different people have their own deities – some are gods in official pantheons, others are revered figures – gurus, yogis, fakirs, and sants.

And yet, if we think about it, prayer might look as if it were embedded in religion, but it is not. One doesn’t have to be religious in order to pray. In fact, it might be the other way around. We don’t pray because gods exist. Gods need to exist because we need to pray. Our players need a target, a landing site and gods fill the breach. Our need for prayer is far greater than our need for gods, contrary to appearances.

At its core, prayer is less about whom we speak to than about the condition we speak from. It arises from a feeling of smallness, of a lack of control. The feeling of insignificance, of coming face to face with how little we matter, especially when we want something, translates itself into an act of performative submission. The act of acknowledging this is, if you like, a negotiating gambit. We discard our ego and seek a reward in return. By overtly confessing to our inabilities, we hope to extract a concession from the universe. Prayer emotionalises the gap between what we wish for and what we can make happen.

There is something about the act of surrender that is oddly uplifting. In prayer, we acknowledge smallness – but this also has the effect of making us feel ennobled and enlarged. The act of prayer is in many ways one of dissolution – the smallness is a way of becoming part of something more universal. We immerse ourselves in a collective by shedding the boundaries around the self. We may call what we dissolve into by the name of god, or we may term it a spiritual experience, but in essence, we momentarily stop feeling alone.

The other option for despair is to cry, to feel sorry for oneself. While a cry is an admission of defeat, a prayer is a belief that asking with humility has an inherent strength. It is an attire worn by despair, but it is one that strives to make it respectable.

Seen through this lens, we can understand why gods could well be a way of making hope tangible. To pray into the void might seem foolish, so gods take on a form. Dialogue becomes possible, even if it is one-sided. Hope needs an address, and the heavens make for a magnificent one.

Around prayer gather its cousins. Manifesting is its most modern. Here, as is befitting our consumerist world, where desire is the engine that drives everything, the loud and intense proclamation of desire is by itself enough. Wanting is good enough. Desire makes us big, not small, and demanding is so much better for the ego than pleading. Wrapped in self-help mush, manifesting is a child’s tantrum wearing new-age clothes.

Vows, on the other hand, are prayers we aim at ourselves, binding the weak future self with words uttered in the present. Mottos are prayer masquerading as guides for action. Here identity is rammed into slogans, talismans repeated until they steady us. Underlying each version of prayer is the same essential construct – that words are technology; they ignite rather than merely describe.

That is why prayer endures even if people stop believing in God. They come veiled as corporate mission statements dripping with faux earnestness or as political slogans that combine hope with promise; they can be found in social media reels full of shibboleths for living. Start-up founders are surrounded by the mythology of relentless striving and ceaseless hope as they fervently manifest their desire for billions. None of them have anything to do with religion; all of them are rooted in prayer.

And yet these are not substitutes for actual prayers. For prayer is not of a corporate need to preserve a sense of self-importance while asking the universe for favours. Prayer is built on fragility, on an admission of vulnerability. It allows us to be finite without shame. To yield is also to join. By surrendering our smallness, we are able to feel part of something larger, something that we might call God, the universe, or simply life itself.

Religions have come and gone as have gods. But prayer remains, because it answers not to belief but to condition. It is the oldest way of making smallness liveable, and in the very act of yielding to our limits, we find ourselves enlarged by what lies beyond them. It is the one place where humans, masters of the universe otherwise, kneel in supplication and confess just how inadequate they are.

One of the pleasures of travelling outside urban centres is to wander off the beaten track and go where one’s feet take you. But even in remote places that are sparsely populated, there is always the pagdandi to guide you. A road beaten into the earth by the tattoo of thousands of footsteps that have preceded yours and fashioned a road where none was. A passage optimised over time, with the experience of years, maybe decades, baked into the path. Following pagdandis allows us to explore unknown vistas with a safety net: you know that even if you are in the wilderness you are not really alone.

The pagdandi is a form of collective instinct that eventually becomes common wisdom. Pagdandis begin as tentative experiments. Intrepid individuals choose a certain path where none exists, and over time one of those trajectories gains favour from later travellers. The moment even the outline of a path is formed, it provides strong incentive for others to follow in its wake. Eventually it becomes like a river on land, winding its way using the erosive abilities of time.

The footpath is an act of democracy; order created not by external edict but by the consensual collaboration of thousands of unrelated people acting in invisible concert over a large period of time. In that sense, while being located in space, it is a document of time, of a resonance between human beings from vastly different eras all being in the same place trying to reach the same destination, all adding to what they are using. In the words of author Robert Macfarlane, footpaths are mundane in the best sense of the word, worldly and open to all; as rights of way determined and sustained by use, they constitute a labyrinth of liberty, a slender network of common land that still threads through our aggressively privatised world of barbed wires and gates, CCTV cameras and no trespassing signs.

Yet this reading of the pagdandi as democratic wisdom elides a harder truth: for most who first tread these paths, the trail is not a chosen alternative to the road but its absence. What looks like a labyrinth of liberty to the wanderer is, for many others, the visible signature of a state that never arrived, infrastructure withheld rather than transcended. The pagdandi, in other words, can be read simultaneously as an act of collective wisdom and as scar tissue, evidence of neglect worn smooth by necessity. Holding both truths together, rather than choosing between them, is closer to what the pagdandi actually is.

If the road is built for travel, a trail is built by it. The road brooks no interference from the natural landscape that it cleaves through. It is high on intent and low on empathy. If it needs to bring down hillsides, cut a swathe through settlements, vault over pesky obstructions or bore a hole through unyielding mountainsides, it does so. It has a job to do, and it efficiently does what it is asked of it. New highways in particular are brusque and abrupt; they look to connect two points set in a certain topography, and they go about their job with a single-mindedness of purpose. Rules are metalled roads; solutions are dusty pathways. Roads crumble with time and use; pagdandis become more firmly etched in permanence. Erosion is useful, and when it stops being so, little diversions spring up around the old pathway as if by themselves. It is disuse that is the pagdandi’s enemy.

If the road is all intelligence and resolute purpose, the pagdandi is about wisdom and perseverance. The trail has no desire to conquer the natural, it finds a way around it. It uses the contours of a landscape to make its way. Nobody loses; nature yields a way without losing self-respect. The trail does not understand straight lines, for human beings left to themselves find that the shortest distance between two points is never a precisely straight line. It undulates gently even on plain ground, and on hills, it wraps itself around the landscapes as it rises and falls, always willing to tiptoe around any obstacle. Pathways are your best friend in the hills. Unlike the roads, which need to circumnavigate the hillside, cutting a wide arc as they spiral their way up, the pagdandi shimmies up the hill, sure-footed and spry. The choice between sust kadam raste and tez kadam rahein (I will not dare to attempt a translation of Gulzar’s exquisite words) is never clearer than in the hills.

Yet the binary is never as stable as it first appears. Left alone long enough, a pagdandi does not remain a pagdandi. It hardens first into a bullock-cart track, then a kutcha road, and eventually, if enough feet and enough need converge on it, invites the state’s attention and gets metalled over. There is a point of transition when accretion tips into deliberate intervention, at which the trail’s very success, its having been noticed, becomes the thing that ends its life as a trail. The pagdandi’s fate, then, is not simply to remain a trail forever in contrast to the road but potentially to become one, betrayed by its own usefulness.

Way before we glorified the internet as the bastion of user created content, the pagdandi was a testament to the power of crowds to find order within chaos, extract shape from the formless. Every user adds to what is being used and makes it even more tangible. A little like a ratings system on the internet, a map of likes and dislikes emerges formed by the thicket of pixels generated by thousands of users. A hashtag follows the same principle as a pagdandi: a word becomes a place thanks to the number of people who land on it. It burrows itself into existence through repeat use. Like so much in the digital world, the dusty trail is an organic evolution, not an expert imposition.

But the analogy has a limit worth acknowledging. A pagdandi has no owner and no stake in where it leads; nobody profits from steering your feet. A hashtag, once it proves itself, is rarely left alone in the same way. Platforms notice what is trending and move quickly to amplify, rank, and monetise it, which makes the digital trail far more vulnerable than its earthen counterpart to being discovered and then paved over by an algorithm optimising for engagement rather than desire. The dusty trail escapes design because nobody is watching closely enough to design it; the digital one rarely enjoys that anonymity for long.

As linguist Guy Deutscher argues, language came into being and evolved following a similar pattern. As he says in his wonderful The Unfolding of Language, language seems so skilfully crafted that it appears to be the work of a master architect, and yet its complex structure must somehow have arisen of its own accord. Much like the unschooled pathway, language was a product of an insatiable human desire, in this case, to communicate. Unintelligible grunts began to fall into place with repeated use by a few, which then gradually took on a more recognisable structure and form. Just like a pagdandi can exist only if we continue to walk on it, language needs to be used. Both evolve with use; as contexts change, both modify themselves to accommodate the new, not with any forethought or design but organically, as a result of an undirected collective effort.

The real charm of a pagdandi is that it offers a tantalising glimpse into the unreachable. It represents a fantasy that there is a path to somewhere else, or to some time else, a desire that ornithologist W H Hudson describes as wanting to slip back out of this modern world. That eventually is at the heart of why these little dust-laden, foot-stomped little paths call out to us. To take us where no road can.

Technology has a way of making radical change feel matter-of-factly incremental. The arrival of the digital world has enhanced our capabilities in ways that are profound, but this dramatic change is consumed as if it were the most natural thing in the world. That one can listen to virtually any song in the world, for instance, when one feels like it, is a truly incredible facility. Similarly, streaming services have made access to all kinds of films and television shows available whenever one desires. Conceptually, this is a fundamental shift. We are in effect trading off longitudinal ownership of a little for latitudinal usership of a lot. By limiting our claim over a film or a piece of music, by foregoing any permanent right to it, we are able to in effect get access to it without restrictions. The idea of subscription acts as a sort of master key that unlocks a dazzling array of options.

The shift from a world based on the idea of ownership to that of ‘usership’ has been well documented. Underlying this, we are experiencing a more fundamental shift in orientation. Our mental models are moving from being rooted in the idea of accumulation (stock) to that of continuous experience (flow). Earlier we thought as progress as the gradual accretion of assets – a cycle, a two-wheeler, a car, gadgets of various kinds, money in one’s bank account, a house and so on. So many of our everyday practices are rooted in this stock orientation, on the idea that progress is additive.

Shops are essentially godowns full of inventory, as are kitchens at home. The wardrobe accumulates clothing of all kinds, out of which we use a mere fraction at any given point in time. Even devices that try to capture the flow of time have tended to be little pieces of frozen accumulations – magazines, the daily newspaper, and the 9 pm news. The photo album is a repository of memories. The home is a collection of objects acquired painstakingly through the years. A job is a fixed allocation of time and attention to a single employer. A cab stand, an aggregation of hireable vehicles. A restaurant, a residence with a fixed menu.

The trajectory of change is unmistakable. Today we are able to live much more in the present continuous tense. We can shop wherever we might be, listen to music on the go, and order any food of choice at the most inopportune time. Food delivery apps can, in theory, make the idea of a well-stocked kitchen redundant. Already one can order ingredients that go into a specific dish, and all one has to do is to cook it. Albums of photographs give way to an endless stream of selfies and other markers of the present. The photograph itself is not so much a document that preserves memories as much as a marker of what is happening today. The news timeline moves rapidly, every moment of the day. Social media is all flow and very little stock; the past disappears rapidly under ever-new bits of the present. The gig economy converts work from being fixed to fluid. Co-working spaces with ‘hot desks’ dismantle the idea of a fixed office.

The idea of abundance too changes from possessing a lot to being able to access whatever one desires, whenever one desires it, as effortlessly as possible. Being wealthy is increasingly not about owning more things but about being able to bridge the gap between desire and fulfilment. If one could have whatever one wanted whenever one wanted it, why would one need to accumulate anything? The pursuit of material acquisition could well give way to cherishing ever-new experiences.

Going forward, imagine a life where one’s needs are on call. We could get our food, whether cooked or in an ingredient form, on call. Instead of owning an elaborate wardrobe, we could order whatever we wish to wear on a daily basis. It isn’t as outlandish as it sounds – already renting clothes is a rapidly growing business, and there is no reason why it cannot become more mainstream.

The possibilities are many. A flow-based world could look at money very differently. Imagine work resulting in getting placed on a band of entitlements, and within each band, getting one’s desired lifestyle streamed. In effect, it would mean an all-inclusive subscription to a lifestyle. Everything you want, available to you for consumption, not for ownership. The clothes you will wear today, the furniture you use this year, the food you will cook at the next meal, and the car you will take a ride in to get to the office.

Such a system would need a new mental model of money, because money today is essentially stored labour. Work is converted into money, which in turn lets you buy what you want. In a world of entitlement bands, money’s job would shift from a store of value to a passport, moving you between levels of entitlement. But a band is not a stored claim the way a house or a sum in the bank is. It is a live relationship, granted only for as long as one continues to qualify, and it dies the moment participation stops. Inheritance grows stranger in such a world too. What does a parent leave a child when entitlement itself cannot be stored, but only currency can?

In such a scenario, things begin to lose their materiality; the solid becomes vapour, and choosing things becomes a life pursuit. The need to save diminishes. The need for self-knowledge deepens, for only when one knows oneself can one choose the life one wishes to surround oneself with. The act of choosing also changes in a world dominated by flow. There is no meal without a menu of ten thousand options, no evening without a scroll through everything ever filmed, no morning without the wardrobe of the world offered up for the day’s choosing. The chooser is never quite done with the act of choosing.

This is a different kind of fatigue than the stress caused by a large consequential decision. There is nothing of significance that is at stake here. What we have instead is a low, continuous hum of micro-decisions that never seem to end. Which is why we have started abdicating choice-making. The surrender to auto-shuffle, the passivity with which we submit ourselves to algorithmic choices, is part of our way to reduce the burden of choosing. It is a rational way of coping with a world that has made choosing too easy and too constant to be able to handle. We are outsourcing selection not because we have stopped caring about what we get but because caring about everything, all the time, is exhausting.

The other consequence of a flow orientation is that we are constantly being put in a position where we have to react to the world. Instead of thinking about the world afresh, we are presented with a menu of options. Which is why actions are increasingly tied to primitive instincts rather than reasoned, thought-through perspectives. Seat-of-the-pants debate is privileged over the deeper study of phenomena.

This degree of change is bound to have cascading downstream effects. A change of this kind creates possibilities of many kinds, some liberating, others terrifying. The casualty will be the gathering of a coherent sense of self, which will be distributed across this array of possibilities.

In a world where everything flows, islands of stock might become more valuable. Flow democratises access, but stock, in its old and slower sense, may become the mark of those who have the ability and desire to accord attention and care to what is around them. The truly wealthy in a flow economy may not be those with the most bands of entitlement but those who no longer need any bands at all because they have retained the one thing flow cannot manufacture on demand, a self that has taken the long way to become who it is.

Luxury is absurd.

The prices are ridiculous. Some of the products that are sold as luxury are mind-bogglingly stupid. Social media is full of creators highlighting the many absurdities of luxury.

And yet, people who buy luxury goods are, by and large, not stupid. These are enormously wealthy people who did not get to where they are by being naïve, gullible or unaware of the concept of good value. A lot of them are owners of large businesses and negotiate deals for a living. So what value do they see in these exorbitantly priced scarves that the rest of us don’t?

To dismiss luxury is easy for those who cannot afford to. To understand it is more complex.

Luxury is a way of thinking. A way of assigning value. A way of creating distance.

Luxury, at its heart, is a measure of distance. Distance from the everyday. From necessity. From others.

Being great is not good enough for a luxury good. It must be difficult to access. It must feel removed from ordinary life. Even when it claims to celebrate the artisan, the land, and the material, it does so only after these have been stripped of familiarity and soaked in meanings that only a select few can afford to decode. The journey from artisan to brand is an exercise in shedding inherited meaning and acquiring new layers of it.

The object is not the point; often it is little more than a placeholder.

The Hermès scarf, the Prada sandal, and the hand-thrown ceramic bowl all tell stories of great plausibility: of heritage, attention, restraint, and craftsmanship. But these stories, magnificent as they are, are meant to be seen through. That is part of their design. You are not deceived by luxury; you are willingly seduced. Everyone knows the game.

Louis Vuitton is a luxury object that happens to be a bag. The bag costs more than whatever it will carry. Its function is inconsequential.

It is not a receptacle for things. It is a vessel of meaning.

That is true of most luxury goods. They are not expensive because they perform a function. Or because they are made of expensive material, although that is often true. They are expensive because function has become irrelevant. The object has escaped its category. A Balenciaga keychain with a packet of chips with the logo sells on Amazon for over a lakh rupees. Clearly nobody is buying the empty packet of chips.

A Hermès Birkin is no longer competing with other handbags. A Patek Philippe is no longer competing with other watches. A luxury object is consumption attempting to distance itself from mere necessity.

Which is why all luxury is, in a certain sense, ridiculous.

It offers what might be called plausible incomprehensibility. It must be expensive enough to seem absurd but explained just well enough to justify its existence. It gives the unimaginably rich what feels like access to a secret, even though it is often just a more expensive version of something they already have.

While most luxury consumers imagine themselves to be connoisseurs, those rare beings who discern notes of meaning invisible to the masses, most are simply part of a herd. They buy not from the inside of meaning but from the outside of it. They recognise the signs but cannot read the code.

One particular code that luxury follows is that it mimics nature at its most exquisite. Not to honour nature, but to transfer its excellence onto the user.

It imitates the texture of aged wood, the scent of early rain, the softness of peach skin, the patina of age, and the beauty of imperfection. But not for their own sake. These reconstructions exist to suggest that the person wearing or using them is what nature was trying to create all along.

Luxury imitates nature at its most exquisite in order to suggest that its user is nature’s most exquisite outcome. Luxury makes the individual the pinnacle of nature.

And yet, to dismiss luxury as a con would be a mistake.

Because there is something real at the heart of all this.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine that you possessed unlimited wealth. So much of it that you could buy anything anywhere without a second thought.

What would you value?

What lies beyond the pale of consumption?

What do you crave if you can have everything in the world?

Not things. But feelings.

Time. Authenticity. Beauty. Sensation. Trust. Mystery. Even friction.

That is exactly what luxury seeks to offer us.

At its most potent, luxury places at the pinnacle all that makes human experience special: time, care, slowness, attention, tactility, and proportion. These are things we already possess but are too hurried or distracted to notice. These were things that got wrapped up in the process of living, and we lost our sense of their significance.

To recognise their worth, we need them on a pedestal. We need them placed at a distance. We need them wrapped in ritual and price. Life needs to become reimagined as art.

Luxury doesn’t give us anything new. It simply places, at great distance and cost, what we already have so we can notice it again.

This is why the logic of luxury begins long before couture or crystal.

It starts without ceremony, in the pantry.

As incomes rise, the milk becomes A2, the tea organic, the bread sourdough, and the ice cream artisanal. The price increase is often three or four times the ordinary alternative. It’s not stratospheric, just expensive. Just enough for it to register as special. Just enough to mark distance that cannot be easily explained.

It is not really about buying better things. It is about becoming the sort of person for whom better things feel necessary.

Long before we buy luxury, we become the kind of person who starts to believe in our specialness. And look for reflection of that feeling in the things we buy. Expensive things.

Most of us spend our lives trying to turn meaning into money. Luxury on the other hand, turns money into meaning.

When abundant wealth makes money feel trivial and inconsequential, luxury restores meaning to it..

Luxury is the currency wealth speaks in because money, by itself, is no longer enough. Money needs to be attached to some form of gravity for it to register. That gravity is the meaning that money finds once again.

That is why luxury prices are so ridiculous.

Their absurdity is part of the design. Only at that level of absurdity, only in those stratospheric heights, does money become unrecognisable – it becomes a kind of meaning that only a few have access to.

When money is scarce, when money is striven for, counted, and planned, it carries enormous meaning. Every time money is spent, there is a sense of depletion, a depletion that demands palpable value in return. All expenses are consequential.

But what happens when wealth reaches a point where money ceases to matter, where it becomes a form of ether? When spending money does not feel like a form of depletion?

Luxury exists to solve that problem.

Luxury is the language wealth turns to when money becomes too inarticulate a language.

Only when Hermès prices reach cardiac arrest-inducing levels does money begin to feel meaningful again. Money becomes rarefied air, breathable only by those who need their wealth to signify something more than purchasing power.

This is why luxury uses money as a signifier of how far outside ourselves we must travel to feel like our authentic selves. It is not the object we are paying for. It is the price of reconnection. Of feeling once again the wonder we lost the instinct to recognise.

There is something fundamentally sad about that.

Not because luxury is hollow, but because we have become hollow to the things that once needed no explanation.

The sadness lies in how luxury sells back to us wonder, care, reverence and attention – things that were once freely available. But this is not merely a personal failure of attention or gratitude. Something more systematic has happened. Luxury has made financial distance the precondition for recognising beauty. Beauty has been removed from ordinary experience and relocated inside the consumption code.

The exquisiteness of the natural when passed through the lens of consumption becomes luxury. We could not have engineered a more efficient way to make wonder inaccessible: first exhaust it through abundance, then sell it back at prices that exclude most of the people for whom it was once simply the texture of daily life.

In some ways the exclusion does not really matter. For people who are not wealthy, luxury remains one of the many inexplicable whims of the ultra-rich. It is only those who are on the periphery of wealth for whom luxury brands feel like a club to which they are not invited. They aspire to a kind of specialness that their money currently cannot buy.

The specialness sought has a special character. Perhaps the deepest fantasy hidden inside luxury is not admiration but inevitability.

We admire old aristocracies not merely because they are rich but because their privilege appears God-given. They have occupied a place in the world that they were ordained to hold.

Luxury attempts to manufacture that feeling. It allows acquired privilege to masquerade as inherited privilege. Success to masquerade as destiny.

Luxury does not merely want to be envied. It wants to appear as though it could never have been otherwise.

Luxury turns red blood blue. It makes the buyer retrospectively aristocratic. It invents a new species beyond the pale of consumption.

The mystery of luxury is that it is simultaneously ridiculous and profound. At first glance, it feels like a con job pulled on the wealthy – a brilliant con because the buyer knows exactly what is happening and experiences that knowledge as part of the privilege.

The profundity sits deeper, at a structural level.

Luxury transfers value from the object to the person buying it. It gives form to the idea of distinction. Luxury has always sold distinction. What has changed is the form distinction takes. Once it signalled power and status. Today it increasingly signals the ability to rise above and beyond. Rising above speed, noise, abundance, distraction and artificiality.

The luxury market has spent centuries learning a simple truth: once survival is secured, people do not crave more objects. They crave more meaning. They seek affirmation of the fact that wealth fundamentally made them into a different category. Ordinary human laws no longer apply. Luxury is simply the code used to underline this.

In the end, luxury isn’t just about what one has. It is the language we invented when wealth stopped being surprising and

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being ordinary stopped being bearable.

Among the sights that we have got used to is the blinking cursor. It sits on our screen and does its thing. Its role is to blink, which it does. Over and over again.

An engineer named Charles Kiesling filed a patent in 1967 for a solution to a small practical problem. On early low-resolution screens it was difficult to see where the next character would appear. He created a mark and made it blink so you could find it easily.

It is interesting how, over time, the cursor has acquired a life of its own.

The heartbeat is the first thing we know. Well before we take our eventual form, there is a thudding sound, a pulse that announces the presence of life. The presence of something alive by the alternating of sound and silence. It tells us that someone is here. That we are not alone.

So the machine acquired a heartbeat it doesn’t have. And we saw in the cursor what we called the blink. A human action, which in a less central way than the heartbeat, is also a sign of life. To be unblinking is to unnerve. We need things to be alive, but aliveness without a pause feels intimidating.

There is something else the cursor replicates, less obvious than the heartbeat, but perhaps more fundamental. We think of vision as continuous, a steady stream of the world arriving through the eyes. But we blink. Thirty times a minute, without noticing, without deciding, the world is briefly cancelled and reinstated. The eye does not record like a camera, which holds its gaze without flinching; we see in interrupted bursts. For significant parts of our life, we are blind. The blink is not a flaw, then; it is what imparts rhythm.

The cursor blinks, and something in us recognises it. Perhaps as the shape of attention itself. We were always seeing this way, in pulses, with gaps, with the world periodically going dark and returning. The cursor simply makes that rhythm visible on the screen before us, turning our own perceptual structure into an object we can look at. Which may be why it feels less like a tool and more like a companion. It does not just mark time; it sees the way we see.

We respond to the rhythm of the blink with the feeling of accompaniment, of being in the presence of something rather than nothing. One becomes part of something, gets inserted into the rhythm of something ongoing and alive. Time takes on a form. It becomes articulate.

For the writer, the cursor is both catalyst and critic. It blinks encouragingly, and at other times, it seems to be asking questions steeped in disappointment. More urgent than the empty sheet of paper, more alive in its discontent.

We are not good at handling unmarked time. Look at the number of ways in which we give form to time: the watch, sundial and hourglass; the church bells, the ghanta ghar and the grandfather’s clock. The whole elaborate invention of time as something measurable made of equal intervals – an absolute fabrication if there ever was one – is what underpins our everyday lives. The sense of passing time made concrete works almost like existential scaffolding for us.

It seems as if to be in unmarked time is to start losing the thread of our own continuity. The self requires the next moment to confirm the last one. In the gap between moments it gets dangerously fragile. We build clocks not just because we need to know the time but because we need the assurance that we are comfortably within a structure. That we are inside it rather than adrift somewhere adjacent to it, watching.

The cursor blinks in precisely that gap. Between the last word and the next one. Between the thought that just dissolved and the thought that hasn’t formed. It marks time while we are trying to make it mean something.

On screen, we mark time in a variety of ways. We have the spinning circle, which can often be exasperating; the hourglass, which tells us that something is happening; and the loading bar, which actually measures how much progress has been made.

Each symbol says something different. If the cursor says I’m here, the spinner says coming soon. The three dots say someone is there, fumbling with thought, striving to find the right words. They simulate the moment before speech.

Time holding its breath. Unhappening poised on the brink of happening. The moment before the meaning. The held breath is like the momentary suspension of the self till the gap is filled.

And yet, on the other hand, when time does become a blob, when we lose our bearings in it, we experience a kind of freedom that cannot be duplicated. The freedom from experiencing time is perhaps the most exhilarating of all. The pursuit of a lot of spiritual exertion is self-forgetfulness, which is another word for getting lost in the cloudy thickets of time while leaving oneself behind.

And so, the cursor blinks on. Steadied by a rhythm no one designed, accompanied by a heartbeat no one put there, held in time by a machine that has no idea what time is.

I want to talk today about Brand India and its future. Now, that phrase ‘Brand India’ usually brings to mind India’s image in the outside world—how we are perceived by investors, journalists, the diaspora, or tourists. It is an idea that we are quite invested in. 

And often, that image can often provoke anxiety. Every time something goes wrong in India, we ask, ‘What will this mean for Brand India? Have we slipped in the world’s estimation? Every time a major Western publication carries a negative article, there is outrage and a defiant assertion that their opinion does not matter, while revealing just how much it does.

The irony is that while Brand India is obsessed with its reflection in the world’s mirror, it rarely pauses to as what it looks like to itself.

For a brand is not merely what the world sees. Good or bad. Biased or Fair?

A brand, stripped of all marketing jargon, is simply a pattern of expectations. It is a system of meaning that coheres around a core idea. It is formed through actions, big and small, voluntary and involuntary. We don’t decide what our brand is—it is inferred from how we act over a period of time. Brands themselves have limited control over how they are received. For country brands, where the sources of brand meaning are so many, it is even more difficult to control the narrative.

So, what does India mean to us? What is the lived experience of India? What patterns of meaning emerge from its choices, its instincts, its actions? 

Take Gandhi as an example—not as a historical figure, but as a brand. We don’t remember him for a single act but for a patterned way of being. His use of satyagraha, an extraordinary innovation that Richard Lannoy called ‘weakness made perfect’; the Dandi March, a cinematic act of non-violence; the use of fasts, a mode of self-denial, as a political instrument; his insistence on cleaning toilets; his unsettling experiments with truth; and his claim that his life was his message—these form a coherent idea. That of discovering extraordinary strength through the rigorous moral disciplining of the self. 

The question, of course, is can a country as vast, diverse, and layered as India ever be described through a single brand idea? Surely, the experience of India for a Dalit woman weaver in Odisha is different from that of a stockbroker in Mumbai or a techie in Bengaluru. As it for a faceless unemployed you who finds a sense of identity and purpose as a gau rakshak in Gwalior and a Muslim family whose house has been bulldozed in UP. Any singular description of India will necessarily be incomplete or distorted or both.

And yet, there still seems to be-  a flicker of something we can loosely call ‘Indianness’ that seems to unite this very diversity. At the structural level, there seems to be a common way of dealing with our reality, with the way priorities are accorded and choices are made. 

So what is Brand India at its heart?

For years we have argued that the idea of India lies in its ability to live with contradictions, to find a way that accommodates rather than resolves differences. Where coexistence of innumerable realities has become a way of life.

Today, that feels a little hollow. For we seem to have found a capacity to emphasise differences and to consciously and deliberately deepen divides in order to extract political gain. Social media is full of many axes of division, outrage and hate – whether the issue is political, religious or even involves the choice of your favourite cricketers. This is no longer the Argumentative Indian but the Perpetually Outraged one.

So what then can define Brand India today?

To my mind, what lies at the heart of Brand India is our desire for progress without change.

Or, to put it more precisely, the search for outward advancement without fundamental internal transformation.

The sensation of motion without dislocation.

India deals with the new in a very particular way. The new in India is not allowed to enter unhindered. Modernity in India has always been a form of negotiated tradition. The new never replaces the old; the old expands to accommodate it.

The arranged marriage becomes the arranged love marriage. Or even the love arranged marriage, where the couple falls in love, and then parents take over and arrange everything thereafter.

Or take an electric ‘akhand’ diya that keeps up the ritual while sacrificing its most important element. As long as the bulb looks like a wick, everyone is happy.

Bhajans are sung to the tune of Hindi films songs that might to the purist seem wholly inappropriate, but we bash on regardless- Mata ke dil mein kya hai sung to the tune of ChoIi Ke Peechhe kya hai. 

Interestingly, in some parts of India we came across the phenomenon of Bhai friends- quasi boyfriends who serve as defanged lifestyle accessories -friends without benefits!

The Indian way is to hollow out both tradition and modernity. If the electric diya empties ritual of its meaning, the Arranged Love Marriage takes a modern institution and makes it part of tradition. 

Hybrid solutions abound- ideas that mash up the old and the new with an underlying intent- contriving to maintain a sense of continuity. To deny the idea of rupture and dislocation.

This ability gives the culture great stability. We want a new lifestyle, but not a new way of life. We are able to guard against external influences which can be overwhelming, while not rejecting them. That is why we can never talk of modernising India without simultaneously talking of Indianising modernity.

At the same time, one must note that this is essentially a defensive posture developed by a culture to resist change or more accurately to make adoption of change extremely selective and contingent upon its ability to become a version of the past.

This means that structural change is very difficult in India. A new India looks vastly different but, in many ways, it feels the same.

Now, there is no denying that a lot has changed in India. Indeed, at one level, the India of today is unrecognisable from the one I grew up in. The roads, the gleaming airports, the malls, UPI and the ease of financial transactions, the ability to consume at will are all signs of a new India.

Even socially, the new self-confidence we see in women, the throbbing energy of small-town India, the blossoming of creative energy among the young, all point to significant change. There is desire for self improvement, an aspiration to do a lot of more and many more avenues are open for the young. The mobile has been a tool of empowerment; a personalised weapon that reminds us every minute that we are individuals and that we share a unique and two-way relationship with the outside world.

So how fair is it to argue that India wants progress without change?

It is true that the airport is dazzling, but step outside and chaos can still rule. T1 in Mumbai, is a good example. The roads are new as are the potholes that spring up on the heels of the inauguration. The cities are dwarfed by skyscrapers which in turn are inundated by floods the moment it rains even a little. I live in Gurgaon, the so-called Millennial City where rain that would be considered a light drizzle in Mumbai gets our cars floating. Every winter, the air turns poisonous, but nothing changes.

And the less said about our institutions the better. Their decline has been steady for decades, but in recent years the process has accelerated. The very instruments meant to deliver modern governance have been absorbed into the logic of society. The police act more as brokers of local disputes than representatives of law. The Parliament is dysfunctional, having been reduced to a theatre of insincerity. Courts increasingly resemble panchayats, dispensing advice in the name of community sentiment rather than jurisprudence. The media, once an observer-critic, now act as demented stormtroopers for the powerful. Even the Election Commission, once the safeguarder of democracy, now faces a real crisis of credibility.

The bureaucracy, too, exemplifies this inversion. On paper, the great instrument of modern governance. In practice, an adjunct of society. Its rigidity paradoxically produces fluidity. So many rules exist that the only way forward is through discretion, which comes at a price. Because nothing can ever be taken for granted, everything must be renegotiated and striven for, leading to a sense of always having to secure something that is yours to begin with. Of never knowing for sure as to what is guaranteed.

It is as if the medicine has been infected by the disease. Every mechanism deployed to regulate society has instead become its instrument.

Along with this erosion, politics itself has become deeply personalised. Policy initiatives are framed not as systemic reforms but as ‘gifts’: a gas cylinder, a loan waiver, a tap connection, new trains, welfare schemes. These are presented as the benevolence of leaders, not entitlements of citizenship.

At independence, we placed a sophisticated political framework on top of an entrenched social order. In the early decades, the post-Independence elite held sway over politics, bureaucracy, media, and culture. Progressive ideals like secularism, equality, and institutional respect were not universally practised or even believed in, but they set the default terms of public respectability. Views that ran counter to them were delegitimised and stayed largely private or local. 

As democracy became more representative and electoral competition intensified, that monopoly over the national narrative began to crack. The instincts of the broader social base—rooted in social order, caste, religion, and language—moved from the margins to the centre. A new language of politics emerged. 

Digital technologies took this further. By turning every individual into a broadcaster, social media removed the last gatekeepers. It rewarded the primal over the measured and, in doing so, legitimised it. What was once whispered in coded terms is now shouted aloud—often to applause—because people discover that their views, however extreme they might be, are not only shared but celebrated.

Beyond the structural issues, there seem to be deeper cultural mechanisms at work.

We excel at inherited order – caste and family tradition – where relationships are defined by birth and position. Here our responsibility is to follow orders, which we do rather well.

But we struggle with constructed order – traffic rules, queues, contracts – where legitimacy comes from impersonal agreement rather than inherited hierarchy.

When we are asked to stand in a line or negotiate a roundabout, our instinct is not to comply but to subvert. Not because we are lawless, but because we don’t recognise impersonal order as legitimate. We understand reciprocity, not rules. We need hierarchy to make sense of the world, and neither traffic nor queues represent hierarchy that we understand. 

Our relationship with rules also follows a distinct pattern. Instead of seeing them as guidelines to be respected, we often see them as a challenge to be overcome. They are an affront to our individuality, a kind of forced belonging to a system that otherwise does not see us. So we sidestep the rules, break them casually, or, if we have the power, rig the system itself. 

And we fiercely protect the status that comes along with hierarchy, sometimes in the most absurd ways. At many airports in the country, there is a board put up which outlines 32 kinds of dignitaries (what a delicious word) who are exempt from pre-embarkation processes, frisking in other words. Although it has changed now, in an earlier version, among the categories, one read 'Governors of states’ within brackets – not Lt Governors. We would all be familiar with the massive billboards near toll booths that again outline those who are exempt from paying. It is an extraordinary testament to the culture that it places so much value on who gets to break rules. It is a clear sign that the important thing about rules is not the penalty for those who break them but the privilege afforded to those exempt from them.

Strength, in such a culture, is often confused with the ability to get away with more. Whether it’s on the road, where the powerful can run over people without consequence, or on the international cricket stage, where the BCCI throws its weight around, strength becomes brutish entitlement. 

Strength confused with impunity explains much about contemporary India. The real task — using strength to dismantle the crumbling structures of the past — is often ignored.

We live by a paradox that looks like a contradiction but is in fact part of a design. We are ritually collectivist and individually anarchic. 

Collectivism anchors us; anarchy frees us. Ritual order reassures us that the social order is intact, while everyday disorder gives us a sense of autonomy. The two together enable a world where formal institutions can remain weak, because society supplies both the discipline and the escape. 

This is why much of Indian modernity feels reactive: it is less a product of vision and more an accommodation of what the world sends our way. We practise a kind of inflation-adjusted change: we accept that change is inevitable but treat it like rising prices — something to manage, absorb, and keep pace with, rather than to shape. By itself, society rarely seeks change; it is a culture waiting to be acted upon rather than acting. Change is imagined as a natural process arising elsewhere, which is then metabolised per our comfort.

Consider the Mandal Commission. At one level, it was perhaps the strongest action taken to reorder social hierarchy since independence. And it did change things significantly — it brought new groups into public life, redistributed opportunity, and altered the texture of politics. But even Mandal, over time, was absorbed into the existing order. Its energy dissipated into the competitive arithmetic of electoral politics. The players changed, but the game remained the same. Stronger castes strive to muscle their way into the list, making reservations an extension of the very system it was trying to resist. Mandal redistributed the access to the existing order without changing the order itself. The cast changed; the script remained the same.

Which is what makes society the invisible behemoth here. More powerful than religion, politics, or economics, it sets the emotional defaults, defines the terms of legitimacy, and decides what change is allowed to mean. Even religion, for all its fervour, tends to act more as a cheerleader than a regulator of society. It lends itself easily to social or political ends, deployed in defence of whatever the societal imperative of the moment might be.

And here lies the great tension at the heart of modern India. The political opportunity lies in using society exactly as it is. Power comes from mobilising existing identities, from deepening reciprocities, from reinforcing hierarchy rather than dismantling it. To win politically is to lean into society’s instinctive design.

But the development opportunity calls for the opposite. It demands that we overhaul these very instincts – make rules impersonal, make contracts reliable, make rights universal, and make outcomes predictable. It calls for institutions that are stronger than relationships and for a vision of equality that runs deeper than hierarchy.

This is why politics and development so often part ways. The very logic that delivers political success undermines developmental progress. Every time politics bends institutions to social logic, society wins—but the promise of systemic change recedes. And every time development is attempted, it risks colliding with society’s invisible boundaries.

The dilemma, of course, is that the very social structures that restrict us also provide value. What is oppressive is often also enabling. The mother-in-law may be the ogre in the domestic imagination, but she is also the one who looks after the child so that her bahu can go to work. The joint family constrains freedom, but it also spreads risk, shares resources, and gives the individual a buffer against the unpredictability of life. Caste discriminates, but it also delivers community and belonging.

This is what makes change in India so elusive. To dismantle a structure is not simply to remove a restriction; it is also to take away a support. And because every structure has this double face—both stifling and sustaining—society clings to it. Reform is never simply reform; it always feels like loss.

This paradox has consequences not only for society but also for the economy. For a while, we have been able to grow in spite of ourselves—riding on demographics, on cheap labour, and on entrepreneurial energy that leaps over obstacles rather than clears them. But progress without change extracts a price.

When institutions are weak and everything is negotiable, investment becomes riskier, contracts less reliable, and outcomes less predictable. It is no accident that Indian markets remain shallow; trust is scarce. Our bureaucracy, by keeping everything contingent, ensures that even economic certainty is provisional—what is cleared today might be blocked tomorrow, and only those who know how to navigate the maze can hope to succeed.

Caste and community still shape access to opportunity. Land disputes drag on for decades, and the rule of law bends to power. This creates friction everywhere. A factory takes years to build, an idea takes years to scale, and only those with the right social or political capital can move quickly. Growth happens, but it remains uneven—spectacular in some sectors, missing in others.

We are trapped between the sediment and flow. On some levels, India is unstoppable — a restless, surging flow. On others, it is immovable — weighed down by sediment that has been building for centuries. The sediment is an accumulation of habits, hierarchies, workarounds, and unwritten codes. It slows the flow, shapes its course, and ensures that movement happens without too much displacement.

One could argue that this is a half glass full or empty kind of a question. Do we focus on the positive which is undeniable or on the negative which is inescapable? India has definitely changed for the better in so many ways. We are a large, complex nation. Are we being too hard on ourselves?  Should we be more patient, more forgiving?

It isn’t as simple as that for there isn’t an equivalence between the two. The positive resides at the surface, the negative is structural. India has cracked the algorithm for shielding itself and its society from the forces of transformation. 

Politics, which was meant to transform society, has instead been irrevocably transformed by it.

You cannot make the developmental omelette without breaking the societal egg. But in India, we are reluctant to do so. Development is imagined as a meal that can be cooked while leaving the egg intact — the shell preserved, the hierarchy unbroken. This unwillingness to disturb the underlying structure explains why so many grand efforts end up as symbolic gestures rather than real shifts.

The problem is that India now faces a world moving at technological speed, while we still change at cultural speed. We will modernise, but subversively, mincing our steps as we zigzag ahead, much like autorickshaw in a crowded bazaar. 

The journey to being a developed country is not about roads, airports and malls. It is about the soft infrastructure of development. About an air of certainty and trust. In people, in institutions, in professions. In knowing that the police will act regardless of who is involved. In Knowing that the courts will decide impartially and quickly. That people will not drive on the wrong side of the road. That a new road will last 18 years, the average in developed countries. That one will not need a reference from someone important to get school admission. That doctors will not prescribe tests that are not needed. That the media will not concoct stories. That women will be safe being who they are. That access to healthcare and education will be widespread and of good quality. That breathing will not involve an act of courage.

When systems take themselves seriously, people follow. The metro works flawlessly. Airport toilets remain clean because the system expects and delivers cleanliness. Immigration lines are orderly because the system believes in order. People rise to the level of order they experience. Blaming citizens for institutional failures misses this fundamental point.

Can this happen? Do we see viable pathways to this change?.

There are a few possibilities that exist, as far as I can tell.

One option is clear. That we are forced into change. Perhaps by technology, which seems the likeliest candidate. Can AI create a system that overrides social mechanisms and create order? Can blockchain create trust of a new kind? 

It must be said that fundamental change in India has the best chance when it is imposed. Liberalisation is a great example.

Technology has the advantage of working invisibly. It bypasses cultural barriers. A mobile phone makes us individuals not through its ideology but through what its use enables. A touchscreen gives us a sense of personal agency by its form- it responds to every small whisper of a command. Can Ai bring about transformational change without being thwarted or tamed by society? 

However, it would be unwise to underestimate the social response. The same technology that empowers women has also created the world’s most powerful tool of social control- WhatsApp. Social media has helped entrenched regressive ideas more than any previous technology.

And AI too could well have the opposite effect- by deepening divides and creating a new set of haves and have-nots. 

The other possible arc of transformation is that the current political dispensation finds a way to overcome its need for revenge, and the othering of minorities searches for a truly Indian mode of thought. One that seeks to find answers in complexity, that does not think of development as a zero-sum game. One that offers an alternative to the dominant Western modes of development which are far from being perfect. One that distils the philosophical spirit of the past for use in the present rather than attempt a return to it

Again, this is a tenuous hope, with little evidence of it materialising into reality. If anything, we are moving in the opposite direction, by trying to create a closed version of thinking, opposed to the West on the surface while mimicking its structure. The famed Indian ability to accommodate differences is facing a challenge as we set out to literalise religion and harden boundaries.

Or alternatively the pot boils over. The frustration of citizens translates into a political movement that forces change. After all, democracy has been the instrument of change in so many countries. It is not fanciful to believe that the same could happen here. In a democracy, this is the most viable path for change if that what its citizens seek. 

But is that likely? We can have a different regime running things, but there is no promise of fundamental change. There are no political players that are invested in this kind of transformation. Everyone is playing within the implicit rules of the game. Without an alternative political imagination, change of this kind doesn’t look possible. And today, the system doesn’t seem to provide adequate incentive for the same. The process of winning todays’ elections almost guarantees that fundamental change is off the table. 

It is worth remembering that there are two arcs along which change can occur. 

The ideological arc measures outcomes — poverty reduction, gender equality, Hindu pride, minority rights. The systemic arc measures processes -- administrative freedom, insulation from consequences if one upholds the rules, separation of power from personal interest. The tragedy is that while politics obsesses about the ideological arc, the real revolution is needed in the systemic one. Unless processes themselves are reimagined and reinforced, ideological promises, however grand, collapse into rhetoric. And that is where no political formation in India today has either any vision or any incentive to move towards.

The responsibility shifts to the people to make this happen. To use the democratic system to demand change. Is that in the offing? Perhaps not, but one can never underestimate how quickly grassroots movements crystallise and become transformative.

Regardless of how the future pans out , India will not collapse. That is its superpower, It will always find its way. There is a resident wisdom at work, that is deep, even profound. But it will not transform dramatically either -- not in the way we imagine a developed nation rising. We will continue to drift forwards, between the banks of improvement and improvisation, slowly bettering our lot while getting more frustrated as our desires outpace our appetite for change.

As I move towards closing out this talk, I am reminded of Nietschze’s invoking of India as a mythical destination steeped in wisdom” will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering Westward, hoped to reach to reach an India- but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity?”

Here in the real, non-metaphorical India, are we looking elsewhere when we should be looking within? Perhaps, there is an elusive wisdom that India represents- one that a single lifetime is insufficient to fully grasp. 

Perhaps a hundred years from now, the countries that are the meteors today may have burned out- consumed in the slipstream of their own velocity. We already see Trumpian America attempting to scrawl over history in block letters with crayons. The developed world is riven by divisions that have emerged in part as a response to their development. 

In contrast, India’s insight might well be that while progress might move at the speed of technology, sustainable change will follow the contours of geology. Societies change far more slowly than technology or GDP numbers. 

Tomorrow’s India may still be moving ahead- in its own messy, conflicted way. Wobbly, but still there. Still charting its own course. Still haggling with the future.

Perhaps that’s the real truth about Brand India.

Not Incredible India, but Inevitable India

Being invited to deliver the Subhas Ghosal memorial Lecture is an absolute privilege, one which is also a terrifying one. Because those of you who are of my vintage would know the weight that name carries. Advertising has always had its share of deities but Mr Ghosal stands apart. His name is never uttered without a touch of hushed reverence. He evokes a time of uprightness, grace and honour, words that feel out of place in any context today, let alone in advertising.

It isn’t just for the work, though the work was considerable. It isn’t just for the institutions he built or the belief he had in the value of people or the many brands he helped build.

It is for something more elusive. A belief, bordering on the sacred, held seriously and enacted consistently, that this profession mattered.

It mattered because it worked for the truth. It mattered because it was a way of making everyday life beautiful. It mattered because it built value, not just in terms of commerce, but in terms of human connection. And finally it mattered because it accepted that it had obligations: to clients, to society, to the people working in the profession and to the consumer. Advertising felt like the pursuit of the civilised in a civilised world.

Things have changed, as they must. It is easy for this talk to be an elegy for a past we have left behind, but that would be self-indulgent, apart from being too simplistic. We live in a transformed world, and advertising, like everything else, must find its own voice within that.

It is a loud world we live in today. It is a world where we react more than we act. Where temperatures seem to be running high all the time, and where communication is largely about two deaf sides screaming at each other. It is the Age of Outrage.

We know this. Who has not lamented about how perpetually outraged we all seem to be. For this talk to have any meaning and interest, it must go beyond what we all already know.

We know that outrage belongs to no single ideology. The right revels in it. The left uses it systematically. The centre deploys it on the rare occasions it remembers it exists. Outrage is a promiscuous beast. It goes willingly with everyone.

We know that outrage is very often manufactured. That algorithms gorge on it. Because outrage is the highest yield emotional fuel available. More reliable than joy. More durable than sadness. More transmissible than the second phase of Covid.

We know it is self-replicating. Outrage multiplies itself. Your outrage feeds mine which in turn feeds theirs. Because it is cheap.

We know it has no sense of proportion. The outrage over a casting decision and the outrage over a massacre carry the same emotional pitch, the same edge of hysteria.

But why is it this way? For while the algorithms have certainly made a difference, there is something deeper at work. There is something in us that makes us respond to algorithms in this way.

At its heart, outrage is about significance.

An ordinary person, faceless except for the few who know them, throws a pebble into the world and watches in amazement and satisfaction as the ripples radiate outwards, generating more ripples, and then even more.

There is a pleasure in this. It is deeply satisfying. It always was, even as children.

This is the pleasure of causation. The feeling that I matter. That I can make things happen at a scale far beyond the small world I inhabit. Of watching a world where you were nothing but a data point, a monthly active user, a demographic coordinate, a target, react at your provocation.

I moved the pond.

This is a new experience. Genuinely new, at this scale. For most of human history, causing ripples beyond your immediate circle required power or wealth or talent or proximity to catastrophe. The right to broadcast was a jealously guarded resource. Controlled by the powerful.

We sometimes do not acknowledge how extraordinary this is, the fact that every individual is a broadcaster today. The generation I grew up in had very few means of being heard. Either the three measly letters to the Editor in a newspaper, or maybe farmaishes on Vividh Bharati. The sum total of our voice, unless one was somebody.

At one level the right to broadcast was hardly democratic, but as a result it built formidable quality standards. Not everyone could get it, and in order to do so, many hurdles needed to be passed. It became an act of responsibility where truth and verification mattered, where the quality of thinking was valued, and above all there was the idea of accountability. To facts. To public welfare. To consequence. To one’s audience. You simply could not publish what came to your mind.

Now when anyone can broadcast their views not just to an immediate audience but potentially to the world, the grammar of knowledge has changed. Today opinions are everyone’s right. They are instantaneous, operating from the outermost surface of the mind. They circulate with great velocity and they can be anonymous. The Overton window for what is deemed acceptable has shifted dramatically.

In real life someone with extreme views had to be careful with airing them. Today the most bigoted perspective gets instant endorsement from thousands of others, emboldening all extreme views. Nothing is deemed too offensive to be off the table. Paradoxically, nothing is too trivial to take offence to.

One more thing. There is something about the nature of time that has changed which has helped create the conditions for the production, consumption and circulation of outrage.

I call this soft time. The time spent doing things while doing other things. The squishy liquidy time when we are watching a show while scrolling, and munching on something.

Soft time has its own distinctive grammar. By its nature, it cannot deal with complexity. It fears ambivalence or nuance. It cannot turn feeling into considered response, but is very good at generating reactions.

Outrage is made for soft time. It is entertainment and stimulation compressed into micro-time. It is immensely scrollable, and even more easily forgettable.

The story of outrage is not only a story about technology. It is a story of how attention works in the digital age. A world that has less and less hard time, time when we do only one thing, give only one thing our full attention, and more and more soft time. And outrage is what makes soft time feel most substantial.

The other thing about outrage is that it is professed far more than it is experienced. It is above all, a performance.

If it were really an emotion, it would show the characteristics of emotion. Something that rises in people and demands to be expressed. There would be a sense of depletion after its expression. There would be a gap before that emotion could be summoned again. There would be some relationship between the nature of the cause and the intensity of the response.

None of these things are consistently true.

And now we have arrived at the logical endpoint of that trajectory. Artificial intelligence can produce outrage content at scale, with no human affect behind it whatsoever. Not performed feeling. No feeling at all. The complete separation of the genre from any originating human experience. When we worried about outrage as performance we were still assuming a performer. That assumption is no longer safe. In a world with infinite content and finite attention, outrage is the easiest answer. And it doesn’t moderate in an AI world. It becomes more necessary as a differentiator.

Outrage exists because it has its uses. It broadcasts to the world who we are. We are who we hate. It is the strongest negative currency in existence: what you don’t like, who you don’t believe in, whose every word is anathema. This is the most articulate signal of identity. Know me by what I spit on.

So outrage plays several roles. Of underlining presence. Of placing oneself within a preferred collective. Of producing the ripple that reassures us that we can cause a reaction. Of declaring identity.

In that sense, outrage is not a malfunction. It is an extraordinarily efficient solution to several simultaneous problems.

What outrage is not focused on is the one thing that would actually matter. Change. The outrage game requires two sides, both suspended in a never-changing web of their own incompleteness. It is a game that must continue unresolved, for that is when it is most productive for the purposes for which it exists.

But outrage is not a harmless way of blowing off steam. It creates a larger pattern, affecting the nature of democracy as a system.

We live today in what I would call a hot democracy. A system constructed to transfer heat more than light. One where response is immediate, emotion is public, reaction is continuous, issues are symbolic and pressure is applied in real time. The business of governance operates under the hood, while on the surface all we see is the transfer of heat from one side to another.

You could argue that this sounds like more democracy. More voices. More urgency. More participation. But that is a misreading of what democracy always was.

Representative democracy recognised that everyone could not have a voice in everything. We elected representatives once every five years who spoke for us, not on every issue that engaged us, but on a few that were deemed important.

Representative democracy was fundamentally a cooling system. You elected someone. You transferred your emotional heat to them. The system acted as a circuit-breaker between emotion and policy. It sought to weed out surplus emotion in order to focus on the substantive.

The hot democracy works on the opposite premise. Emotion is the primary animating force. The system reacts constantly and operates on primal instincts. Which is why we see the rise of populist authoritarian democratically elected governments in so many parts of the world. Hot democracies produce a type of power that focuses on emotive issues and revels in creating faultlines. Along the axes of race, culture, nationality, religion, caste, gender, sexuality.

So many of the burning issues of the day are symbolic. The demand that a scene be removed from a film. The insistence on an apology for the wrong word used years ago. The campaign to remove someone from a position because of a view they once held. So much of the outrage today involves symbolic issues. Who said what. Did a film offend a community by using the wrong word. We have seen this in the examples of Tanishq and Lenskart.

And here, outrage often wins. The ad is taken off air. The film scene is censored. An apology is issued. But this is all theatre because nothing of consequence changes. Because nothing of consequence was at stake in the first place. The outrage was a flex. It was a way of saying the group I am part of is powerful.

The question of where society goes from here is not separate from the question of where this profession goes. They are the same question operating at different scales.

Two possible directions.

The first is that this is a phase. Technology has always moved faster than culture. The printing press created a century of religious strife before equilibrium returned. The internet and the smartphone have set in motion something whose consequences we are still inside. But culture has absorbed disruptive technology before. Equilibrium has been reached before. More than once.

But history, encouraging as it is, is no guarantee.

The second direction has no equilibrium built into it. We become more primal as we become more connected. Even as we embrace more modern tools, our tribal hardware reasserts. We boil over with primitive passions. Strength asserts itself nakedly, and seeks to dominate. Remember, the liberal project and the rules-based international order are an aberration in history and not the rule. We could go back to being what we always were.

The age of outrage will not resolve itself from the outside. AI will not fix it. It will just make outrage easier. It will either be reversed from the inside, by people and institutions choosing, against the grain of every incentive the current system offers, to do the harder thing. To replace the posture with the truth. The reaction with the thought. The outward ripple with the inner meaning.

Or it will become the culture. The temperature at which everything simply runs. The air we breathe without noticing anymore.

That choice exists at every scale. In governments. In institutions. In individuals.

And in advertising.

Now let’s talk about this room.

Because advertising has not been an innocent bystander in all this. In many significant ways it has helped construct this world.

The age of outrage did not suddenly arrive. Advertising helped create the enabling conditions for it and it is worth being honest about that.

That is not to say that this was done deliberately. It was certainly not malicious. But it happened systematically. Over decades. In the normal course of doing its job extremely well.

Consider what advertising actually taught the world.

It taught the world to understand itself through tribes. From a certain point in the twentieth century, the logic of advertising shifted. It moved from saying this product has these qualities to saying this product is for people like you. The Pepsi Generation. The BMW driver. The Patagonia buyer. The woman who knows her own mind. Advertising invented the idea of identity consumption. The idea that what you choose, what you buy, what you wear, what you drive, where you eat, is a signal of who you are.

That same grammar is now the grammar of outrage. I am defined by what I like and what I reject. Know me by what I cannot tolerate. My opinion defines who I am. The tribes are no longer defined by products alone. But the logic that our choices are the primary signal of who we are, that came from here.

Advertising also taught the world to live in a state of escalating but managed dissatisfaction. To manufacture a gap, between what you have and what you could have, between who you are and who you might be, and then offer to close it.

Do this at industrial scale long enough and the result is a population programmed for dissatisfaction. A constant feeling of inadequacy and insufficiency. A nagging sense of incompleteness.

Outrage is that dissatisfaction with one unique advantage. It cannot be resolved. It can only feed more outrage. It can ebb but it never disappears.

That is the condition that the outrage economy now exploits with perfect efficiency.

Outrage ate advertising’s lunch using advertising’s own tools.

Advertising was, for most of its history, a hard time medium. It was the price people paid for being interested in something else. You wanted to see the cricket match. The film. The article. The advertisement was the cost of entry. You couldn’t refuse, it was embedded into the experience. No skip button. No fast forward.

Advertising’s golden age was built, in significant part, on a structural compulsion.

And interestingly, the profession’s response to that compulsion was creativity. Coming from an acknowledgment, implicit but real, that holding someone’s attention without their consent created an obligation. That there needed to be a reward for the viewer, to make the imposition feel worthwhile.

Creativity was the sweetener. It made the interruption tolerable. At its best, genuinely pleasurable. Sometimes the advertisement became the thing people remembered more than the programme itself. Advertising was a legitimate part of popular culture. It was part of the memoryscape of the times. It was part of public conversation. Did you see that ad? Remember that one? Eras were marked by ads, taglines were cultural material. Live Life Kingsize. Taste the Thunder. Dhoondte reh jaaoge? Bhala uski kameez. Har Ghar Kuchch Kehta hai. Yeh Dil Maange Mor. Thanda Matlab Coca Cola.

When digital technology arrived, the entire power equation turned on its head. The captive audience was liberated. Advertising was no longer a compulsion. And advertising found itself in a soft time world, trying to use hard time tools on audiences who had moved on and would never return.

The crisis that followed is usually described in economic and technological terms. Fragmented attention. Ad aversion. Programmatic buying. The death of the thirty second spot. Performance advertising over brand building. But these are symptoms. The underlying condition is simpler and more severe.

In a soft time world, the instinctive reaction to anything that appears as advertising is rejection. The moment the audience identifies what it is, their defences go up. Not because the creativity got worse, although it has. But because the audience gets to choose what to watch. And advertising just doesn’t cut it.

In a soft time world hard time activities become very expensive. Unless they add real value, they are shunned. That’s the challenge cinema in theatres faces, for instance.

But here is what I find genuinely puzzling.

We now have a medium designed precisely for short form storytelling. The exact form this profession has practised for decades. The cornerstone of advertising was the thirty second spot, the ultimate compression of storytelling. And now we have a media format entirely dedicated to this mode. With no constraints. No clients. No safe briefs. No committees to pass through.

And where is advertising in all this? Nowhere.

It is the seventeen year old from Moradabad who has killed it. Without a budget. Without any training. Without any title proclaiming special creative ability. Without the elaborate structure that storytelling hides inside in advertising.

How do we explain this?

It is not the absence of talent. Advertising has always been full of talented people. The problem is that advertising took the power of raw storytelling and buried it inside a process. An ecosystem so dense that over time the storytelling became almost incidental to the machinery around it. The brief. The creative review. The iterative approval system. The production house. The fetishised shoot. The astronomical budget. Successively advertising protected itself from the immediacy of human connection.

And then the profession built a reward system that has nothing to do with its professed intention. To tell stories that move people and make them act in a certain way.

The award.

I am acutely aware that this is being said at an awards function. I will leave you to decide whether that makes it more relevant or less.

The award itself is not the issue. It is the primacy accorded to it that is. It has given the profession a reward system that has nothing to do with the market or the audience. It has turned the profession inwards. Unmindful of the fact that the world outside does not care, has stopped caring years ago. At a time when advertising as a form is facing an existential crisis, this devotion to self-congratulation feels staggeringly tone deaf.

There are no Lions for creators making reels. That is their greatest strength.

So when the profession is absent from the one space where its claimed expertise should be most visible, it is no surprise.

Which raises a more fundamental question. Why is advertising a profession at all?

Isn’t it simply a genre?

Horror is a genre. Romance is a genre. The folk song is a genre. Anyone can work in them. Nobody owns them. They have no fee structure, no agency model, no creative brief, no strategic planning department.

Why not advertising?

This is not speculation. The signals are already visible. Creators make their own versions of ads. And they do it every day. And Unilever’s move to recruit thousands of influencers is not a media buying decision. It is a momentous structural shift. The institution is being disaggregated. The form, the persuasive short form narrative, is still highly relevant, perhaps even more relevant than ever. The profession as this room has known it, however, may not be.

Here is what I find hardest to accept.

The world has never been more hospitable to what this profession knows how to do.

Think about what the age of outrage actually runs on. Narrative construction. Identity performance. The framing of reality. Presenting the self to maximum effect. The manufacturing of desire and grievance. The compression of complex feeling into transmissible form.

These are not new skills that appeared from nowhere. This profession invented them. Refined them. Deployed them at scale for decades. Advertising was the original master of every technique the attention economy now runs on.

And then consider the short form narrative. The thirty second spot. The profession’s proudest claim. The ultimate compression of storytelling. Emotion, character, conflict, resolution, in less time than it takes to pour a cup of tea. The creator economy is built entirely on that form. It is the dominant cultural form of our time. Hundreds of millions of people watch it, share it, build their identities around it.

Not one significant creator came from advertising. Not one.

This should have been advertising’s moment. The world finally speaking the language this profession spent a century building.

This was the time for the profession to prove that it did not work because it could force people to watch ads, or because of the aggregation of audiences that media used to provide. That when it came to the crunch, its storytelling prowess was enough.

This was the time when the profession could have become a factory for creators. It could have invested in startups, taking sweat equity in exchange for strategic and creative input, building stakes in the new world rather than mourning the old one. It had the talent. It had the relationships. It had the understanding of what moves people that nobody else in the room possessed.

But that would have meant letting go of the set way of doing things. The elaborate approval structures. The fetishised production process. The awards that told the profession it was excellent regardless of whether anyone outside this room agreed.

The profession clung to the form, not the meaning.

It found itself frozen. Bleating about lost relevance. Watching a seventeen year old from Moradabad do in three minutes on a phone what the profession spent fifty years and a thousand award entries claiming only it could do.

The story that could only have come from a human being. Told with genuine craft and genuine obligation. To a person who chose to receive it.

The Age of Outrage could have been The Age of Advertising. It still can be

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