(Credits: Reuters)

A minister resigned and a crowd at Jantar Mantar cheered like something had ended. Something did. It is worth being clear about what.

Dharmendra Pradhan is gone. The Cockroach Janta Party—a name chosen for the insult, worn like armour—got the scalp it asked for, got the promise of compensation for the families of students who did not survive the news that their results would be scrapped, got a seat at a table where a five-point reform plan will be “reviewed.” That word, reviewed, is doing a great deal of quiet work. The protests have been called off. The demands were met. Everyone went home.

And the man who took the chair is Prahlad Joshi, who came up through the RSS the way water comes up through a well, and who spent the last few years fighting climate activists and coal-belt villagers to dig more coal out of the ground. A six-term MP close to the Prime Minister. Consumer affairs, food, renewables—and now, additionally, the education of a billion people, handled on the side. His first public statement was that he wanted to understand first, then deliver. Read that as reassurance if you like. I read it as a man who has been handed a fire and told to make sure it stops trending.

Understand what “restoring public trust in the exam system” means when it is this man’s assignment. In 2024, Bengaluru police booked Joshi’s estranged brother, a nephew, and a woman who allegedly passed herself off as Joshi’s sister, for allegedly cheating a former MLA’s wife of around two crore rupees: the promise being a BJP Lok Sabha ticket, the sales pitch being Joshi’s own closeness to Modi and Shah. Joshi is not named in the FIR. He says he cut his brother off three decades ago, filed the affidavit, published the notice, washed his hands. Take him at his word. It changes nothing about the shape of the thing, which is that his name was valuable enough to sell—that somewhere out there a family handed over their savings because proximity to this minister was understood to be purchasable currency. That is the man now tasked with convincing seventeen-year-olds that the system rewards merit and not access. You could not write it as satire. The CJP already used the best available name.

Here is the thing nobody chanting on Saturday wanted to sit with: the ministry changed hands without changing direction. This was never a policy defeat. It was a personnel adjustment. The machine offered up a face, the crowd accepted the face, and the machine kept running. Pradhan absorbed the anger and then Pradhan was removed, which is precisely what a minister is for. If you had designed a system to survive a mass movement while conceding nothing structural, you would have designed this.

I don’t say that to sneer at the students. The rage was real and earned. When exam after exam leaks and the people who administer them keep their jobs and their dignity, and the children who studied for two years in coaching-town cubicles are told to sit again, something has to give. It gave. A minister fell. That is not nothing. Governments in this country rarely apologise, and this one didn’t either, but it flinched, and a flinch is a kind of confession.

But a flinch is not a foundation. And this is where I want to be honest about the CJP, because the celebration has a shelf life and the movement does not have an ideology underneath it to outlast the celebration.

The Cockroach Janta Party has a grievance and a genius for spectacle. It does not have a theory of power. It knows what it is against: a rigged exam, a smug minister, a system that treats the young as raw material, but “against” is not a politics, it is a mood. Movements built on a mood win the moment and lose the aftermath, because the moment ends and the aftermath is where everything actually gets decided. What is the CJP’s position on caste in the classroom? On the private coaching cartel that turned aspiration into a subscription service? On who gets to sit the exam in the first place? I don’t know. I’m not sure it knows. It had a villain and now the villain has a replacement, and a movement organised around a villain does not know what to do when the villain is simply swapped out for a quieter one.

And while it works out what it is, the government gets on with everything that does not photograph well.

Consider the Ken-Betwa river-linking project, grinding forward through the Panna landscape; a scheme to move water from one river to another that will drown a chunk of a tiger reserve and displace people who were not consulted in any language they use at home. It does not leak on a Tuesday. It leaks over decades, into forests that cannot hold a press conference. There was no crowd at Jantar Mantar for the trees.

Consider the E20 mandate: twenty percent ethanol blended into the petrol you are already buying, sold as a green triumph, arriving without asking whether your car was built to burn it, whether your mileage drops, whether the sugarcane and maize feeding the blend should have fed people instead, whether the water that grows the cane is water a drought-state can spare. A policy that reaches into every fuel tank in the country and it moves as a footnote, because a footnote does not have a face to demand the resignation of.

This is the trade the machine makes gladly. Give up a minister, keep the pipeline. Give up a portfolio, keep the policy. The things that trend get a resignation. The things that don’t get built anyway.

And then there is the part the CJP would prefer I not raise, so I will raise it, and I want to raise it fairly, because the easy version of this critique is wrong.

The easy version says the movement was upper-caste and blind to it. It wasn’t, quite. Its founder, Abhijeet Dipke, is Dalit, from a poor family in Maharashtra, an Ambedkarite who arrived in Delhi holding up Babasaheb’s autobiography, who declared blue his colour after someone flung ink in his face, who was himself buried under caste abuse the moment he said the word Dalit on X. So this is not a movement that forgot caste existed. It is something more uncomfortable: a movement led by a Dalit that still could not make caste part of what it was willing to fight for, because caste is the one demand that does not unify a crowd of aspirants; it divides them along the exact lines the exam pretends to erase. Dipke owned his identity and kept it, strategically, to the side. The manifesto stayed about merit and exams and jobs, the clean grievances, the ones that let a savarna student and a Dalit student stand in the same square without discussing why they didn’t start from the same place.

Which means the movement left people out anyway—not out of ignorance, but out of the arithmetic of winning. It did not carry the marginalised whose grievances do not fit on a placard about exam integrity: the Dalit and Muslim and Adivasi young who are not failed by the exam so much as filtered out long before they reach it, and who, when they show up to help, are the first the state comes for. They get a lathi. They get a case. They get a night in a station and a family whose documents are taken while a movement they served celebrates a few kilometres away.

Say his name, because the crowd already forgot it. Muhammad Junaid, not a leader, not a face on a placard, a young man who noticed in early June that protesters at Jantar Mantar were struggling to find drinking water in the Delhi heat, and who started handing out water, and then food, day after day, for weeks. His crime, in other words, was feeding people. And for that the Uttar Pradesh police went to his house in Ghaziabad and took his father, detained his minor brother, drove to Meerut to pick up his sister’s husband and father-in-law, and seized the family’s Aadhaar cards and bank passbooks—the documents that in this country are the difference between a person and a problem. What is my crime? Is providing food and water a crime? he asked, and no official answered, because the answer was written in who he was: a Muslim volunteer at a protest that had otherwise kept itself carefully patriotic, carefully respectable, carefully unthreatening. His family was released after two days. The machine had made its point.

Notice the asymmetry the movement could not resolve. The students who led the protest went home with a minister’s head. The Muslim man who fed them went home to a raided house. The CJP condemned it, said the right things, promised to fight it in court, and I don’t doubt they meant it. But condemnation is cheap and the structure is the tell: the protest could win the demand that photographed well and could not protect the volunteer who made the demand possible. The same police whose tactics against the exam protesters “drew wider support”, the phrase the international press used, approvingly, are the police who, for the marginalised, have never needed a protest to justify the lathi. They arrive with it standing.

That is the asymmetry the celebration papers over. A movement that can extract a resignation for a leaked exam but cannot keep the police from raiding a volunteer’s home for the crime of handing out food has discovered exactly how much dissent this system will absorb and exactly whose dissent it will not. The CJP won the fight it was allowed to win.

Which is why the question everyone is now circling matters more than it looks: does the CJP become a party? Does it walk the road AAP walked out of the Anna Hazare movement, from a clean-hands anti-corruption agitation into a registered outfit with candidates and a symbol and, eventually, all the compromises that a symbol requires? The comparison is unavoidable, and Dipke keeps swatting it away. No electoral ambitions, he says. A student campaign, not a party. We field no candidates, we are not registered with the Election Commission. He rejects the AAP parallel more insistently than he rejects anything else.

I would believe the denial more if he weren’t building the machine that makes it a lie. There is already a constitution. There is a five-point manifesto. There is a membership system that issues you an ID and a digital card and a “swarm number,” a lakh of sign-ups in seventy-two hours, an invitation to political parties to come rally under the Tiranga. That is not the infrastructure of a mood. That is the infrastructure of a party that has not yet admitted it wants to be one. And Dipke, of all people, knows the shape of this road—he worked AAP’s social-media team for three years. He watched a movement become a party from the inside. When he says the CJP won’t follow that path, he is not speaking from innocence. He is speaking from having seen exactly where it leads and insisting, for now, that he can stop short of it.

And here is the trap, sharpened by everything above. If the CJP stays a movement, it stays a mood, and moods evaporate—the paint was already being scrubbed off the Jantar Mantar walls before the crowd finished celebrating. If it becomes a party, it inherits everything that hollowed out AAP: the need to win seats, which means the need to not alienate, which means the caste question that Dipke already kept to the side stays sidelined not for one season but permanently, and the Junaids stay volunteers rather than constituents—useful at the barricade, invisible on the ballot. AAP came out of Anna promising to be different and governs now like a slightly politer version of the thing it replaced. A movement with no structural ideology underneath it does not resolve this dilemma. It only picks which way to disappear.

So: now what.

Joshi will understand first. The reform plan will be reviewed. The compensation will be paid, and it should be, and it will also function as a receipt marked paid in full; a way of saying the account is settled, please disperse. The next exam will be administered by the same architecture that leaked the last one, tuned slightly, watched slightly harder, until the watching relaxes. Ken-Betwa will keep moving. The ethanol will keep blending. Junaid will go on being the kind of citizen who feeds strangers in the heat and gets his family raided for it, and the movement he fed will not, in any lasting way, be waiting with him.

I am not telling you the protest was pointless. I am telling you that a movement which does not know what it believes cannot defend what it won, and cannot notice what it abandoned. The crowd got a resignation. The question is whether it wanted a resignation or wanted things to actually change, because those turned out to be very different sizes of thing, and it accepted the smaller one and called it the larger one and went home.

Maybe that’s all a movement can get in a single season. Maybe the scalp is the seed and something structural grows from it. I would like to believe that. I have watched enough of these cheers fade to know what usually grows instead, which is nothing, which is the next scandal, which is a new minister who understands first and delivers never.

The cheering has stopped now. That’s when you find out what a movement was actually made of—not in the winning, but in the long quiet afterward, when the cameras have gone and the only people still standing at the barricade are the ones who were never invited to the front.

On Monday morning, the monsoon session of Parliament opened to the sound of its own children at the gates. Students, some still in school uniforms, some who had slipped out of their homes without telling their parents, some carrying the ghosts of siblings lost to an examination system that eats its young, marched from Jantar Mantar toward Sansad Bhavan. By afternoon, they had been answered with lathis and tear gas. Inside, the Lok Sabha was adjourned. Outside, a 59-year-old man lay in a hospital bed on the twentieth-plus day of a hunger strike, writing handwritten letters describing his confinement as illegal detention.

Sonam Wangchuk is not fasting for Ladakh this time. He is fasting because a question paper leaked. Because the CBSE’s on-screen marking left thousands of students staring at results they could not trust. Because somewhere between the coaching centre and the exam hall, the Indian state broke its most basic promise to its most powerless constituents: that if you work hard, the test will at least be real.

Sit with that for a moment. A man who has spent his life building schools in the Himalayas is now prepared to die because the country cannot conduct an honest exam.

The demand at the centre of this movement, the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, has been dismissed by its critics as theatre. What would one man’s exit fix, they ask, when the rot is structural? NTA, the coaching-industrial complex, the centralisation of examinations, the sheer actuarial cruelty of twenty-four lakh students competing for a sliver of seats—none of this disappears with one resignation letter.

They are right about the rot and wrong about the remedy. Systemic reform does not begin with a white paper. It begins with a precedent. A minister resigning over an exam leak would establish, in the muscle memory of the Indian state, something we have almost forgotten: that actions have consequences. That a failure of this magnitude, on this watch, carries a cost that is borne by the powerful and not only by the eighteen-year-olds in Kota and Patna and Sikar who bear it now—in lost years, in depression, in the worst cases in death. Accountability at the top is not a substitute for structural reform. It is the precondition for it. No system reforms itself while the people who broke it keep their chairs.

Notably, Wangchuk’s own conditions for ending his fast are not about any one man. He has asked for the government to take accountability for the education system’s failures, and for the paper leak to be raised on the floor of Parliament. That distinction matters, and it tells you what this movement actually is: not a vendetta, but a demand that the machinery of the republic acknowledge its own breakdown. The resignation is a symbol. The symbol is the point. Symbols are how states remember.

The cockroaches, the memes, and the genius of Gen Z

It should embarrass all of us that the most electric protest movement in the country right now is named after an insult. When a sitting judge’s remarks were taken as calling ordinary aspirants cockroaches, a young digital strategist did the most Gen Z thing imaginable: he took the slur and wore it as a crown. The Cockroach Janta Party was born as satire and became, within weeks, a mass mobilisation: sit-ins, digital campaigns, and finally a march on Parliament that drew students from across the country.

This is worth naming as craft, not just spectacle. The older grammar of Indian protest, the dharna, the padyatra, the fast, has been fused with a newer one: the meme as manifesto, the reclaimed insult as identity, the Instagram reel as pamphlet. A cockroach, after all, is the thing that survives everything. The joke does serious work. It is legible to a sixteen-year-old scrolling at midnight in a way that no press release ever will be, and it travels faster than any police barricade can rise. Social media did not create this anger, the anger was sitting in every coaching-town hostel room already, but it collapsed the distance between a leaked paper in one state and a broken heart in another, and turned isolated grief into collective grievance. That is what amplification means when it matters: not virality for its own sake, but the discovery, at scale, that you were never alone.

And yet—and this must be said plainly—this protest is not for the CJP. It is not for any banner, any founder, any handle. The organisation is a vehicle. The students are the destination. Movements curdle when the vessel starts mistaking itself for the cause, and the surest way to honour what has been built at Jantar Mantar is to remember whose bodies are actually on the line: the aspirants, the repeaters, the ones who lost a year, the families who lost more than a year.

On latecomers and purity

Now, the harder part—the part where I implicate myself.

There is a familiar sneer doing the rounds: where were these liberals when—? And the sentence can be completed a dozen ways, each of them fair. Many of the people posting solidarity stories this week were silent through other, less telegenic injustices. I have been that person. I have scrolled past causes that demanded more of me than a repost, and I have arrived late to fights that others were bleeding in for years. The charge of selective outrage lands because it is true.

But here is what the sneer misses: a movement is not a members-only club with a loyalty card. Everyone in this country was a student once. Everyone remembers the particular terror of a result, the particular helplessness of a system that will not explain itself. That is precisely why this cause has broken through where others haven’t; it requires no translation. And if that accessibility makes it, yes, a sanitised cause, safer to support than the ones involving less sympathetic victims, that is an argument for using this door while it is open, not for slamming it on the people finally walking through.

The left has a long, exhausting habit of greeting new arrivals with an entrance exam. Purity politics is the luxury of movements that have already lost. Every hour spent litigating who cared first, whose solidarity is authentic, whose politics are sufficiently radical, is an hour gifted to the very establishment being protested. Fracture is not rigour. Fracture is what power prays for. The lathi that fell on Parliament Street on Monday did not check anyone’s ideological credentials first.

So let the latecomers come. Let them come embarrassed, come inconsistent, come with their compromised timelines and their newly discovered outrage. The test of solidarity is not where you were; it is whether you stay.

There is a quieter exercise unfolding across the country this month, and it belongs in the same essay as the tear gas. Booth Level Officers are walking door to door under the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR), the first such nationwide scrubbing of the electoral rolls in over two decades, distributing enumeration forms, verifying voters, redrawing the master list of who counts. In several states, the deadlines fall within days. And the fine print carries a warning every protester should read twice: if your form is not submitted, your name may simply not appear in the draft roll. In Uttar Pradesh alone, nearly three crore names did not survive the revision.

Whatever one’s view of the exercise, and there are serious, contested questions about who gets deleted and why, its practical meaning for this generation is unambiguous. The eighteen-year-olds at Jantar Mantar this week are the newest entrants to the electorate, and many of them are one unsubmitted form away from not being on it. So check your name. Fill the form. Register, verify, and drag your family to do the same. This is not civic homework tacked on to the real politics of the street; it is the politics of the street, carried indoors. A protest demands that actions have consequences. A vote is the only instrument the Constitution gives us to deliver those consequences ourselves — to remove, without lathis or hunger strikes, the representatives who failed us, and to choose ones who will not.

Because here is the uncomfortable symmetry: if we march in July and are absent from the rolls by election day, our silence becomes a form of consent. The minister who does not resign, the agency that is not reformed, the system that leaks and shrugs, all of it persists partly on the arithmetic of people who were angry but unregistered, outraged but unenrolled. Complicity does not always look like support. Sometimes it looks like a missing name on a list we never bothered to check.

We are living through a moment when the word anti-national is deployed like a cudgel—against students, against protesters, against a man on a hospital bed refusing food. But consider what was actually on display this week. Teenagers who believe, against all available evidence, that this country’s institutions can still be made to answer to them. A man willing to stake his life on the idea that Parliament will listen. That is not sedition. That is the most desperate form of faith in India that exists.

The truly anti-national act is the shrug. It is watching a generation’s future get traded in leaked PDFs and deciding it is not your problem. It is having a voice and sitting on it because the timing is inconvenient or the company imperfect. A nation is not its ministers, its agencies, or its exam-conducting bodies. It is twenty-four lakh students who did the work and asked only that the test be honest, and every one of us who decides, late or early, loudly or clumsily, to stand with them: on the street, on our timelines, and on the electoral roll.

Use your voice. It is the one paper that cannot leak.

There is a particular pleasure the internet has discovered in not liking Alia Bhatt. Not hating her the way people hate villains, with moral clarity and justified outrage, but disliking her the way you dislike a coworker who seems slightly too curated, too managed, too aware of how she’s being perceived in every room she enters. The dislike is ambient. It spreads easily. It requires almost no justification because it has accumulated so many justifications over the years that you can pick whichever one fits your mood: she’s a nepo kid, her PR is exhausting, she tolerates her husband’s condescension, she tries too hard to be liked. Each of these things is, to varying degrees, true. And yet the pile-on has always been a little too enthusiastic to be purely about any of them.

Let’s start with what should settle the matter first, because it almost never does: Alia Bhatt is genuinely good at acting. Not “good for a star kid” or “good given her limitations”—she is technically, formally, measurably good. Highway in 2014 announced something different in her; Raazi confirmed it; Gangubai Kathiawadi got her a National Award for a performance of extraordinary physical and emotional control. The woman can disappear into a character. She can cry in a way that doesn’t look like crying. She can hold a scene’s emotional register without announcing that she’s holding it. For a country that claims to take cinema seriously, this should count for something. It doesn’t, particularly. Because the talent has been buried under layers of narrative management that have made her deeply difficult to trust, and we have decided —perhaps correctly—that the management is the real story.

The paid PR problem is not that it exists. Every A-lister in Bollywood has a machinery humming in the background. The problem is that Alia’s PR has always been visible enough to see the fingerprints. You notice the planted stories, the strategic appearances, the interviews where every answer sounds rehearsed to seem unrehearsed. There is a recognizable syntax to it: the self-deprecating anecdote that positions her as relatable, the pause before the “vulnerable” admission, the laugh that arrives a beat too fast. When it works, it works briefly. When it fails, it fails in ways that lodge in cultural memory—the Koffee with Karan episode where she didn’t know who the President of India was became a meme that followed her for years, not because she was uniquely uninformed but because it punctured the image so cleanly, so publicly, and in the very house where her image was being built.

Karan Johar laughed. This is the thing people forget. He set it up, let her walk into it, and laughed. There is something instructive in that, the machinery that builds you will also let you embarrass yourself if the content is good enough, because the content is always more important than you are. This should have been a lesson about the limits of managed PR. Instead it became a loop she’s been trying to escape ever since, with strategies that sometimes make the problem worse.

Appearing on India’s Got Latent Season 2 was one of those strategies, and it failed in an entirely predictable way. The show is Samay Raina’s territory: irreverent, deliberately uncomfortable, built for an audience that has developed sophisticated antibodies to exactly the kind of managed relatability that Alia’s PR team specialises in. The fans who fill Samay’s comments aren’t going to warm to you because you showed up and laughed at a few jokes. They’re going to watch for the moments where the performance slips. They’re forensic. A celebrity walking into that space hoping to seem “cool” and “in on the joke” is a celebrity who has fundamentally misread what the space is. You can’t buy cool from people who have made a whole identity out of not being bought.

What Samay got from that appearance was straightforward: views, mainstream attention, the legitimacy of a Bollywood A-lister choosing his platform. What Alia got was considerably less. The criticism that followed—that she seemed coached even in an uncoached setting, that the appearance was itself a PR move poorly disguised as anti-PR, only reinforced the original problem. She tried to reach a demographic that distrusts her by doing the thing that demographic distrusts most. Samay’s audience didn’t become her audience. They just became another room where her image didn’t quite fit.

The nepo discourse is both entirely fair and somewhat dishonest in how it gets applied to her specifically. Alia Bhatt is the daughter of Mahesh Bhatt, launched by Karan Johar, who was practically family before she was old enough to have a career. Student of the Year is a film that didn’t require her to do anything difficult, which is probably the point of a launch vehicle: it’s designed to be survived, not to reveal talent. The access, the connections, the years of proximity to the industry before she worked a single day in it: these are real advantages that real people with real talent don’t get. To pretend otherwise would be dishonest.

But the nepo argument, when applied to Alia, often gets used to explain away the talent entirely, as though Gangubai Kathiawadi was also a product of nepotism, as though Raazi is what Karan Johar’s connections look like on screen. It isn’t. The advantage got her in the room; what she did once she was there is, by any honest measure, not nothing. The discomfort is that both things are true simultaneously, and we are bad at holding that. It’s easier to pick one and commit: either she earned it, or she didn’t. The reality, that she was handed an extraordinary runway and then actually ran, doesn’t give us anywhere clean to land.

What the nepo discourse mostly does, in her case, is give people who dislike her for other reasons a respectable peg to hang it on. It’s the criticism that sounds structural and principled when a lot of what drives the pile-on is less structural and considerably less principled.

The Ranbir Kapoor chapter is the one that is hardest to write about cleanly because it makes you angry in ways that are difficult to direct properly.

The lipstick incident, the widely reported moment where Ranbir apparently asked Alia to wipe off her lipstick, circulated precisely because it captured something ugly so efficiently. It’s the kind of ask that sounds small until you sit with it: be less, be softer, be more palatable to the people whose approval matters here. That it was reportedly about lipstick is almost beside the point. That she did it is the point. And the point beyond that is the image it creates of a woman with a National Award, who plays queens and gangsters and spies on screen, quietly removing her lipstick in a car before knocking on her future in-laws’ door.

The volume thing—the various reports and comments suggesting Alia has, in different ways, learned to take up less space domestically—fits the same pattern. Ranbir Kapoor has a documented history of being called out by the women he’s been with: Deepika Padukone spoke publicly about infidelity, the pattern in his relationships has a consistency that isn’t invisible to anyone paying attention. And Alia, who is by every available metric the more talented artist, who is certainly the more commercially consistent star, who has by any measure more cultural capital than he does right now, Alia is the one making adjustments.

This is what the feminist critique of Alia Bhatt actually is, and it’s a gentler and more complicated thing than simple dislike. It’s not that she’s weak. It’s that watching a competent woman perform smallness for a mediocre man is deeply, specifically dispiriting. Especially when that woman has spent years building a brand around empowerment and authenticity. The dissonance between the public image and the private accommodations is the thing that makes people feel, not wrongly, that they were sold something false.

But here too, the criticism gets contaminated. The derision that attaches itself to “she tolerates his misogyny” often sounds less like feminist concern and more like contempt for her choices, which is its own kind of misogyny. The criticism is sometimes entirely right but also sometimes delivered with an undercurrent of what kind of woman puts up with that, which is a question that blames women for the behaviour of men and has a very long and unpleasant history.

The National Award is where it all converges, and it’s instructive that her winning it produced as much skepticism as celebration. The argument went several ways at once: that SLB had lobbied for it, that the jury process is politically inflected, that Gangubai is a great performance but was there nothing better that year, all of which may or may not be true, and none of which are arguments people deploy with the same energy when a male actor wins. Nawazuddin Siddiqui doesn’t get this kind of scrutiny. Neither does Manoj Bajpayee. The assumption that the achievement is explainable—that the talent is really connections, that the award is really lobbying, that the success is really the machinery—is applied to her with a consistency that begins to look like something other than film criticism.

This is where it gets honest and uncomfortable. We do not like successful women in ways that require us to know what to do with them. Alia Bhatt is rich, beautiful, famous, married to a Kapoor, the daughter of a Bhatt, winner of a National Award, internationally recognised via her Hollywood debut in Heart of Stone, and in every single one of those categories there is a ready-made reason to dismiss the achievement. She was born into it. She married into it. Her studio made a calculation. The jury was biased. There is always an explanation for why the success doesn’t quite count. Meanwhile, the things that are unambiguous: the range of roles, the actual craft visible on screen, require you to sit with a reality that resists dismissal, and that is uncomfortable, so we don’t.

Here is the thing: none of the criticisms of Alia Bhatt are wrong exactly, and yet the sum of them adds up to something that doesn’t fully account for itself. The PR machinery exists and it’s exhausting, but the same is true of Shah Rukh Khan and it’s somehow charming in him. The nepotism is real, but Ranbir Kapoor has spent fifteen years underdelivering on his launch and we remain considerably gentler about it. The Ranbir situation is genuinely disappointing, but the weight of that disappointment lands more heavily on her than on him, which is itself the problem being described. The National Award might have been lobbied for, but cinema awards in India have never been purely merit-based and this becomes a crisis specifically when a woman wins.

What is easy about hating Alia Bhatt is that there is always a legitimate reason available. What makes it worth examining is what it requires you not to notice to sustain it, that the talent is real, that the standard applied to her is not the standard applied to her male contemporaries, that the most damning thing about the lipstick moment is not what it says about her choices but what it says about the culture she’s navigating, and that we are part of that culture, watching, opinionating, finding her wanting in all the ways we have collectively decided women at the top of their field can be found wanting.

She earned the National Award in a room we decided she cheated to get into. She is a nepo kid who learned to act anyway. She is a feminist icon whose marriage makes feminists uncomfortable.

We’ve decided to hate her. She keeps being too good at her job.

I used to have a very specific image of what my life would look like at 30. Bylines in the places that matter, a body of work that had actually done something—changed a law, freed someone, embarrassed someone who deserved it. And somewhere in that image, inevitably, a Pulitzer. Not because I needed the validation, or at least that’s what I told myself. But because it stood for a kind of journalism I wanted to be capable of. The kind that requires months and institutional money and editors who believe in you enough to let you disappear into a story for a year.

I don’t have that image anymore. And learning to be okay with that has been stranger than I expected; not because giving it up was hard, but because I kept waiting to feel like I had, and for a long time I didn’t.

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Coming to terms with a decision like this is less dramatic than it sounds. It doesn’t happen in a single moment. It happens in accumulated small ones—the fifteenth time a pitch goes unanswered, the realisation that the publication you’d have killed to write for has laid off half its staff, the slow understanding that the version of journalism you trained for exists now mostly in the past tense. The Pulitzer dream was built on a set of assumptions about how the industry works. Those assumptions stopped being true. That’s it. That’s the whole story.

But being honest about that requires resisting a particular temptation, which is to make the giving-up feel more meaningful than it was. To dress it up in language about evolution and intentionality. The truth is I was also tired. Tired of pitching into a void, tired of watching the long-form investigative space shrink, tired of doing the emotional and intellectual labour of good journalism for rates and conditions that suggested nobody particularly needed it to exist. Letting go of the Pulitzer dream wasn’t just about being realistic. It was about admitting I couldn’t sustain the pursuit of it in the form I’d imagined, in the industry as it currently is, without it costing me more than I was willing to spend.

That’s not failure. It’s just arithmetic.

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The MBA thing surprised me most of all because of how much I’d resisted it. For years I’d held the belief, the kind you don’t say out loud because you know it doesn’t survive scrutiny, that business school was where people went when they stopped caring about ideas and started caring about income. This was lazy. It was also a way of protecting myself from thinking seriously about why the industry I loved was falling apart and what, if anything, I could do about it beyond writing sad essays about it.

The curiosity crept up on me. I started reading things I’d previously skipped, pieces about media economics, the mechanics of subscription models, why certain publications had survived the last decade’s collapse and others hadn’t. I couldn’t stop thinking about the structural conditions that make good journalism possible or impossible. At some point I realised I was spending more of my mental energy on those questions than on any story I was actually reporting, and that probably meant something.

An MBA is a way of taking that curiosity seriously. Of getting access to frameworks and rooms and people that would help me understand media businesses from the inside rather than just observing their failure from the outside. I’m not abandoning journalism. I’m trying to understand the machine well enough to eventually be useful to it in a different way —to be someone who can think about why stories get funded and distributed and read, not just someone who produces them.

Whether that’s the right call, I don’t know yet. But it feels like a more honest use of what I’m actually good at and what I actually want to spend my time on than chasing an award in an industry that has structurally deprioritised the conditions under which that award gets made.

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I still write. That part hasn’t changed. I still pitch and report and file pieces and feel the particular satisfaction of finishing something that says what I meant it to say. Freelancing is harder in every material sense—the precarity is real, the rates are often embarrassing, nobody is paying my legal fees if I need them. But there’s something in it that I didn’t have when I was oriented entirely around the big dream, which is that the work is genuinely mine. I write about what I’m actually thinking about, for publications that take the work seriously enough to edit it properly, without needing to produce a certain volume for a certain metric so an algorithm somewhere stays happy.

Some of my best work has happened in this period. That surprises me every time I think about it.

The Pulitzer version of my career would have required me to be inside an institution that no longer reliably exists. The version I’m building now, freelance journalism, an MBA, a longer-term interest in understanding how media businesses actually function, doesn’t have a clean name. It sits somewhere uncomfortable between journalist and strategist and person who still opens a notes app at odd hours because something is bothering them and they need to figure out why. That’s not a smaller ambition. It’s just a less legible one. And I’m slowly making peace with the fact that legibility was never the part that mattered to me anyway.

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The new thing, whatever it is, didn’t announce itself. It arrived the way most real interests do: sideways, inconveniently, in the middle of doing something else. I wasn’t looking for a new passion. I was just paying attention to what I kept coming back to even when I was supposed to be focused on something else. Media business models. The economics of attention. Why readers pay for some things and not others. I’d find myself three links deep into a piece about private equity and publishing at midnight and realise I hadn’t noticed the time passing.

That’s usually the tell.

I don’t think I’ve fully left the old dream so much as stopped letting it be the only frame. The thing I actually care about—journalism that is rigorous and necessary and changes something in the reader—is still what I care about. I just stopped believing the Pulitzer was the only shape it could take, or that a staff position at a legacy publication was the only path to it. Those were always means, not ends. I confused them for a long time. Most people who want things badly enough do.

The grief is real. I won’t pretend it isn’t. There’s a version of my career I thought I was building that I’m not building anymore, and sitting with that honestly, without softening it or over-explaining it, takes longer than you expect. But underneath the grief there’s something that feels, cautiously, like relief. Like I’ve stopped trying to fit myself into a shape that was never quite right and started asking what shape I’d actually choose if I were choosing now, with everything I know, in the industry as it actually is.

I don’t have a full answer yet. But I’m more interested in the question than I’ve been in a while.

I keep thinking about the ₹370.

Not the outrage that followed, not the deactivated Instagram account, not even the note about accountability. Just that number. Three hundred and seventy rupees. The price of a chicken biryani. The price, according to a 23-year-old web developer named Himanshu Jangra, of what he believed he was owed from a woman he had taken on a date. He told this story onstage at Pranit More’s show with the relaxed confidence of someone recounting a win. He’d spent the money. She owed him. Her body was the settlement. The audience laughed, and More — instead of doing literally anything else — called it “peak Gurgaon content,” handed Jangra ₹5,000, and then posted the clip himself. As highlights.

The internet eventually caught up. A man lost his job. Another man deleted his internet presence and issued a statement.

But a woman was discussed as a transaction on a comedy stage, the comedian gave the man a prize for it, and for a little while — in that room, on that night — everyone seemed to think that was entertainment.

There’s a version of this essay where I explain what stand-up is supposed to be — the transgression, the danger, the willingness to say what polite society won’t. I could talk about Richard Pryor or Hannah Gadsby or the idea that comedy has always been where we process the uncomfortable. That version isn’t wrong, exactly. But it’s also the version that every comedian reaches for the moment they’re in trouble, and I’m a little tired of it.

Because transgression isn’t inherently brave. It depends entirely on who you’re transgressing against. Saying the unsayable about a woman’s body, from a stage, to a crowd that’s already primed to laugh — that isn’t courage. That’s the easiest possible thing. Women have been the default punchline since before any of these men picked up a microphone. It’s not transgression if it’s tradition.

The More controversy is worth sitting with because of how familiar it is. Not shocking. Familiar. The sequence practically runs itself: comedian does something misogynistic, clip goes viral, outrage follows, comedian issues statement, discourse moves on. The cycle is so well-practised it has started to function as a kind of absolution. Like going to confession. You say the thing, you get called out, you apologise, and then you’re clean again.

What gets lost in that cycle is the actual thing that happened. A man walked into a comedy show and described, cheerfully, his belief that a woman’s body was owed to him in exchange for a meal. That isn’t a bad joke. It isn’t even a joke. It’s a worldview — one that a lot of men hold, quietly, until they find themselves in a room where saying it out loud earns them laughter and ₹5,000. The stage didn’t create that worldview. But it rewarded it. And rewards have a way of reinforcing beliefs.

There’s also the matter of what More had already told us about himself. During his stint on Bigg Boss, older clips resurfaced of him joking about a woman whose bracelet resembled one Salman Khan wore — asking, with a smirk, whether she’d been to the actor’s Panvel farmhouse. The implication was grotesque enough that Salman Khan himself addressed it on air, telling More some things shouldn’t go “below the belt.” Two incidents, the same instinct: when in doubt, a woman’s body is always available as material.

The ‘it’s just comedy’ defence works by treating laughter as neutral, accidental, something that just happens to a crowd. It isn’t. When a room laughs, it’s collectively deciding something is okay to laugh at — which is the same as deciding it’s okay, full stop. A crowd’s laughter is not a passive response. It’s a vote.

What makes crowd work especially frustrating in this context is the cover it provides. A scripted bit can be scrutinised, cut, challenged. But crowd work is supposedly spontaneous — the comedian is just reacting, just going where the audience takes him. Except that’s not true either. More made choices at every single beat of that interaction. He chose to lean in. He chose to name it content. He chose to post it. Spontaneity doesn’t mean unaccountable.

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Harsh Gujral has built a significant part of his comedy on jokes about Russian women. The punchline is always the same thing dressed in different clothes: they’re available, they’re easy, they’re after something — a visa, a phone, a good time funded by someone else. He presents it as observation, as worldly wisdom, as something he knows that you’d know too if you’d travelled. What it actually is, is sexism with an international passport. The jokes don’t need a Russian woman in the room. They don’t need her to have a personality or a story or an interior life. They just need her to be foreign and female, which is apparently enough to make her a punchline twice over. First as an outsider, then as a body.

I’ve watched audiences laugh at those jokes with this particular kind of pleased-with-themselves energy. Like they’re sophisticated for getting it. They’re not sophisticated. They’re just men who’ve been told, in a funny enough way, that women from other countries exist for their entertainment and their use.

Samay Raina is a more complicated case in some ways — beloved in a way that Gujral isn’t, genuinely talented in a way that made his India’s Got Latent scandal harder for a lot of people to process. On that show, disabled people — many of them with spinal muscular atrophy — were brought on and mocked for the entertainment of a large online audience. The Cure SMA Foundation of India filed a petition. The Supreme Court summoned Raina and four other comedians. Coercive action was threatened. The whole thing escalated to a point that would have been unimaginable for a YouTube show.

And then, in October 2025, Raina posted an apology. On his birthday. He opened by noting that his birthday was the most special day of the year for him, and that he wanted to share it with the people his show had hurt. I’ve read that apology several times and I still can’t decide if it’s oblivious or contemptuous.

The ableism of India’s Got Latent and the misogyny of the biryani clip come from the same place. They’re both about finding someone whose body marks them as different, pointing at it, and calling the pointing entertainment. The logic is identical. The only thing that changes is who gets to be the prop.

In America, Matt Rife opened his 2023 Netflix special Natural Selection with a joke about a woman with a black eye working at a restaurant. The punchline: maybe if she could cook, she wouldn’t have gotten hit. The crowd laughed. When the backlash came, Rife posted an ‘fake apology’ — a link to a helmet designed for people with special needs. The contempt in that response was almost clarifying. He wasn’t sorry. He thought the people objecting were the problem. His fanbase agreed, loudly, calling the critics humourless and hysterical and, inevitably, said it was just comedy.

It wasn’t just comedy. It was a man with a Netflix deal telling a room full of people that a battered woman was funny, and then telling anyone who disagreed to go to hell.

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The same week the Jangra clip went viral, another clip from the same show also started circulating. A female doctor named Sejal Pawar, from KEM Hospital in Mumbai, had done her own crowd work moment, describing how she and her colleagues would sometimes joke about male cadavers’ anatomy — specifically, about penis size. The clip spread alongside Jangra’s. The internet, with the symmetry-seeking instinct it gets sometimes, treated them as equivalent. Pawar made her Instagram private. People called for her to be fired too.

She shouldn’t be. And it’s worth saying clearly why.

What Pawar described is a real ethical problem. Cadavers are donated bodies — families give their loved ones to medical institutions as an act of genuine generosity, because they believe in the future of medicine. The dignity of those remains matters, not as sentiment but as a practical foundation for why body donation continues to happen at all. Doctors came out publicly after the clip spread to say that this kind of behaviour corrodes the trust that makes medical education possible. Those concerns are legitimate.

But Pawar’s joke did not make a living woman less safe. It did not reward a man for treating a woman as a transaction. It did not add itself to the long running cultural script that tells men — in jokes, in songs, in how we talk about dates and money and what women owe — that female bodies are available by default to whoever spent enough on them. The targets of her humour were dead. Dead men. In a dissection hall. It was crude. It raised real professional questions. It was not the same thing.

When the internet flattened them into equivalent outrages, it did something revealing. If everything offensive is equally harmful, then nothing is specifically harmful. If Sejal Pawar mocking a cadaver and Himanshu Jangra describing a woman as a debt to be settled are the same kind of wrong, then the whole thing becomes a wash — everyone behaved badly, everyone needs to apologise, no one needs to look too hard at the specific conditions that make one of those incidents a symptom of something much larger and more dangerous. That conclusion is very convenient for everyone who’d rather not.

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The thing about misogynist comedy is that it doesn’t create the beliefs it expresses. It finds beliefs that already exist and puts them in a room full of people and makes them communal. That’s the function. A joke about what a woman owes a man who paid for her dinner works as a joke because the men in the audience already, somewhere, believe it. The comedian didn’t plant that. He just surfaced it, and made it something they could all share a laugh over, and in sharing it they made it a little more normal, a little more speakable, a little more like just the way things are.

That’s what gets called ‘transgression’. But there’s nothing transgressive about confirming what your audience already thinks. Actual transgression — the kind that costs something — would be turning to a man who just bragged about treating a woman’s body as a refund and telling him, in front of his laughing friends, that he’d described something ugly. That takes something. The other thing just takes a microphone.

Accountability in the comedy world has become a genre of its own. There’s an established grammar for it by now: the account goes quiet, then a note appears, measured and contrite, and the comedian takes some time away. Pranit More at least didn’t make himself the victim of the situation. He said what he should have said and he said it quickly. That’s not nothing.

But accountability that only arrives after a clip goes viral isn’t really accountability. It’s damage control. The difference is whether you’re thinking about the woman who was turned into a punchline, or whether you’re thinking about your career. One of those can happen before the internet notices. The other always happens after.

The bigger question isn’t really about More or Jangra or any individual comedian. It’s about an industry that keeps producing these moments and keeps being surprised by them. The Indian stand-up scene sold itself, when it emerged in the 2010s, as something different from the crass sexism of mainstream film comedy — smarter, more progressive, made by people who read things and thought about them. What it actually produced was the same sexism with better production values and a crowd that felt too culturally self-aware to be accused of it. That’s not progress. That’s the same thing in a nicer room.

Every time a crowd laughs at a Russian woman being described as available for the right price, or a disabled person being reduced to their diagnosis for a punchline, or a beaten woman being told she had it coming — the crowd is choosing. No one forced them to laugh. They decided. And in deciding, they told everyone in that room, and everyone who’d watch the clip later, exactly where they stood.

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A deactivated account doesn’t undo anything. A birthday apology doesn’t restore the dignity of everyone who got mocked on a YouTube show. A note about accountability doesn’t reach the woman whose body was evaluated as a potential refund at a comedy show in Gurgaon.

Comedy shapes what’s normal. Not dramatically, not all at once, but incrementally — joke by joke, laugh by laugh, in the slow accumulation of what a room full of people agrees is funny. If we keep laughing at the same things, we keep deciding those things are okay. And right now, a lot of us are still deciding that ₹370 is a punchline.

It’s not a punchline. It’s a confession. There’s a difference. We could start there.

Horror has always had a complicated relationship with sympathy. We root for the Final Girl, recoil from the monster, and leave the theater having neatly sorted the world into victims and perpetrators. Curry Barker’s Obsession — the indie horror sensation of 2026 — deliberately scrambles that sorting. On the surface, Nikki’s irrational, frightening behavior after Bear’s wish is granted raises the question of whether this person is even truly Nikki any longer. She becomes violent, unhinged, terrifying. She is the one with the gun. She is the one who kills. And yet to accept Nikki as the villain of Obsession is to make the same moral error that Bear himself makes throughout the film: to prioritize the discomfort of the one with power over the suffering of the one without it.

Bear is the true villain of Obsession. Not because he is loud or cruel or calculating, but because he is something far more insidious — a man who mistakes longing for love, and cowardice for innocence.

Bear is a music store employee who buys a supernatural toy and wishes for his childhood friend Nikki to fall in love with him. Stated plainly like that, the moral horror is almost too obvious to require unpacking. And yet audiences have argued furiously about whether Bear bears real culpability — after all, he didn’t know what the wish would do, did he? He was lonely. He was shy. He just wanted to be loved.

This is precisely the defense that Barker dismantles with surgical patience over the course of the film. Bear’s wish is not an accident. It is not naïve. It is a choice — made by an adult man who, faced with the terrifying vulnerability of honest communication, decided instead to outsource Nikki’s feelings to a supernatural force. The film’s ingenious plot conceit — a lovelorn loser makes a wish that the beautiful friend he secretly pines for loves him more than anyone in the world, and it comes horribly true — instantly raises ideas surrounding relationships, abuse, consent, and misogyny. Bear’s wish is not romantic. It is a seizure of control. It is, at its core, a refusal to accept that Nikki is a person with her own desires, preferences, and the sovereign right to feel nothing for him.

What distinguishes Bear as a villain is not malice in the conventional sense. He does not twirl a mustache. He does not want Nikki to suffer. But the absence of malicious intent has never been a satisfactory alibi for causing harm, and Obsession knows this. The film makes increasingly clear that this is all Bear’s fault, for Bear selfishly brought this hell down upon himself by using his wish to create this twisted tulpa version of Nikki he believed he wanted.

The word ‘believed’ is doing enormous work there. Bear did not wish for Nikki — he wished for a version of Nikki that suited him. The real Nikki, with her own interior life and her own choices, was effectively erased the moment that wish was granted. And when confronted with the consequence of what he has done, after finding out the real Nikki would rather die than continue living a lie with him, he can’t see past his own loneliness and misguided desires to set her free. This is the moment that seals Bear’s status as the film’s true monster. He is given a clear opportunity to choose Nikki’s wellbeing over his own need — and he refuses it.

The film’s thesis is spelled out in one of its earliest scenes, when Nikki tells Bear she’s writing a love story that isn’t a romance, with Bear not understanding that the two are different concepts. This ends up being the thesis for the rest of the film — that ‘love’ (obsession and co-dependence) can exist without genuine romance (mutual understanding and respect). This distinction is not incidental. It is the entire moral architecture of the movie.

Nikki is not a villain who happens to be female. She is a person whose cognitive and emotional autonomy has been stolen from her. Director Barker has discussed how Nikki is depicted as both a villain and a victim after her best friend Bear makes a wish that she would love him more than anything in the world. But ‘both’ implies a false equivalence. Yes, Nikki’s actions are terrifying. Yes, she commits violence. But every one of those actions flows directly from a supernatural compulsion she did not consent to and cannot control. She is not choosing to be this way — she is imprisoned inside it. Inde Navarrette’s performance makes this devastatingly legible: beneath the horror of what Nikki becomes, the real Nikki is always faintly, heartbreakingly visible, a person screaming silently from behind glass.

To call Nikki a villain is to punish the prisoner for the crime of the jailer.

What elevates Obsession beyond mere genre exercise is how precisely it diagnoses the particular flavor of harm Bear represents. He is not a predator in the traditional cinematic sense. He is a recognizable archetype — the gentle, overlooked, devoted friend who believes that the depth of his feelings entitles him to reciprocation. Ian tries to help Bear win Nikki over with dubious advice, such as calling her by a nickname they know she hates because it was used by her bullies in high school. Even before the wish, Bear exists in a social world that frames Nikki as a prize to be won rather than a person to be respected.

The wish, then, is not a departure from Bear’s character — it is its logical conclusion. When the legitimate tools of courtship fail (or more accurately, when Bear cannot summon the courage to use them honestly), he reaches for an illegitimate one. He chooses certainty over consent. He chooses his comfort over her freedom. And when the horror that results confronts him with the full weight of what that choice means, he still cannot let go.

Obsession is a horror movie about wish fulfillment because wish fulfillment — the fantasy that desire, sufficiently intense, can override reality — is one of the most dangerous ideas romantic culture has ever produced. Bear is its avatar. He is every story that told lonely men that persistence is the same as love, that a woman’s ‘no’ is just a ‘not yet’, that the strength of longing is a moral credential.

The longer the film goes on, the clearer it gets that Bear is the true villain of the story. Not because he wanted Nikki to suffer. But because he wanted Nikki to love him more than he wanted Nikki to be free — and he was willing to make that choice for her.

That is not romance. That is not loneliness made sympathetic by its sincerity. That is possession wearing the costume of devotion. And Obsession, to its great and lasting credit, refuses to let it pass as anything else.

The New York Post called them ‘toned’. That single word — deployed with the confidence of someone who has never had to earn it — is doing more ideological work than most op-eds manage in a thousand. The arms in question belonged to Demi Moore at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where she sat as a jury member, a 63-year-old woman of considerable power and cultural weight, and the internet immediately collapsed her to a body part. Not her opinions on cinema. Her arms.

Let’s be honest about what ‘toned’ means in this context. It is the linguistic trick we perform when we want to praise smallness without naming it. Toned. Svelte. Refined. Lean. These are the euphemisms of a culture that has decided the highest achievement of a female body is its own reduction, but that doesn’t want to be caught saying so directly. When Moore’s arms prompted widespread concern, when fans wrote you look like you’re dying and others clapped back with stop shaming her, the debate flatlined into the usual binary: too thin vs. body-positive. What nobody wanted to examine was the deeper architecture beneath both responses — the shared assumption that a woman’s worth begins and ends at her silhouette.

This is how capitalism launders itself through feminism. It hands women the language of autonomy (my body, my choice) and then makes sure the only choices on offer are various flavors of shrinking. Ozempic. Intermittent fasting. Clean eating. Cortisol diets. The wellness industry, worth over five trillion dollars globally, has figured out that the most profitable customer is one who is perpetually almost there. The woman who has lost twenty pounds but is working on the last five. The woman who is ‘being mindful’. The woman who has learned to call hunger discipline. She will buy forever. She will never arrive. That is the point.

Demi Moore, to her considerable credit, seemed to understand some version of this. At the 2025 Golden Globes, accepting her award for The Substance — a film literally about a woman who splits herself in two trying to remain desirable — she stood at the microphone and said something startling in its plainness. She listed the doubts: not smart enough, not pretty enough, not skinny enough, not successful enough. And then she quoted the advice she’d received: you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick. It was a quietly radical thing to say in a room full of people who profit from women picking the measuring stick back up.

And yet here we are, a year later, and the measuring stick is out. The irony is almost elegant: the woman who starred in a film about female self-destruction is now being measured, weighed, and found either wanting or inspiring depending on which corner of the internet you’re in. ‘The Substance’ asked what happens when women internalize the male gaze so completely that they begin to consume themselves. The Cannes coverage answered: we write headlines about their toned arms.

The Demi Moore of G.I. Jane — muscled, shaved-headed, furious — made men uncomfortable in a way that her current frame does not. That body took up space. It said: I am here to do something, not to be looked at. The cultural response was to call it mannish, aggressive, unsexual. We have spent thirty years as a culture quietly informing women that muscle is masculine and smallness is feminine, and that femininity is the toll you pay for being taken seriously in a room. We dressed it up as health. We called it wellness. We put it on Instagram with golden light and called it a lifestyle.

The capitalism-feminism merger is never cleaner than in the body discourse. Every few years the aesthetic shifts — curves are in, heroin chic is out, heroin chic is back, strong is the new skinny, skinny is the new strong — but the through-line is constant: your body is a project, and it is never finished. The market requires this incompleteness. A woman who has made peace with her body is a consumer who has exited the loop. She is not buying the supplement, the program, the injectable, the lifestyle. She is, in the language of the wellness economy, not taking care of herself.

What would it mean to take up space? Not metaphorically — though yes, that too — but literally. To have arms that suggest you have used them. To eat in public without narrating it as a moral position. To age without either celebrating your restraint or apologizing for your expansion. Demi Moore at 63 is a jury member at one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals. She has survived addiction, a public divorce, a cultural dismissal, and an industry that discards women at an age when it is only beginning to take men seriously. She starred in one of the most critically discussed films of 2024. She gave a Golden Globes speech that people are still quoting.

We talked about her arms.

This is not about Demi Moore specifically — she is, by all accounts, living her life, making her choices, unmoved by your Twitter thread. This is about the reflex. The immediate, automatic reduction of a woman in power to the dimension of her body. The way ‘toned’ arrives as a compliment and lands as a cage. The way concern trolling and genuine concern have become indistinguishable because we’ve built a culture where it is genuinely impossible to tell the difference between caring about a woman’s health and punishing her for being visible in the wrong shape.

Thinness, at its cultural extreme, is the performance of non-threatening femininity. It signals: I am not consuming resources. I am not hungry. I am not demanding. I am not difficult. I am taking up less and less and less. There is a reason the same culture that celebrates female smallness also rewards female silence, female agreeableness, female self-erasure in meetings and negotiations and marriages. It is all the same project. Make yourself smaller. Smile while you do it. Call it discipline. Call it wellness. Call it toned.

Put down the measuring stick, she said.

We are, apparently, not ready to.

Some conversations stay with you longer than the destination itself. Mine happened in the backseat of a cab speeding toward the glowing chaos of Delhi airport at dawn. The kind of ride you forget by the time you reach security check — except this one quietly rearranged something inside me.

The driver’s name was Umesh.

At first, he was just another man navigating traffic with one hand on the wheel and the radio humming softly in the background. Then somewhere between a red light and a flyover, life spilled out.

His wife had left him five years ago.

Not after a dramatic fight. Not after some cinematic betrayal. She simply walked away, leaving him to raise their son and daughter alone. He said it matter-of-factly, the way people talk when pain has become sedimentary — settled too deep to be performed anymore.

There was no self-pity in his voice. That’s what struck me first.

Most people, after being abandoned with two children and a ₹30,000 monthly income in a city that eats money for breakfast, would understandably speak with bitterness. Umesh spoke with determination.

“My children should study well,” he said. “Bas unka future ban jaaye.”

That sentence carried the weight of an entire life philosophy.

He told us how seriously he takes their education. How every expense is calculated around school fees, books, coaching, uniforms. How he dreams of one day owning a flat — not because he cares about property as status, but because stability is the ultimate luxury for people who’ve never had it.

He earns barely enough to survive. Yet he speaks like a man investing in a future he may never personally enjoy.

And then came the part that changed the atmosphere inside the taxi entirely.

After his wife left, he spiraled into alcoholism and depression.

He admitted it without embarrassment. No masculine performance. No ‘men don’t cry’ bravado. Just honesty. There were days he drank too much. Days he didn’t want to continue. Days life felt heavier than his body could carry.

But then he looked at his children.

And something shifted.

“Nahi sambhalta toh bachchon ka kya hota?” he said.

If he didn’t pull himself together, what would happen to them?

My father was sitting beside me during this conversation, unusually quiet. Then slowly, almost cautiously, he began relating to Umesh’s story. When my father lost his job years ago, alcoholism and depression had also entered our lives like uninvited tenants. Listening to these two men — from entirely different worlds — speak the same emotional language felt strangely profound.

Pain, I realized, is deeply democratic.

A man driving a taxi through Delhi traffic and a middle-class father who once lost professional stability could arrive at the exact same emotional cliff edge. Shame. Failure. Escapism. Despair. The specifics change; the ache doesn’t.

But what moved me most wasn’t their suffering. It was their recovery.

Neither man described healing in grand terms. There were no motivational slogans. No LinkedIn-style ‘comeback’ narratives. Survival, for them, was quieter. More practical. Wake up. Go to work. Feed your children. Keep going because someone depends on you.

We often romanticize resilience online. We turn it into aesthetics and quotes pasted over sunsets. But real resilience looks like Umesh driving twelve-hour shifts while worrying about tuition fees. It looks like fathers swallowing their own grief because their children cannot afford for them to collapse.

And perhaps that’s why the conversation stayed with me long after the airport announcements swallowed us whole.

I spend a lot of time online, where ambition is measured loudly — salaries, promotions, followers, aesthetics, ‘soft life’ aspirations. But in that cab, success looked radically different. Success was a man who refused to let heartbreak destroy his children’s future.

Umesh may not own a flat yet. He may still struggle some days. But he has already built something more impressive than property: emotional endurance.

There’s a specific kind of dignity in people who keep going not because life became easier, but because someone else needed them to.

As I stepped out of the taxi, airport trolleys screeching around us and flights waiting to carry strangers elsewhere, I realized perspective rarely arrives through books or self-help podcasts. Sometimes it comes from a tired man in the driver’s seat telling you the truth about survival.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you listen.

The most revealing thing about Cassie Howard played by Sydney Sweeney in Euphoria is not that she’s sexualised. It’s how willingly she participates in her own humiliation because somewhere along the way she learnt that being desired is the closest thing to being loved.

One of the most unsettling moments in the newer season comes when Cassie effectively turns herself into a performance animal for male validation — dressed, posed and directed with the obedience of someone who has fully internalised her own objectification. The scene plays less like empowerment and more like emotional roadkill. She isn’t expressing sexuality; she’s surrendering personhood. Yet within hours of the episode airing, social media predictably converted the moment into screenshots, thirst tweets and body commentary. The tragedy of the scene disappeared beneath the internet’s Pavlovian response to Sydney Sweeney’s body.

There’s something deeply bizarre about the way the internet talks about Sydney Sweeney. Not because celebrity culture is new — we’ve always obsessed over beautiful women — but because every conversation about her eventually collapses into the same thing: her breasts. It’s like the collective cultural IQ drops by 40 points the second her name enters the chat.

Sweeney has become less of an actress and more of a discourse machine. Scroll through TikTok, Reddit, X, YouTube comments — anywhere, really — and you’ll find people talking about her body as though they’re analysing a political event. Her rise coincided with this weird online panic that Hollywood had become ‘too curated’, too Instagram-face, too detached from what people call ‘real beauty’. So when Sydney Sweeney arrived on screen looking like a modern version of a 1990s bombshell, the internet reacted like dehydrated men crawling toward water.

And honestly, Cassie from Euphoria only intensified all of it. Cassie is written as someone painfully aware that her body is the thing people notice first. Her beauty gives her attention, validation, power — and also completely destroys her. She spirals through the show desperate to be loved, constantly reshaping herself around male desire. It’s tragic, embarrassing, vulnerable television.

But the strange part is how audiences watched that critique and somehow missed it entirely. People didn’t leave Euphoria talking about Cassie’s loneliness or emotional instability; they left talking about Sydney Sweeney’s chest size. The performance became secondary to the body. The actress basically got swallowed by the character’s sexualisation in real time.

And maybe that’s why Sweeney inspires such intense reactions. She sits at the intersection of so many cultural anxieties right now. She’s blonde, conventionally attractive, openly feminine, and not particularly interested in downplaying it. In a media culture where women are expected to either present themselves as hyper-intellectual or perform a kind of detached irony about their beauty, Sweeney just… exists as a bombshell. That alone seems to short-circuit people’s brains.

Then came the American Eagle ad — the one that spiralled into a full-blown online debate because of the phrase ‘good genes’. On paper, it was a pretty standard denim campaign. In practice, it became internet fodder because people immediately connected the wording to eugenics rhetoric. A blue-eyed blonde actress talking about ‘great genes’ in an all-American campaign was enough to send social media into a tailspin.

Some people thought the backlash was overblown. Others argued it revealed how advertising still quietly packages whiteness and conventional attractiveness as aspirational ideals. Either way, the entire thing showed how heavily loaded Sweeney’s image has become. She’s no longer viewed neutrally. Her appearance carries political meaning now, whether she wants it to or not.

That political reading only intensified once people started speculating about her Republican leanings after photos from her family party circulated online. Suddenly, the internet began treating her like a symbolic figure in America’s culture wars. Her body, her beauty, even her styling became evidence in some larger ideological argument. Which is absurd, really. But also very 2026.

There’s a tendency online to flatten women like Sweeney into archetypes instead of people. She’s either the ‘last real bombshell’, the conservative fantasy woman, the victim of misogyny, the embodiment of male gaze culture, or proof that Hollywood beauty standards never changed at all. Rarely is she allowed to just be an actress who happens to be attractive.

And underneath all the discourse is something much older and uglier: society still struggles to deal with women whose sexuality feels visible without feeling controlled. People are comfortable when beauty is ironic, heavily intellectualised, or carefully sanitised. But Sweeney represents a more old-school kind of femininity — glamorous, overt, unapologetically sexy — and culture still doesn’t quite know how to process that without turning her into a symbol.

In another era, Sydney Sweeney would’ve just been a movie star people had crushes on.

Now she’s treated like a referendum on feminism, beauty standards, politics, genetics, desirability and the American psyche itself. All because a woman existed on television with big breasts and blonde hair.

On any given night this year, your group chats are likely to be split between two conversations: geopolitics, and whether Yogesh was right to choose Ruru over Akanksha.

The second is winning.

The sixteenth season of MTV Splitsvilla, a dating reality show that has been running since 2008, has erupted into a full-fledged cultural fixation, not because it has reinvented itself, but because it has perfected a formula viewers now understand and, paradoxically, cannot resist.

This season, marketed as ‘Pyaar Ya Paisa’, has delivered exactly what its audience has come to expect: engineered volatility. Fights escalate quickly, loyalties shift overnight, and emotional betrayals are packaged into tight, meme-ready clips.

In recent episodes alone, contestants have hurled clothes into pools, pushed each other mid-argument, and engaged in physical altercations—moments that dominate social feeds long after the credits roll.

The drama is not incidental. It is the point.

Reality television scholars often describe such formats as ‘conflict machines’, where editing, task design and casting converge to ensure maximum friction. In Splitsvilla, this friction is heightened by the premise itself: strangers are expected to form romantic connections under surveillance, while competing for survival in the game.

What has changed, however, is not the show—it is the viewer.

Audiences no longer just watch Splitsvilla. They live inside it.

On Instagram Lives, Reddit threads, and fan pages, viewers dissect contestants’ micro-expressions, defend them like close friends, and build elaborate moral hierarchies: the ‘green flags’, the ‘red flags’, the villains and the misunderstood.

When contestant Deeptanshu Saini was accused of having a girlfriend outside the show, the reaction was not mild curiosity but moral outrage.

This is parasocial intimacy at its most intense: viewers projecting authenticity onto a format designed to blur it.

The show’s central promise that love can emerge authentically within a controlled, competitive environment, has always been tenuous. This season has made that fragility impossible to ignore.

Multiple contestants have been accused of entering the show while already in relationships. Deeptanshu’s alleged off-screen relationship sparked one controversy; Sorab Bedi faced allegations from a partner who claimed they were still dating when he joined the show.

Another contestant was accused by co-participants of hiding a girlfriend outside the villa, further muddying the show’s romantic premise.

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Even within the villa, emotional continuity is suspect. Contestants reconnect with exes, pivot alliances, and form bonds that dissolve as quickly as they appear; less like relationships and more like narrative arcs. To watch Splitsvilla is to watch a story, not a reality.

Hours of footage are condensed into episodes that foreground conflict and compress timelines. A glance can be turned into a betrayal, a hesitation into manipulation. Contestants are not just participants; they are characters.

The ‘villain edit’ and the ‘hero edit’ are not accidental—they are structural necessities. Without them, the show risks becoming what it technically is: a group of strangers making inconsistent, often mundane decisions.

Instead, it becomes a morality play.

There is a reason viewers who claim to hate the show cannot stop watching it.

Splitsvilla operates within what might be called the ‘brainrot economy’: content designed for maximum emotional engagement and minimum cognitive effort. It is loud, repetitive, and instantly digestible.

In a media environment saturated with information, such shows offer a peculiar relief. They demand attention without requiring interpretation. The stakes feel high but remain safely inconsequential.

You can care deeply without consequence.

For contestants, the show is less about love and more about visibility.

Over the years, Splitsvilla has served as a launchpad for influencers and television personalities, turning relatively unknown participants into social media celebrities with millions of followers. Alumni have gone on to mainstream television, reality franchises, and digital fame, transforming the show into a pipeline for aspirational visibility.

This, too, shapes behaviour. Contestants are not just playing for connection; they are performing for an audience that extends far beyond the villa.

Authenticity becomes a strategy.

And yet, viewers return.

They return knowing the show is staged, that relationships may be performative, that editing shapes perception, that contestants often carry lives, and partners outside the villa.

They return because the show offers something increasingly rare: a shared cultural obsession that is immediate, chaotic, and collective.

To watch Splitsvilla today is not just to consume television. It is to participate in an ecosystem of memes, debates, stan accounts and digital loyalties, where the line between spectator and participant has all but dissolved.

The real love story, it turns out, is not between the contestants.

It is between the audience and the spectacle.

At first glance, Dhurandhar: The Revenge presents itself as a high-octane action spectacle—gritty, detailed, and unapologetically loud. But beneath its stylised violence and patriotic fervour lies a deeply troubling narrative architecture that confuses vengeance with virtue, and propaganda with storytelling.

The film’s central thesis is not subtle: hypermasculinity is heroism. The protagonist is not just a man—he is a weapon, a vessel for rage, grief, and unchecked aggression. His pain is neither processed nor questioned; instead, it is weaponised. In this world, a man’s duty is singular and suffocating—to fight till the end. There is no room for vulnerability, nuance, or moral conflict. Only retaliation.

What the film labels as patriotism is, in reality, vengeance draped in the national flag. The audience is encouraged—almost instructed—to cheer for destruction. Dialogues like “This is new India—we don’t just barge into homes, we attack” are not framed critically; they are punchlines meant to elicit applause. And disturbingly, they do.

Women, meanwhile, exist on the margins—barely sketched, largely irrelevant. They are emotional props at best, narrative afterthoughts at worst. Their purpose is not to shape the story but to justify the male protagonist’s rage. In a film so obsessed with ‘duty’ and ‘honour’, women are denied both agency and presence.

The film’s much-celebrated “peak detailing” is another misdirection. What critics and viewers are praising as realism often boils down to meticulously choreographed gore. Violence is not just depicted—it is aestheticised, lingered upon, glorified. The camera does not flinch, and neither is the audience expected to.

More insidious, however, is the film’s ideological undercurrent. It leans heavily into Islamophobic tropes, reducing Muslims to monolithic villains—either terrorists or silent enablers. This portrayal is not just lazy; it is dangerous. In a country like India, where real-world tensions have led to incidents ranging from the North East Delhi riots to mob lynchings, such narratives do not exist in a vacuum. They reinforce prejudice, validate fear, and embolden hate.

And yet, one of the most common defences offered by audiences is: “It’s just a movie.” But that argument collapses under even basic scrutiny. Cinema does not exist in isolation—it is both a reflection of society and a force that shapes it. To dismiss propaganda as ‘just entertainment’ is to misunderstand how media works. Repetition normalises ideas; spectacle softens their edges; applause legitimises them.

In a country already grappling with the othering of Muslims, films like Dhurandhar: The Revenge don’t merely mirror bias—they risk amplifying it. When entire communities are repeatedly depicted as threats, it feeds into a larger ecosystem of suspicion and hostility.

The film also engages in a subtle but powerful form of gaslighting. Its grieving protagonist is manipulated into becoming a pawn for a larger nationalist agenda. His personal loss is co-opted, reframed as a collective battle, until his individuality dissolves into ideology. What could have been a story about trauma and healing instead becomes a cautionary tale about how easily grief can be redirected into violence.

Dhurandhar: The Revenge is not just an action film—it is a mirror reflecting a certain strain of cultural appetite: one that celebrates aggression, simplifies morality, and equates dissent with disloyalty. It asks its audience not to think, but to feel—loudly, viscerally, and without question.

And perhaps that is its most unsettling success.

There are films that entertain, films that impress, and then there are films that sit with you long after the screen fades to black. Homebound belongs firmly to the last category. I watched it knowing it would hurt—and still, I wasn’t prepared for the weight it would leave behind.

In an era where Hindi cinema is increasingly obsessed with spectacle, speed and spectacle masquerading as substance, Homebound does something radical: it slows down. It watches. It listens. And in doing so, it captures a truth many of us would rather forget — the emotional, social and economic wreckage left behind by the pandemic, particularly for those who were already living on the margins.

At its core, Homebound is a story about displacement. Not just physical displacement, but emotional and existential exile. The film traces the journey of ordinary people caught in the churn of India’s sudden lockdown — migrant workers, families torn apart, and individuals forced to choose between dignity and survival. There is no melodrama here, no manufactured villain. The cruelty lies in systems, in silence, and in indifference.

What makes Homebound so devastating is its restraint. It does not sensationalise suffering or ask for sympathy through grand speeches. Instead, it relies on quiet moments — a look held for too long, a road that never seems to end, a body slumped from exhaustion. These small, human details accumulate into something profoundly moving. You don’t just watch the characters suffer; you sit with them in their exhaustion, their fear, and their longing to return to something resembling home.

The film’s portrayal of the migrant crisis during the pandemic feels especially urgent in a time when collective memory seems dangerously short. For many urban viewers, the lockdown was an inconvenience. For millions of others, it was a catastrophe. Homebound refuses to let that disparity be forgotten. It reminds us that while some people learned to bake sourdough or attend Zoom meetings in pyjamas, others walked hundreds of kilometres with blistered feet and broken hope.

What also stands out is the film’s political honesty. Without preaching or posturing, Homebound exposes how structural neglect and apathy magnified human suffering. It is not interested in assigning easy blame but insists on asking uncomfortable questions about whose lives are deemed expendable during a crisis.

And yet, for all its heaviness, the film is not devoid of hope. Its final moments carry a quiet resilience — the kind that doesn’t promise miracles but acknowledges survival itself as an act of resistance. There is grief here, yes, but also tenderness. The kind that reminds you why cinema still matters.

Homebound is not an easy watch, nor is it meant to be. If you’re looking for escapism, this is not your film. But if you’re willing to sit with discomfort, to remember what the pandemic revealed about inequality, compassion, and endurance, then this film feels essential.

In a time when forgetting has become convenient, Homebound insists on remembrance. And that, perhaps, is its greatest achievement.

For weeks now, Heated Rivalry, a glossy, emotionally charged show about two elite ice hockey players who fall in love, has had the internet in a chokehold. Clips circulate like contraband. Dialogue is screenshotted, bookmarked, romanticised. Fan edits rack up millions of views. And one demographic, in particular, seems utterly captivated: straight women.

This is not an accident, nor is it new. But the intensity of the response says something urgent about desire, gender politics and the kinds of love stories women are no longer willing to settle for.

At first glance, the appeal seems obvious. Ice hockey is a hyper-masculine sport: bodies colliding, teeth missing, aggression rewarded. Place a gay love story inside that arena and the contrast crackles. Two men who are trained to suppress vulnerability are suddenly required to negotiate it—publicly, painfully, tenderly. The result is not just romance, but rupture: of what masculinity is allowed to look like.

Straight women are watching closely because this is masculinity reimagined.

For decades, heterosexual romance on screen has asked women to do the emotional labour. The male lead is stoic, wounded, unavailable; the woman is intuitive, patient, endlessly forgiving. Desire flows in one direction, care in another. In ‘Heated Rivalry’, that script collapses. Both men are emotionally articulate. Both are jealous, insecure, soft. Both want reassurance. Love is not extracted from a woman; it is negotiated between equals.

That symmetry is intoxicating.

There is also safety in the gaze. Watching two men fall in love allows straight women to experience desire without being implicated in it. No female character stands in for the viewer, meaning there is no pressure to compare bodies, choices or worth. The fantasy is immersive but unthreatening. Desire can be indulged without self-surveillance.

This is not about fetishisation, at least not entirely. It is about relief.

In a cultural moment where women are exhausted by dating apps, emotionally unavailable partners and the constant negotiation of consent and care, queer male romance offers an escape hatch. These stories imagine men who choose emotional risk over dominance, communication over control. Men who fight, yes, but also apologise. Men who want each other openly, fiercely, without irony.

And then there is the enemies-to-lovers trope, sharpened to perfection. Rivalry externalises internal conflict. The ice becomes a stage for longing, denial, restraint. Every glance is loaded; every hit on the rink doubles as foreplay. Straight women have long been fluent in reading subtext because they have had to be. ‘Heated Rivalry’ rewards that literacy.

The show also benefits from timing. We are living through a cultural reckoning with masculinity, what it has cost women, but also what it has cost men. Stories like this suggest that tenderness is not a betrayal of strength but its evolution. That intimacy between men need not be tragic, closeted or punished. That love can survive ambition.

Straight women are not watching because they want these men to be straight. They are watching because they want men, full stop, to be like this.

Emotionally present. Accountable. Capable of love that does not require someone else to disappear.

In that sense, ‘Heated Rivalry’ is less a guilty pleasure than a quiet protest. Against flat male characters. Against joyless romance. Against the idea that wanting more makes women demanding.

On the ice, two men crash into each other and fall in love. Off it, millions of women are watching—and taking notes.

At the stroke of the midnight hour in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru declared India’s “tryst with destiny,” envisioning a nation where all her citizens—regardless of faith, class, or creed—would have the freedom to shape their future. Nearly eight decades later, that promise feels strained. The world’s largest democracy is still wrestling with questions of representation, inequality, and voice. And yet, across the world, in another city of immigrants and contradictions—New York—an Indian-origin leader has just reignited that old Nehruvian dream.

When Zohran Mamdani—a 34-year-old Muslim, South Asian, and democratic socialist—was elected Mayor of New York City this week, it wasn’t just a victory for progressives in the U.S. It was a political earthquake that sent ripples far beyond American borders. For India, a country that has long grappled with questions of representation, diversity, and youth leadership, Mamdani’s win offers a rare blueprint of what modern politics could look like when powered by authenticity rather than dynasty.

Born to an Indian mother, filmmaker Mira Nair, and a Ugandan father, Mamdani embodies the hyphenated identity of a global citizen. But his campaign was strikingly local—anchored in the lived struggles of working-class New Yorkers. His promises weren’t grand ideological gestures; they were tangible policies: free public buses, affordable housing, rent freezes, and city-funded groceries. The message was simple—government should work for people, not power.

For India, where elections are often driven by personality cults, caste loyalties, and emotional nationalism, Mamdani’s model offers a provocative contrast. It’s a reminder that bread-and-butter issues still matter. In cities like Mumbai, Delhi, and Bengaluru—where the cost of living has skyrocketed and public transport systems creak under pressure—voters are hungry for leaders who talk policy, not posturing.

People don’t want saviours anymore. They want problem-solvers. What Mamdani managed to do was bring back the idea of civic politics—the politics of the everyday. India’s metros are crying out for that kind of leadership.

There’s also a generational lesson buried in Mamdani’s win. His campaign was youth-driven, social-media savvy, and volunteer-led—mobilizing a base that is often dismissed as apathetic. Videos of him canvassing neighborhoods, meeting local vendors, and translating policy into street-level action went viral. He didn’t just ask for votes; he invited participation.

India, with the world’s largest youth population, has yet to harness that kind of civic energy. Most young Indians express their politics online but remain disillusioned with the electoral process. Mamdani’s approach—bottom-up, participatory, intersectional—shows that when you speak to young people like adults, not demographics, they listen.

Then there’s the matter of representation. As the first Muslim and first South Asian mayor of New York City, Mamdani’s win carries enormous symbolic weight at a time when identity politics is polarizing the globe. But what made his campaign powerful was that his identity wasn’t a marketing strategy—it was context. He didn’t run as a Muslim or as a South Asian; he ran as a citizen trying to make his city fairer.

India could use more of that nuance. Too often, representation here is tokenistic—used to signal diversity without redistributing power. Mamdani’s story underscores that identity and integrity can coexist, and that marginalized communities don’t just need seats at the table—they need the ability to set the agenda.

Finally, his win is a testament to political courage. Taking on an entrenched figure like Andrew Cuomo and winning wasn’t just an electoral upset—it was a declaration that new ideas can still topple old empires. For India, where dynastic politics remains stubbornly intact, this is a call to action for a new generation of leaders who dare to start small, stay rooted, and challenge the script.

In the end, Mamdani’s victory isn’t just about New York—it’s about the future of democracy in an era of fatigue and cynicism. He didn’t win by being louder; he won by being real. And perhaps that’s the biggest lesson for India: that authenticity, empathy, and everyday politics still have a place in public life.

Because sometimes, the most radical thing a politician can do is simply listen.

It wasn’t love at first sight in the dramatic, movie-scene kind of way — no slow background music, no cinematic lighting, no sudden realization that my life was about to change. It was quieter than that. I saw him one afternoon on campus — sunlight bouncing off his hair, laughter spilling effortlessly from his mouth — and something inside me shifted. Not with thunder, but with recognition.

I just knew.

He was standing near the canteen, talking animatedly to a group of people, probably telling one of his stories. Everyone around him was laughing, leaning in. He had that rare ability — to make people feel seen, even in a crowd. His confidence wasn’t loud; it was effortless, unstudied. The kind that can make even the shyest person feel drawn in.

I wasn’t supposed to notice him this much. But I did. And when he caught me looking, I panicked. My instinct? A sarcastic jibe, delivered with a smirk that I hoped hid my nerves. It was my armor — humor masking vulnerability. He laughed, the sound still etched in my memory. And that was it. The smallest exchange, yet somehow, it felt like the start of something.

He quickly became the gravitational center of our college. He’d walk into a room, and conversations shifted toward him. Girls whispered his name in corridors. He was that boy — the crush everyone had, even the ones who swore they didn’t. He flirted easily, but not cruelly; his charm felt natural, like sunlight — impossible to ignore, impossible to contain.

I didn’t think I stood a chance. Still, when our mutual friends let slip that I liked him, something unexpected happened. He started noticing me too — not dramatically, but in small, deliberate gestures. He’d linger around when I was nearby. Follow me quietly down the hallways. Catch my eye across lecture halls and smile, that half-grin that made my heart skip a beat.

But I never acted on it. My anxiety wouldn’t let me. I’d overthink every possible scenario, every word, every glance. What if he didn’t mean anything by it? What if I was reading too much into his smile? What if I was setting myself up for heartbreak? So, I kept my distance — watched from afar, smiled when our eyes met, and pretended it didn’t matter as much as it did.

That year, I was also battling depression — though I didn’t have the words for it then. The weight of expectations, the noise of college life, the exhaustion of pretending to be fine — it all caught up with me. I took a gap year soon after, leaving behind the campus, my friends, and him. Especially him.

But he didn’t leave me.

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Even in the quiet of that year — the empty days and sleepless nights — his memory stayed. I’d recall the way he’d grin at me from across the room, or how he’d run a hand through his tousled hair while talking, or how his laughter could fill a space like a warm breeze. I didn’t know it then, but he had become a symbol — of something beautiful that existed outside my sadness.

Years later, when I came across his profile on Bumble, my heart did the thing it used to do — race without reason. His smile was the same, maybe a little older, a little wiser. My thumb hovered over the screen. One swipe right, and maybe we could’ve rewritten our story. But I didn’t. I told myself I was being rational, that some stories are better left untouched. But deep down, I knew it was fear — the same fear that once kept me from speaking to him in those corridors.

I’ve dated others since. Some kind, some careless. I’ve tried to fall in love again, tried to feel that spark — but none have made me feel the same mix of warmth and chaos that he did. Sometimes I wonder if it was really him I loved, or the version of him that existed in my mind — untarnished by time, untouched by reality.

Still, every now and then, I catch myself searching for him in other people — the tilt of a smile, the boyish laughter, the same gentle eyes. And I realize that he’s become a part of the lens through which I see love itself.

If destiny would ever have my way, I hope to meet him again. Maybe in another city, another time, another version of myself — one that isn’t afraid. I’d look him in the eye and say what I couldn’t back then: I liked you. I really did.

And maybe this time, that would be enough.

In one of the last publications I worked at, there was a growing belief that producing more articles would automatically attract more readers. What they overlooked was that readers crave compelling stories, not rehashed pieces that read as if they were generated by ChatGPT. Yet this has become a common practice across many digital publications—especially mainstream ones—where newsrooms increasingly resemble factories.

Journalists are expected to churn out 15 to 20 stories a day, each stretching 400 to 450 words. That’s nearly two articles per hour in a standard shift—a pace that leaves little room for reflection, research or the kind of thoughtful reporting that sustains public trust.

What began as a survival strategy for digital publications—feeding algorithms, keeping up with competitors, ensuring Google search visibility—has metastasized into an industry norm. Each year, the daily quota seems to grow. The newsroom that once prized scoops and narrative depth now too often resembles an assembly line.

The irony is glaring: in a landscape saturated with content, readers are far more likely to linger on a story that feels crafted, not cobbled together. Yet when the demand for speed trumps all else, quality inevitably slips. It is no wonder, then, that some journalists quietly turn to artificial intelligence tools, using them not as aids to polish their work but as shortcuts to meet impossible targets. Can we really blame them?

Journalism, after all, was never meant to mimic the cadence of a social media feed. Its value lies in what content creation cannot replicate: rigorous fact-checking, deep reporting, on-the-ground interviews, and a sense of moral responsibility to the truth. When these elements are sidelined, the profession begins to lose its distinction. We risk becoming what many in the industry dread—content creators rather than journalists.

Of course, the realities of the modern newsroom cannot be ignored. Budgets are tighter. News cycles are shorter. Breaking news waits for no one, and Google’s algorithms reward speed. But when the race to publish first eclipses the need to publish accurately, the public is left with half-baked reporting, misinformation, and distrust. In this calculus, everyone loses.

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Consider the alternative. A well-researched investigation or a deeply reported feature may not go viral in the same way as a breaking news alert, but it builds credibility. It sparks conversation, influences policy, and earns the loyalty of readers who come to trust the publication’s voice. Journalism’s greatest power lies not in its volume, but in its ability to illuminate, challenge, and provoke thought.

The shift toward quantity over quality is not irreversible. It requires editors and publishers to recalibrate their expectations, valuing a strong, accurate story over a flurry of forgettable posts. It requires readers to demand more than rehashed press releases dressed up as news. And it requires journalists themselves to resist being reduced to machines, to fight for the time and space necessary to do their jobs properly.

The industry is at a crossroads. Will it continue to reward speed, clicks, and churn? Or will it reclaim its core mission: to tell the stories that matter, with clarity, accuracy and depth?

Good journalism takes time. Without it, what we are left with is noise—and the slow erosion of trust in an institution that democracy depends on.

When Donald Trump came into power, those who voted for him did so with the belief that immigrants wouldn’t steal their jobs or resources and Trump’s executive order to deport ‘illegal aliens’ made sure to fulfil American citizen’s anti-immigrant sentiment. Keeping up with this, the United States has ramped up deportations of undocumented Indian immigrants, many of whom risked their lives—and their life savings—to reach American soil. Some were caught at the southern border after grueling journeys through Latin America. Others lived for years in the shadows before being rounded up in immigration crackdowns. Their forced return to India in shackles tells us something about the state of American immigration policy, but perhaps even more about the conditions in India that drove them to leave in the first place.

For decades, America has been a dream destination for many Indians, particularly from Punjab and Gujarat, where stories of successful immigrants have long fueled aspirations of a better life abroad. But in recent years, this pipeline has become increasingly desperate. The growing number of Indians attempting illegal crossings—many paying traffickers exorbitant sums to endure perilous journeys—suggests that for them, staying in India feels like a dead end.

The reasons are not hard to discern. India’s job market, despite its much-touted economic growth, remains anemic. The promise of “Make in India” and a booming digital economy has not translated into enough stable employment opportunities, especially for young people. Rural distress persists, and small business owners, once the backbone of India’s economic resilience, have struggled post-pandemic. In this landscape, the allure of the American Dream, however fraught, is difficult to resist.

But the phenomenon of illegal migration is not just about economic survival—it is also about societal pressures. For many families, particularly in northern India, emigration is seen as a mark of upward mobility. A son or daughter “settled” abroad, legally or otherwise, elevates the family’s social status. Parents mortgage land and homes to fund these dangerous journeys, driven by a belief that their children will eventually thrive in America. This isn’t merely economic desperation—it is also a deep-seated cultural expectation, one that equates staying behind with failure.

The deportations should be a wake-up call for India. While American immigration policies may oscillate with political winds, the fact remains that a significant number of Indians are willing to risk everything to escape their homeland. This is an indictment of India’s inability to provide viable futures for its people. If a rising global power cannot convince its own citizens that they have a future within its borders, what does that say about the nature of its growth?

There is also the question of accountability. Indian authorities are quick to express concern when citizens face hardship abroad, but what efforts are being made to address the conditions that push them to leave? What protections exist against the exploitative agents who promise safe passage and abandon migrants in treacherous situations? And what reintegration plans exist for those who return, often in debt and socially stigmatized?

America’s tightening borders are not going to solve India’s migration problem. The question India must ask itself is: Why do so many of its citizens still believe that a dangerous, uncertain path to another country is better than the one at home?

Until that question is answered, the deportations will continue, but the exodus will never stop.

Bianca Censori, the internet’s latest sensation and ‘the most googled person’ according to Kanye West who she is wife of, is no stranger to provocation. Her latest public appearance—clad in what could barely be called a dress, but rather a translucent sheath of fabric clinging to her body displayed her privates openly—has reignited a familiar cultural debate at the music industry’s biggest event—the Grammy’s where reportedly they were asked to leave. But are we witnessing a woman fully in control of her own image, or is this just another iteration of a timeworn narrative: the male gaze, repackaged in Yeezy aesthetics?

Censori’s transformation since her marriage to West has been stark. Once a relatively private figure, she now appears in a series of hyper-revealing ensembles that leave little to the imagination—outfits that invite both voyeurism and controversy. Her near-nudity in public is not just a personal style choice; it’s a performance, a carefully curated spectacle that blurs the lines between empowerment and objectification. And yet, this spectacle feels eerily familiar, mirroring the ways in which women’s bodies have historically been put on display for consumption—whether by men, the media, or the marketplace.

For centuries, the fashion and entertainment industries have operated as machines of commodification, stripping women of agency under the guise of liberation. The “naked dress” is not new; from Marilyn Monroe to Kim Kardashian, hyper-sexualized fashion has always existed at the intersection of power, desire, and control. The difference now is the speed at which these images circulate, feeding an insatiable social media ecosystem where engagement is currency and controversy is free advertising.

Kanye West, who might be responsible for his partners’ aesthetics, has long wielded fashion as a means of control. His influence over Censori’s wardrobe echoes his past styling of Kim Kardashian, though this time the nudity is even more pronounced. West’s vision, whether artistic or strategic, plays into a long-standing trope: the male genius shaping his female counterpart into a work of art, a live-in installation of his own creation. The question, then, is whether Censori is an autonomous participant in this aesthetic—or simply another woman caught in the web of a powerful man’s vision.

Some will argue that Censori is exercising agency, that she is an adult making independent choices about how she presents herself. And they are not wrong; autonomy and objectification are not always mutually exclusive. But in a society that still overwhelmingly equates a woman’s value with her appearance, we must ask: Who truly benefits from this performance? When near-total nudity becomes a requirement for visibility, is it really about choice, or is it about survival in an economy that rewards women who make themselves consumable?

Censori’s naked dress is a reflection of a culture still fueled by the male gaze, still obsessed with dissecting and debating women’s bodies, still unable to imagine female empowerment without erotic spectacle. Whether we gawk in admiration or disapproval, we are participating in the very system that makes such performances necessary. The true rebellion would be to look away.

In an inaugural prayer service sermon, Episcopal bishop of Washington, Right Rev Mariann Budde in an impassioned plea to Donald Trump asked him to ‘have mercy’ upon communities across the nation that have been targeted by anti-LGBTQ+ policies. This came after an executive order passed by Trump that directed the federal government to recognise only two sexes—male and female. “There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in both Democratic, Republican and independent families who fear for their lives,” Budde said with compassion.

This move threatens to unravel years of progress for LGBTQ+ rights. For the transgender and nonbinary communities, this rhetoric signals more than just an ideological stance; it portends a rollback of fundamental rights and access to essential healthcare.

Trump had made gender identity a cornerstone of his campaign, pledging to enforce policies that restrict the recognition of gender to biological sex at birth. From bathroom usage to sports participation, Trump’s stance aims to set definitive boundaries on what he describes as “woke ideology.” But the implications of this go far beyond cultural posturing—they could have devastating consequences for individuals who rely on gender-affirming care and legal protections against discrimination.

A Direct Hit on Transgender Rights

The Trump administration’s record offers a preview of what could be on the horizon. His first term saw the reversal of Obama-era protections for transgender students, the ban on transgender individuals serving in the military, and the erosion of federal guidelines allowing transgender individuals access to healthcare without discrimination.

Legal experts fear that under a second Trump presidency, these policies could become even more entrenched. This rhetoric isn’t just symbolic. It creates a hostile environment where transgender and nonbinary individuals are denied their basic humanity and stripped of their legal protections.

If Trump’s policies take effect, laws that protect against discrimination in employment, housing, and education could be curtailed, leaving millions vulnerable to prejudice and exclusion.

The Assault on Gender-Affirming Care

Perhaps the most urgent concern is the potential impact on healthcare. Gender-affirming care—a combination of social, medical, and psychological interventions—is considered lifesaving by leading health organizations, including the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization.

Under Trump’s proposed policies, access to this care could become even more restricted. States already passing laws banning puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgeries for transgender youth would likely receive federal support, cementing barriers to care. Moreover, healthcare providers could face fewer consequences for denying services to transgender patients based on “conscientious objections.”

But this isn’t just about banning surgeries or treatments. It’s about sending a message that transgender people are not legitimate, that their identities are not real. That has a chilling effect on mental health and well-being.

A Global Backlash

The implications of a Trump-led rollback on LGBTQ+ rights extend far beyond the United States. As a global superpower, U.S. policy often influences international norms. Countries struggling to advance LGBTQ+ protections may see Trump’s actions as justification to stall or regress.

Leadership matters—when the U.S. takes a hard-right turn, it emboldens governments around the world to crack down on marginalized communities.

The Road Ahead

The stakes for the LGBTQ+ community in the upcoming years could not be higher. Advocacy groups are mobilizing to counter Trump’s policies, but they face an uphill battle against a political climate increasingly hostile to gender diversity.

In the meantime, transgender individuals and their allies continue to fight for visibility and rights. For many, this is not just a political battle but a deeply personal one.

As the country grapples with Trump’s vision of America, the question looms: What kind of nation does it want to be—one that embraces diversity or one that erases it? For millions of Americans, the answer will determine their future.

Larsen & Toubro (L&T) Chairman S.N. Subrahmanyan’s recent comments advocating for 90-hour work weeks and even working on Sundays have sparked outrage and reignited debates about the ethics of modern work culture. His remarks—captured in a video from an internal interaction—suggest that relentless work is the key to staying competitive. However, this perspective ignores the serious consequences of such a grueling schedule on employee health, work-life balance, and societal well-being.

The Dangerous Toll on Health

Working 90 hours a week is a recipe for burnout. Prolonged work schedules have been linked to chronic stress, anxiety, depression, cardiovascular diseases, and even premature death. The World Health Organization (WHO) reported in 2021 that working 55 or more hours a week increases the risk of stroke by 35% and heart disease by 17%. For young professionals, like the Ernst & Young consultant who tragically passed away at 26 due to job-related stress, the costs of overwork are immediate and devastating.

Mr. Subrahmanyan’s remarks also disregard the importance of recovery and rest. Neuroscience studies consistently show that creativity, problem-solving, and cognitive efficiency decline with overwork. In the long run, employees subjected to extreme hours are less productive, less innovative, and more prone to errors—outcomes that contradict the very competitiveness such schedules claim to foster.

Work-Life Balance: More Than a Luxury

Equally concerning is the dismissal of personal lives and relationships in Subrahmanyan’s comments. His flippant question, “How long can you stare at your wife?” reflects a broader cultural undervaluation of personal time and familial bonds. Work-life balance isn’t a luxury; it’s essential for physical and emotional health. Employees with fulfilling personal lives are happier, more engaged, and ultimately more productive.

Ironically, the emphasis on extreme work hours has contributed to higher attrition rates in organizations like L&T. Reports from employees highlight how campus hires are overburdened, underpaid, and given negligible time off. This churn—over 90% of new recruits leaving within three years—undermines any long-term competitiveness the company seeks to achieve.

Capitalism at Its Most Unsustainable

At its core, the 90-hour work week is a product of exploitative capitalism, where productivity is prioritized over people. While Subrahmanyan justified his stance by citing Chinese work ethics, such comparisons ignore critical cultural and systemic differences. Additionally, these comments highlight a glaring disparity: while CEOs earn disproportionately high salaries and enjoy autonomy, their expectations often disregard the realities of their lower-paid employees.

The backlash to Subrahmanyan’s remarks reveals the growing discontent among employees globally, who are demanding fairer working conditions, flexible hours, and better compensation. As one Reddit user pointed out, offering different work schedules with proportional pay could be a viable solution. Instead, outdated notions of productivity and loyalty continue to dominate corporate rhetoric.

A Wake-Up Call for Better Work Practices

As mental health and work-life balance become central to workplace discussions, comments like Subrahmanyan’s feel dangerously out of touch. They serve as a reminder that achieving true productivity and competitiveness requires respecting employees’ well-being. It’s time for businesses to shift from glorifying overwork to fostering environments where people can thrive—both professionally and personally. After all, no company’s success is worth the cost of its employees’ lives.