(As a professional haver of ideas, I would like to think mine were cooler but I know they weren’t.)

More regional language support. More voice-first tools. My mom needs a reason to move away from Google search. Better partnerships with universities. Founder programs. Government engagement. India-specific pricing. Better distribution. Maybe an accelerator. Maybe a fellowship. Definitely something for creators.

Unfortunately, this whole list is almost entirely obsolete.

Over the past week, I read every OpenAI and Anthropic announcement about India I could find. Product launches. Global Affairs updates. Hiring pages. Partnership announcements. Education initiatives. Benchmarks. Interviews. Press coverage. Turns out, the suits at the helm had some idea about what they’re doing. Nearly every obvious idea had already been built.

Access, a question we all were asking when we started thinking of AI for India, is at least partially answered.

So, what after access?

Adoption is not diffusion

Adoption is always framed as a problem of distribution. I don’t know about this product, I learn about it, I use it. A beautiful, linear process that suits people like you and me wonderfully, and has very little to do with how technology gets diffused into a society.

Here’s the difference that I’ve settled on in recent months. Adoption is the decision I make to use ChatGPT or Claude. Diffusion is the effect of my using it on ten more people. Adoption and diffusion are different, and they get measured in different ways. Adoption creates users, MAUs, licence purchases and so on, the statistics that go in the launch posts. Diffusion creates behaviour and behaviour shows up on dashboards only long after the event.

It can be viewed as a three-phase problem. First phase: access. Can I even reach the tool? Second phase: accessibility. Is the tool accessible to me where I am in my language, on my payment rails, at the prices that I’m willing to pay, rather than making me come to it? And the third phase has very little to do with the existence of AI. Even my grandpa believes in AI. What remains is persuading people that they can reshape their working lives using the technology. This does not come from a press release about some feature. It comes from seeing someone trusted doing it.

Somebody in a learning cohort at GrowthX builds the first internal AI application, and suddenly three more GXers build theirs. Suddenly, GrowthX realises that this is a workflow of workflows they could consolidate and teach. A recruiter figures out how to use AI to screen her candidates differently and replicates herself in her whole team in a month. A teacher redesigns her lesson plans, and it spreads among her peers in the staff room. No playbooks are distributed, no files on skills are shared.

Someone sees someone they trust and two things happen at once: she believes that if he could do this, then so could she, and suddenly the technology doesn’t feel threatening anymore, but cooperative.

Sociology calls this a Diffusion Process, and the fact that it maps to AI as the perfect pun is just great!

I spend most of my working life talking to people. It is quite literally my job. Every discussion that I have started with AI has ended in one of four places: career, ambitions, education, and loneliness. I expected these discussions to change with changing models, and they haven’t, which is telling me where the diffusion battle will actually be fought. (The discussion about loneliness deserves a separate essay and will get one).

A market must expand in every way

AI India is not a market expansion story anymore. It’s an organizational redesign story, and organizational redesign consists mostly of gloriously non-sexy problems. Coordination of hospital services. Preparation of your taxes by chartered accountant. Documenting quality assurance in factories. Lesson planning in schools. Movement of documents in district administration. Filing FIR reports in police station. Supply chain management by the export manager. Logistics of delivering orders by Nykaa.

None of those industries ask for AI. Most of them are currently suffering from the poor implementation of AI precisely because the template of such a huge country is to optimize for reach without measuring the quality. Users, institutions, partnerships, licenses are all real metrics, of course, but they are lagging. The leading indicator is how many people reshaped their working life based on the demonstration they’ve seen.

So if the obvious list is done, and the new era is diffusion, what would I build?

Build for operators, not just founders

The conversation around AI circles founders as central characters and for good reason. Founders are, well, founders. They lead the charge, create companies, change processes quickly, and own the onus of changing lives on a daily basis. My time in VC has created a distorted view of change because working with founders makes you think every founder is amenable to experimentation.

Investing in companies that build for MSMEs reminded me of how truly small the world of startups and venture capital is. The guy sitting in a rented 2BHK in HSR with a Delaware Incorporated entity is going to say yes to anything AI is going to say yes only. If you want to see how change emerges in a small business in in India, you really have to go talk to a CA who has done the books for a whole bunch of startups and inherently distrusts ‘all these new things’ because she has seen founders monumentally muck up their books trying to ‘optimise’. It might be the accounts person who has rolled their eyes at an agent workflow that could have been an email. It might be the admin guy who somehow knows how everything works, right from the AC machine to the domain of the Claude-generated website. You’ll meet variations of this person constantly. On paper, they have limited power and authority, but their practical authority makes them arbiters of outsized trust, and hence, owners of outsized context.

India, I’d wager, is a land of operators. We are very good at making terrible systems, and then we are excellent at making people jump hoops to learn how to navigate those systems. Once the hoops are jumped, we consolidate a cadre of people whose entire job is to translate systems to the rest of us chumps. That makes the most influential distiburion layer for AI because their behaviours have multipliers attached to them. If I can convince one founder to use AI well, I change one company. If I help a CA who works with 200 cos find a way AI can become genuinel useful to her practice, I potentially touch 200 cos without having to convince 200 founders separately. It will not look like the glittering ‘we are now AI’ announcements on LinkedIn, and that’s fine. Diffusion is not a moment!

There is a psychological cost to the adoption of AI we tend to gloss over. We have spent the last three years telling people two things simultaneously. One, THIS IS THE MOST IMPOTANT TECHNOLOGY OF YOUR LIFE AND IF YOU IGNORE IT YOU ARE IN TROUBLE. Two, DON’T WORRY, THE TECHNOLOGY THAT CAN TAKE YOUR JOB WON’T…OR WILL IT?

Of course there is fear attached to AI! Of course there is inertia! A ChatGPT or Claude workshop might teach me how to prompt (badly, might I add), but it cannot give me the permission I need emotionally to change how I do my job, something I have been good at for the last 15 years. That permission only emerges from me seeing someone I respect incorporate new technology into their work without becoming meaningfully worse for it. A surprisingly large amount of tech adoption is simply borrowed courage.

This is why the first thing I would build is an Operator Network (that is not a Whatsapp group that everyone mutes in 3 weeks or less). I would curate a deliberate network of people who have disproportionate influence on how work happens inside orgs across finance, legal, hiring, sales, admin, customer support, procurement. Basically, people who keep the wheels turning but rarely get treated as the protagonists of the story of technological innovation. While easier to optimize for industry first, I’d instead focus on the function. A finance operator at a logistics co has a lot more in common with a finance operator at a luggage company than either do with their respective marketing teams.

The measured unit of participation will be workflows. The price of admission will be something that is expensive, repetitive, frustrating, slow, or unnecessarily dependent on one person’s institutional memory. The engagement will involve them rebuilding it with Ai tools, establish and document the changes and failures, and teaching it to someone else. To borrow from teaching hospitals, see one, do one, teach one. The metric of obsession is not an NPS score or number of participants. It is the number of ways and industries a workflow can travel into. Simply, if a workflow built by one finance team can get picked up by another without needing someone to being paid to create adoption for it, success!

Why should an OpenAI or Anthropic do this? Because this network will be an extraordinary listening tool. They already know what millions of Indians prompt every day. I would personally do a lot of marginally illegal things for one day with their data dashboards (hehe). What is ,uch, much harder to figure is what someone does after they close the tab or the desktop app. Did the answer actually answer anything? Did the finance team take any inputs? Did the workflow fall apart when persona A tried to teach it to persona B? Did it work for a 400-person logistics co but completely fall apart for a 12-person distributor dhandho in Surat?

This infprmation is going to become increasingly more valuable as models get better. Once ‘can the model do this?’ becomes redundant as a question, the more interesting one to ask will be ‘why didn’t the org adopt this even though the model could do this?’ An Operator Network answers that in realtime because you get to observe and support people taking frontier models to non-frontier conditions.

More importantly, you start building flywheels. Not ‘use cases’ (ugh) but demonstrated and sustainable changes in workflows that are infinitely replicable. Over time, the goal would be to remove dependency on the network as operators become evangelists and workflows mutate and adapt. We have enough AI influencers. I want to build AI behaviour leaders.

Apprenticeships, not another AI course

I recently attended a ‘Free AI course’ I won on CRED (because who actually wins a jackpot? NO ONE I THINK). The instructor asked the group attending what they wanted out of learning about AI. Everyone said some variation of ‘I am curious about AI because I am an xyz and I can’t figure how it will improve my work.’

No great ambition starts and stops with ‘learning AI’. The goal is always to become better accountants, lawyers, recruiters, designers, teachers, salespeople, architects, researchers, doctors. They want to be promoted. They want to make more money. They want to be better at their own jobs they’re likely pretty damn good at. Obviously, some people want to ‘learn AI’ to learn AI, but they’re already doing that all over my X feed. Serious…all over…

Supply is not a constraint in India. We have spent an enormous amount of energy and resources on AI education. Microsoft says it has trained millions of Indians in AI skills. Google has enormous developer and skilling programmes. OpenAI has Academy, the Learning Accelerator, certifications coming, university partnerships, and education products. Anthropic is doing its own education work. Add the hundreds of courses, bootcamps, workshops, YouTube channels and the guy on Instagram promising to teach you 47 AI tools before breakfast, and I am not convinced another general AI course creates much marginal value.

I think what is fundamentally missing is education that revolves around roles and functions, not the technology itself. If I tell you to teach an CA AI, you’ll start with ChatGPT or Claude, you will explain the model, what prompting means, maybe projects, contexts, agents. Tell her what a skill.md file is, show her a bunch of features, give her examples of how you would use AI, and hope that she will take all this knowledge that is in your context and apply it to her own. What if instead we focus on creating an AI-native Chartered Accountant and start with what is on her desk at that moment? What does she do? She looks at tax notices, reconciliations, client communication, compliance research, documents, reviews. She has a hundred WhatsApp texts running with clients who forget to send her invoices on time. She’s chasing after TDS documents, she is chasing after TAN numbers, and she has spent way too much time typing out “please send Form 16A.” I know all of that only because I called up my CA and asked her, “Hello, what are the things you do on an everyday basis?”

What if AI only entered after we understood the job to be done and then worked backwards from there?

This is why I would build these apprenticeships around professions or skills, and I would use the word “apprentice” very, very deliberately. A course asks me whether I understood what you taught me. An apprenticeship asks whether I can now do what you have taught me in the context of my work. The latter is a lot more difficult. I don’t think it’s useful for a CA to complete like 23 modules and answer a 30-minute quiz about prompt engineering. I want her to bring a tax notice, establish the workflow through which she deals with it today, help her rebuild that workflow, test it against multiple examples to discover failure points, and finally, decide what she is comfortable allowing AI ownership over

The curriculum would have to be modular in nature and would have to be built backward from work rather than forwards from the models. You would have to find a couple of recurring artifacts that define the skills in the job. Then find practitioners, ideally people who have already spent time on social media or YouTube teaching people how to do those things, and use them as leverage for creating teaching flows. You will work with those people, and you will essentially create teaching flows that can be diffused across networks very, very quickly and answer really pinpoint questions. The apprenticeship should ideally teach people what to delegate and what not to delegate, because one of the things that AI needs to work in tandem with is contextual judgment, and that is where the curriculum design becomes incredibly important.

This would also solve one of the weirder things about the current conversation about AI and jobs. We keep asking which professions will AI replace, as though professions are static bundles of skills that have been anointed by some divine power. They aren’t. Jobs have always adopted technologies and rearranged workflows around them. What is unusual about AI is the number of professions being asked to sort of recalibrate what “being good at my job” means. The fact is that that recalibration is a deeply uncomfortable negotiation with what you see as a part of your identity. That is why a lot of people shirk away from it.

An apprenticeship and the community that it can build gives that negotiation a collective space. Instead of telling a 25-year-old who has just done a master’s in organizational psychology, “Hey, your job is going to be replaced by AI. Good luck. You are going to be putting her in the same room as 50 excellent recruiters. You will let them figure out what parts of their work become dramatically better with AI. They publish what they learn so that the profession can learn from their experiences and do a collective negotiation of what ‘good’ looks like.”

India is also a degree- and certification-obsessed country. The apprenticeship framing allows people to get value from this process. Think of our national skills architecture. Think of how employers are still hung up on degrees. Knowing a skill and being appointed as a knower of skill are two fundamentally different things, and I don’t want to change that reality. I just want to piggyback on it. We can just provide models, technical expertise, evaluation, practitioner networks, and institutions that are already doing what they do with training and employment are better equipped to continue their work. The ambition is not that we are India’s largest AI school. The ambition is that every space that makes better, more employable, more educated people is better equipped to support their members through this mass transition into AI systems.

And the commercial reason for doing it is obviously very simple: if I learn ChatGPT or Claude through a generic AI course, Open AI, or Anthropic, I just own one of the tools I use. If I learn how to negotiate my place in my profession and world through one of these organizations, I have a much deeper relationship with them because they have participated in the construction of my new idea of good work and what it looks like. I will have simply built my way around working these goals and that is ownership over a user that new gimmicky image generation social media trends can’t buy.

So if the operator network is about finding people who have influence over work and helping their AI-enabled behaviors become fungible, apprenticeships are a layer earlier in that they help us change what a profession thinks a good practitioner looks like as the norms shift with the emergence of AI systems. We are essentially going to stop producing people who have “AI skills” and start producing people for whom using AI well is simply a part of being really good at their jobs.

Take AI off the laptop

Look, as a person who is an information worker, obviously everything I’ve described so far works primarily with information. The work I’ve described, whether it’s CAs, recruiters, lawyers, teachers, officers, etc., etc., etc., may be very different, but enough of it eventually boils down to words on a screen. There is a very clear path from AI to AiWorks that makes my life better. India, unfortunately, is not an economy made entirely of people sitting in WeWorks with MacBooks.

A bulk of the Indian economy is still deeply physical. We make things, move things, inspect things, repair things, grow things, pack things, load things, count things, and occasionally, often lose things between Bhivandi and Bangalore. Manufacturing is physical, logistics is physical, construction is physical, agriculture is physical, hospitals are physical, and even retail, which looks increasingly digital from the consumer end, has an enormous physical machine sitting behind the little “out for delivery” notification. If AI diffusion in India concentrates primarily on people whose work already happens inside the non-physical, we end up with a very sophisticated transformation for a very narrow slice of the country.

I don’t mean that OpenAI or Anthropic should start creating robots. No, that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that physical work is surrounded by information work. A nurse spending time with a patient documents what happens, and that documentation is key to her ensuring that the patient gets the care they need. A factory worker inspects a component, and somebody has to record whether it passed QA. A machine fails, and a maintenance engineer goes to diagnose it, find the manual, document the failure, figure out what has happened, and tell the next shift what was done to fix the failure so that they don’t replicate it. Everything has invoices, inventory records, exception reports, render coms, compliance requirements, WhatsApp messages going up and down asking where something is and when it will reach

The cool thing about the current generation of multimodal models is that they do not need a person standing on a factory floor to become a sophisticated prompt engineer. She can simply photograph a defect. She can speak in the language that she’s comfortable speaking in. A field technician can ask a question, looking at what they need to fix, instead of having to return to a desktop, find the right PDF, and figure out the correct instructions in the 200-page manual. The problem is that, for all the awesome demos seen in this space, the deployment has been fundamentally terrible.

That is why I would love to build something I would think of as Physical Economy Labs rather than an AI-for-manufacturing program. I would pick a small number of environments where physical work and information friction constantly leap over each other, and then people who understand models besides people who understand the physical work. I would want the AI people to discover that beautifully designed workflows simply do not work in real-life conditions, and for the operations people to discover that paperwork can transform into something that doesn’t take up half their day.

The metric of observation here is a physical event and all the information that surrounds it when:

• a machine breaks

• a shipment arrives

• a patient is just transferred between departments

• a batch fails inspection

• a field worker encounters something she hasn’t seen before

I’d like to consolidate what happens next:

• Who gets called?

• What gets photographed?

• Which form gets filled?

• Where does the information go?

• How many times is the same information entered into different systems?

• What requires human judgment?

• What can only be done because this is how the process is?

Then you introduce a multi-modal AI into that chain and see what changes. I don’t want to begin with “where can we put AI” and end up with an agent everybody’s pissed off with. The correct question to ask would be: why does this take 4 hours?

We spend so much time talking about AI making the most digitally empowered workers even more productive that it’s very easy to imagine a future in which a lawyer with a MacBook gets 10 times better at what she does (while the person maintaining the machine or making the machine remains exactly where she is). I don’t think that’s inevitable. I think a lot of AI doomers think that’s inevitable, but I am an AI optimism maxer. As voice, vision, and reasoning improve, that does not need to be an inevitability. In fact, one of the most interesting things about India as a market for AI is precisely that so much expertise in AI in India sits outside digitized systems in people’s heads. The interesting question here is whether AI can augment that expertise without flattening it into what is easiest for a chat interface.

If we’re serious about building AI for India rather than AI for the sliver of India whose working day looks exactly like ours, it eventually has to get off the laptop.

Why am I writing this?

I started writing this essay because I wanted to take a punt at working with one of the companies building the models I spend so much of my life thinking about. So why didn’t you send your CV in, Harnidh? You ask. Because AI models can’t really make sense of mine! It’s very irritating!

On paper, my career has been a basket of chaos! I have been a VC, I have championed founders, I built and ran India’s coolest program for young founders, sat up through nights making sure those founders won, stuck around when shit hit the fan, built products, wrote a national bestseller, became an influencer on the way, worked with state governments making sure people had access to sanitation facilities they were building, co-created one of the first SMB platforms for a unicorn, sold NFTs to football teams in Indonesia, created one of the biggest communities for thirtysomethings in Bangalore…phew. I am professionally incapable of staying in one industry, which has historically made it impossible to fill the “what do you do?” box on forms.

Most of my working life has involved discovering something interesting before it is obvious, figuring out who needs to care about it, and then building the machinery that helps it travel. Venture capital is obvious. You find a founder and spend a frankly ridiculous amount of time convincing other people that the future she sees is real. Building WTFund was another version of it. A huge part of the job was creating an environment in which founders borrowed context, ambition, networks and, yes, courage from each other. Writing is definitely a version of it. I take an idea that has been rattling around in my head, translate it into something another person can relate to, and then watch it escape into conversations I am no longer part of.

Turns out, I might just be professionally obsessed with diffusion.

I also think that is why AI has eaten such a disproportionate amount of my brain over the last couple of years. The models are fascinating, but I am not a researcher and I have no desire to cosplay as one. What I find much more interesting is the giant mess that begins once the model leaves the lab. What happens when it reaches the founder in HSR and the CA who thinks the founder is an idiot? What happens when a twenty-five-year-old recruiter has to decide whether using AI makes her better at her job or makes her job disappear? What happens when multimodal intelligence meets a port in Kakinada where the internet is patchy, the ERP is ancient and the documentation has to be done in hand because government records need a triplicate? One could argue that these are tech questions, but I think they are fundamentally questions about people and their incentives. Those are the questions I know how to work on.

The other thing I am very good at is being a translator of contexts. Product teams and design teams. Large institutions and twenty-two-year-olds building companies out of apartments. Brands and creators. Technology people and people who absolutely do not think of themselves as technology people. I know what it feels like to be in a room where everyone understands the jargon, and I know how quickly that jargon becomes useless when you leave the room. If the next phase of AI in India is really about diffusion, I think a lot of the work will happen in that layer of translation.

I am also very comfortable building things that do not yet have an obvious template. WTFund did not come with a manual for how to find exceptional founders under 25 across India, convince them to trust a new programme, design an experience that was actually useful to them, bring institutions around it and then figure out what needed to change after the first cohort. I like zero-to-one.I like the slightly grubby bit between a clever observation and grounded building.

I have no idea whether the three things in this essay are exactly what OpenAI or Anthropic should build. I wrote this from the outside, with public information, conversations with people around me, the companies I have worked with and whatever pattern recognition I have accumulated from spending years poking around the Indian startup ecosystem. Give me access to the people actually building these products, the organisations already using them and the data I joked about doing marginally illegal things to see earlier, and I fully expect parts of this memo to look stupid within a month. That would be useful! The point is not that I have arrived with The Four Ideas™ (three, now. We killed one). The point is that this is how I would go looking for the right ones.

I would go to the CA before designing AI for CAs. I would find the operator everyone trusts before creating an “AI champions” programme. I would spend time on the factory floor before announcing AI for manufacturing. And I would keep asking the question that underscores this entire essay: what happens after somebody discovers that the technology can do something?

I would really, really like to do that work.

A large part of my Punjabi playlist sounds, well, not Punjabi. It starts with a tumbi, drops into a reggae bassline, swerves through an R&B chorus and occasionally contains a man rapping in a combination of Punjabi, English and Jamaican patois. Occasionally, a tappa slinks in and a jhanjhar shimmers in the background. It shouldn’t work, but it does!

Apache Indian. Bally Sagoo. Panjabi MC. Rishi Rich. Juggy D. Jay Sean. Dr Zeus. RDB. Sukshinder Shinda. Songs that still make a room move within four seconds. Get any thirty-something desi to hear aaja mahi aaja mahi aa sohneya ve… and they will start shimmying, no exceptions. Songs that sound, even now, like someone has opened five different doors at once and somehow let the same party through all of them.

The story we tell of Punjabi music going global has a bunch of familiar, contemporary names. Sidhu Moosewala was a phenomenon in how his verses went global. AP Dhillon and Gurinder Gill made music created for streaming. Diljit Dosanjh walked onto the Coachella stage in a turla and a black kurta and announced that Punjabi aa gaye oye! All of this is true, and the kind of global love these artists have created is undeniable. But it’s unfair to give them all the credit for this because Punjabi music had gone global once before. That music came from Handsworth, Southall, Coventry, Bradford and Leicester, where the children of Punjabi migrants grew up hearing tappe and filmi music at home, reggae and soul from the house next door, American hip-hop on imported tapes, and British rave music in clubs that did not always want them there.

For roughly two decades, Britain produced some of the most inventive Punjabi music in the world. It had bands and producers, singers that got mobbed when they went grocery shopping, specialist labels and record shops, weddings that functioned like touring circuits, people who crashed said weddings just to gear the music, pirate radio, daytime raves, international stars and an audience that could sustain a parallel economy.

So, where did it go? Why do we still bop to Kangna and Aaja Soneya without a clue about where Dr. Zeus or Bally Saggoo are today? What happens when there is a gap between the cultural, commercial and institutional power accrued by a scene? What falls through the cracks?

Come, let’s find out.

The myth of ‘fusion’

The word fusion (as we know it now, in its commercially sanitized avatar) makes me imagine a record executive sitting with a whiteboard behind him and a shit-eating grin on his face. One side, Afro-Caribbean audience; the other side, Punjabi audience. Add a reggae beat here, add a Punjabi tumbi here, and bam, we double our commercial capacity. And that is how fusion works today as a strategy, of course. The idea is that you bring two disparate cultures together and you mesh them to consolidate their audience and to give people a reason to double their streams. The goal is to simply find how two audiences can be commercially useful to each other.

That is not how British Bhangra fusion emerged. It emerged because of real, lived experiences. In Birmingham, for example, Punjabi and Caribbean families were sharing neighborhoods, schools, high streets, clubs, and grocery stores. They were also sharing the experience of being treated with incredible hostility in a foreign country where you are permanently treated as the other. What didn’t help either was that the first-gen immigrants who came in were incredibly wary of each other. They did not intermingle. In Punjabi, there’s this phrase called “roti beti ka sambandh,” which basically says that these are the people we will share food with and marry our daughters to. Do you think that existed for these two communities? Of course, it did not.

Between these racial and cultural tensions, Handsworth was already home to one of Britain’s most important reggae cultures. Whether you think of Steel Pulse or UB40, Sound System culture was not an exotic other. It was what the second-generation kids were discovering and trying to reconcile with. These kids were definitely not Indian because they were born and brought up in Britain. They were also definitely not British because they were being othered. Who did they look for? They looked for each other as both inspiration as well as belonging.

Steven Kapur, who we know better as Apache Indian, grew up in Handsworth and followed his Afro-Caribbean friends into reggae. He worked with local sound systems before making the music that would eventually become known as Bhangramuffin, which was reggae and dancehall structures that carried Punjabi rhythms and ways of speaking. Years later, when asked about his inspiration for this “fusion,” he said that when he entered a studio, he did not want the music to only be reggae, so they added a Punjabi rhythm, which was “just like their lifestyles.” You can hear the same instinct in Bally Sagoo. He was raised in Birmingham on soul, reggae, hip hop, and Motown, and initially found the kind of Punjabi and Indian music he heard at home too flat for the clubs that he frequented. He began rebuilding it: Hindi and Punjabi vocals laid over deeper bass, programmed drums, dub, space house energy, building the kind of rhythmic beat quality that he, as a DJ, would need to spin in a club.

There was no grand ambition surrounding ‘preserving folk forms’ or ‘protecting heritage.’ Sagoo treated Punjabi music like living material (which is exactly what it is!) He stretched it, sampled it, tightened it, pulled the voice away from the original arrangement, and gave it a completely new body. Punjabi MC did something similar through hip-hop. Rajinder Singh Rai grew up in Coventry, listened to the music his parents loved while trying to capture American rap from the radio. He once sent someone to London with a ghetto blaster to record a Tim Westwood show, practiced his Punjabi music at a Caribbean social club, sand saved wages from a clothing factory to beuild his own production setup because nothing else would allow him to bring his vision to life.

This is why the best records from that period still feel coherent even when the list of influences sounds ridiculous. Reggae, ragga, bhangra, house, jungle, UK garage, hip-hop, R&B, Hindi film music, synthpop. On paper, it can look like too much. When you hear it, though, it makes sense. It is good music! The kids making it were not switching identities every time the beat changed. Their lives already contained all of those things, so naturally their music did too. That did not make it any less Punjabi.

The party had to happen at two in the afternoon

While music itself is intangible, it requires a tangible space to be tested in. It needs an audience in front of which a song can fail, can be remixed, can be demanded again. It has to become attached to a particular ecosystem, to a particular circumstance. That, for British Asian teenagers in the 1980s and the 1990s, was often at the Daytimer.

To understand the history of the daytimers, one must go back to the incredible immigrant anxiety that first-generation immigrants felt over their children becoming “westernized.” Young people’s parents would not allow them to go clubbing at night because they didn’t want to allow them to become “white.” What ended up happening was ingenious and slightly silly. Kids left home claiming they were heading to school, changed elsewhere, travelled by train to different cities to dance for several hours and returned home in time for dinner. The events spread through London, Birmingham, Bradford, Nottingham, Manchester, Leicester, Luton, and beyond. Some, in fact, drew thousands to become a very enmeshed part of British identity.

The history of the daytime was obviously focused on secrecy and freedom. For young women in particular, these afternoons offered access to public pleasure under conditions that were otherwise very, very heavily monitored. They could dress as they wanted, meet boys, dance, and occupy public space without being constantly surveilled. These parties, of course, were not uncomplicated. Many were marked by inter-school and inter-religious violence, and community groups became incredibly territorial about who went inside. Despite all of that, they created a rare space where British Asian youth could see themselves as part of something larger than the sum of the anxieties that their parents felt about them growing up in Britain. This, of course, created space for music.

Promoters need venues. DJs need records. Audiences need belonging. Which meant that the daytime venues became the perfect space for this new fusion to be tested out. Record shops became ticket counters and information networks. A song that worked in Luton went ahead and traveled to Birmingham. Producers could hear what was the audience’s reaction in real time.

One does not need to romanticize the daytimers to acknowledge the impact that they had. They worked through unfair restrictions, very real racism, and intense family surveillance, but if you cannot be out at midnight, a rave at 2:00 in the afternoon starts to make sense. If the main clubs will not play your music, you hire the same clubs before the dark and play it yourself. The audience, the venue, the information network, and the testing grounds were all built in parallel. When we talk about representation now, we mostly mean seeing a brown face that looks like us on a mainstream stage. Representation can also mean building a stage of your own because the existing one has no place for you, and that is exactly what the Daytimes did. They did not wait for British nightlife to recognize British Asians as a desirable customer. They created their own parallel “nightlife” in the middle of the day, and because it was parallel, it became stomping grounds for experimentation that would have otherwise taken years to become commercially viable.’

The dancefloor was full of women. The stage was not.

Go back and reread the list of names I opened this essay with. Apache Indian. Bally Sagoo. Panjabi MC. Rishi Rich. Juggy D. Jay Sean. Dr Zeus. RDB. Sukshinder Shinda. Every single one of them is a man. That is not because women were absent from British bhangra. They were dancing to it, requesting it, promoting parties, coordinating alibis, singing on records and, occasionally, standing behind the decks. But when the scene turned all that cultural energy into careers, catalogues, money and names people would remember thirty years later, the default beneficiary was still a man.

The Daytime raves existed in large part because young women needed an outlet, and they were the ones that championed it. They were simultaneously the scene’s most committed and most surveilled audience, and none of them ever got to be on stage. The same family and community scrutiny that pushed parties into the afternoon made a daughter with a microphone anathema to most households. A stage meant public visibility, especially as an entertainer. If you look at Indian/Punjabi terms for entertainers, nachaniya, nautanki, jamoora, there has always been a classist and casteist lens attached to the profession. You also have to remember that the two majority castes from Punjab in Britain at this point were the Jatts and the Ramgarhias, both of whom had a very strong sentiment against “their” women being available to the public.

It would be wrong, however, to say that no women made it onto the stage or behind the decks. Rani Kaur, better known as DJ Radical Sista, was playing Bradford daytimers by the end of the 1980s. DJ Ritu became a pioneer of the wider bhangra and Asian Underground scenes. Sweety Kapoor was another important figure in the club culture that followed. Their existence does not weaken the argument. It makes the real problem clearer. Women could participate, organise and occasionally become visible, but the scene did not produce a comparable pipeline of women who were recorded, marketed, managed and allowed to compound their success.

Hard Kaur is a name I will evoke here. She grew up in Birmingham, came through the same city that produced Bally Sagoo and Apache Indian, and became one of the first British-Indian women to build a serious career in rap. “Ek Glassy” had already found an audience in Britain, but it was Mumbai, and eventually Bollywood, that gave her access to mass scale. The irony is difficult to miss. Britain helped make Hard Kaur, but she had to enter the Indian film industry before she could become a mainstream star.

You could sell tens of thousands of cassettes and still not exist

In 2002, a Guardian survey of Britain’s regional music scenes described Birmingham Bhangra as a parallel music universe. A specialist label executive estimated that major Bhangra albums could sell 100,000 copies even before piracy could be considered. They could sell huge numbers through Asian music shops, grocery stores, market networks, and weddings.

What ended up happening was that these sales moved through commercial value chains that were not counted by the national chart system, while mainstream chains did not stock the records at all. It may have been Britain’s ultimate underground scene, but it was simply segregated and uncounted. The roots of that economy went back decades. Before the producer era came the bands. You had bands like Alaap, Heera, Premi, Apna Sangeet, DCS, and others who turned Punjabi folk and medding music into a distinctively British live format. Drum kits and synthesizers were introduced. In fact, they inspired legends in return too (as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan engaged with the British audience more, synthesizers and steel drums entered his arrangements).

Labels grew around them. Orient Star Agencies began with Muhammad Ayub importing records for immigrant communities who could not find the music from home that they missed. In 1969, after being approached by the Bhujangy group, the business began releasing records too. It went on to become the foundation of British South Asian music, supporting artists like Malkit Singh, Bally Sagoo, and NFAK The story of OSA is the story of immigrants building missing markets for themselves. Multitone, founded in the 1970s, became another major home for British Bhangra; Fantronic, Nachural, Moviebox and later 2Point9 formed pivotal nodes too.

The industry operated outside standard systems used by the British Phonographic Industry. Sales were incredibly difficult to verify. Publishing rights were inconsistently registered. Cash payments and full buyouts were incredibly common. Artists could make records that went ‘viral’ without receiving a transparent account of how many copies were being sold. Rights that should have produced income over decades were often surrendered in the beginning simply because nobody knew how to consolidate the ecosystem around the artist.

For a moment, the ceiling kept rising

What makes the story more frustrating is how close the scene came, repeatedly, to breaking through the mainstream.

Apache Indian signed to Island in the early 1990s. “Arranged Marriage” reached number 16 on the UK singles chart and the Nuff Vibes EP, led by “Boom Shack-A-Lak”, reached number five. Bally Sagoo signed with Sony. “Dil Cheez” reached number 12 in 1996. In 1999, Talvin Singh’s OK won the Mercury Prize. He belonged to the adjacent Asian Underground rather than the bhangra scene itself, and his music moved through Indian classical, drum and bass, ambient music, jazz and electronica, often in more art-house spaces. But the win still felt like a door opening. Singh described it at the time as a sign that he was “not a minority any more”. For a brief period, it seemed as though the industry might finally understand this music as something central rather than peripheral.

Then came Panjabi MC. “Mundian To Bach Ke” had first appeared years earlier, but its European release in the early 2000s turned it into something else. A Punjabi folk vocal by Labh Janjua sat over the Knight Rider theme, filtered by a producer who understood both hip-hop sampling and what a dhol-driven beat could do to a dancefloor. It reached #5 in Britain. Jay-Z appeared on a remix. A mostly Punjabi-language song travelled across the world and people who didn’t know what Punjabi was grooved to it. I remember being in a club in Shanghai in 2019 and, as soon as the Chinese DJ saw me on the floor, he started playing this song. It was the only non-English or Chinese song he played that night. Cool, huh?

Then, in 2003, the Rishi Rich Project released “Dance With You (Nachna Tere Naal)”. Rishi Rich produced, Juggy D owned the Punjabi vocals, Jay Sean carried the R&B line, and the record moved between languages seamlessly. It reached number 12. Jay Sean’s “Eyes on You” would reach number six the following year; “Stolen” reached number four.

Rishi Rich was one of the foundational creators of this era. He was a producer capable of creating a recognizable, cogent sound across performers without forcing anyone to compromise on their style. 2Point9 offered an all-in-one British Asian entertainment structure. Relentless and Virgin provided major-label reach. This is the moment people forget when they describe early British Asian pop as a collection of charming crossover experiments. The songs charted. The artists signed major deals. The audiences existed globally. The scene was not a blip in time. It had all the elements of success available to it!

The biggest British film in the world

In 2002, Gurinder Chadha released Bend It Like Beckham. A film about a Punjabi girl in Hounslow who wants to play football became one of the most profitable British films of its era. It grossed tens of millions worldwide and crossed into American cinemas in the spring of 2003, the same season “Mundian To Bach Ke” was tearing through the British charts. For one moment, a Punjabi song was in the UK top 5 and a Punjabi family from West London was one of Britain’s biggest cultural exports. And the soundtrack was the scene. B21. Malkit Singh. Bally Sagoo.

Nor was the film an isolated event. Goodness Gracious Me had run on the BBC from 1998. The Kumars at No. 42 launched in 2001 and sold internationally. East Is East was a critical and commercial hit in 1999. Between late 90s and early 2000s, British Asian culture peaked across television, film, comedy and music at the same time. Then, across all of those formats, it receded at roughly the same time too.

A scene is not the same thing as an institution

This is where cultural histories often become frustratingly vague.

Institutions are, for all their evils and faults, bulwarks against which trends can lean on. Someone has to find the next artist before the current one stops charting. Someone has to account for the publishing numbers, know where the masters are, collect royalties across territories, and train the managers, producers, A&R executives, lawyers and promoters who understand the market. Someone has to pay attention to audience behaviour and use that data to guide creators and artists. The success of one act should make it easier to finance five more. The catalogue should keep earning. Ideally, some of that value should stay with the people and communities that created it.

The mainstream labels tended to treat British Asian performers as individual exceptions instead of part of a pipeline. Apache Indian’s deal did not become an Island pipeline for the next generation of bhangramuffin or Punjabi artists. Bally Sagoo’s success did not turn Sony into the institutional home of British South Asian production. Talvin Singh’s Mercury Prize did not make the Asian Underground a permanent category of British investment. Jay Sean’s Virgin deal did not produce ten more Jay Seans.

Britain built one formal institution for this audience. The BBC Asian Network went national in 2002, at the exact peak of the culture’s visibility, growing out of local programming that had served Midlands audiences since the late 1980s. It gave the music national airplay, gave the scene professional broadcasters, and gave a generation the experience of hearing their own languages on a national frequency. Within eight years, the BBC proposed shutting it down. The station was reprieved after a public campaign, with its budget slashed, and it has spent most of its existence since then fighting for survival. It is difficult to compound very much value when the institution itself is perpetually on probation.

The independent labels did immense cultural work, but many were operating inside a market deformed by uncounted sales, piracy, weak rights enforcement, informal accounting and limited access to mainstream distribution. They were being asked to build for the long term while constantly solving for short-term survival. Eventually, much of the value collected in catalogues moved upward.

Oriental Star Agencies operated for more than fifty years. Its catalogue contained around 18,000 songs, concerts and video recordings. In 2024, Universal Music Group announced that it had acquired the complete catalog, including recordings and, where held, publishing rights.

There is nothing overtly sinister about a catalog acquisition, obviously. A global company can restore, revive, distribute and introduce old music to audiences an independent owner may struggle to reach. But the symbolism is difficult to miss. A community built a musical archive because the mainstream did not consider that music worth serving. Decades later, after the global market had demonstrated how valuable South Asian listeners were, the archive became a growth asset for the world’s largest music company. This is what I mean when I say the music was commercially orphaned. Obviously, people made money. But how much of it went back to the people who created the music itself?

Jay Sean and the price of becoming visible

The tragedy of Jay Sean (if you can call being a smoking hot superstar a tragedy) is a microcosmic lesson. His early success was unmistakably rooted in British Asian music. Me Against Myself straddled R&B, hip-hop and South Asian production inside the same pop identity.

Then came “Down”. Released after Jay Sean signed with Cash Money, featuring Lil Wayne, the song reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2009. It made him the first solo artist of South Asian origin to top the chart. It was a genuine, enormous achievement. It also contained no identifiable Punjabi musical DNA.

Jay Sean, of course, did not owe anyone a lifetime of tablas and tumbis. South Asian artists should be allowed to make ordinary pop, bad pop, brilliant pop, music about nothing, music that refuses to carry an entire civilization debt on its back. White singers are not asked to insert a folk instrument or Bible verse into every chorus to prove they remember where they came from. But the difference between the two stages of his career still tells us something about the market around him.

Jay Sean has said that looking back, when he first entered the mainstream he felt he had “no choice but to sing in English” because Punjabi from a Punjabi performer would have been more alienating. He found ways to hold onto his roots in the arrangement instead: a Bollywood sample, Eastern strings, an Indian flute.

We often celebrate the first person from a community who succeeds in a mainstream institution as proof that the door is finally open. Occasionally it is. But a successful individual can also be absorbed into an industry without the industry becoming meaningfully more interested in everyone else who looks and sounds like them. One person’s visibility can comfortably conceal an industry’s larger disdain.

By the end of the 2000s, the British Punjabi ecosystem no longer felt like the centre of the future. Some of its producers moved into Bollywood. Some artists continued making music for loyal audiences. British Asian musicians entered grime, rap, garage and mainstream pop through other routes. The local scene did not vanish, but it stopped carrying the simmering potential of a global legend being created.

The centre moved to a corridor, not a country

I could end the next section in basically 4 words: Britain failed. Canada succeeded.

That would be a gross simplification.

The modern Punjabi music economy is not simply Canadian. It is a corridor running through Punjab, Toronto, Brampton, Surrey, Vancouver, Chandigarh, Mohali, London. Artists are born in one place, raised in another, blow up with a single recorded on their phones, scrounge up money to fly down to Toronto, record across several countries, get introduced to produces like Desi Crew who ‘initiate you’, and then release to a market that does not experience those borders as separate. An early example of this is Jazzy B, who born in Punjab, raised in Surrey, shaped professionally through Birmingham and closely associated with Handsworth producer Sukshinder Shinda.

The British wave was built through physical proximity: Punjabi and Caribbean families sharing streets, schools, studios and clubs. The new wave was built through a different kind of proximity, one created by migration routes, cheap production software, YouTube, streaming platforms, group chats and a global Punjabi-speaking public able to hear a record at the same time. That changed the power relationship.

A British Asian artist in the 1990s often needed national radio, chart-return shops, a major distributor or a crossover press narrative to become “available” outside the community. A Punjabi artist in Canada could upload a song on YouTube and Spotify and reach Punjab directly. An artist in Punjab could build a Canadian audience without first being selected by Canadian radio. The diaspora was no longer only the market at the edge of an Indian release. India and the diaspora were listening together.

Spotify reported that four of India’s ten most-streamed songs in 2022 were Punjabi. “Excuses” by AP Dhillon, Gurinder Gill and Intense was the most-streamed song in the country, while Sidhu Moose Wala’s Moosetape was the most-streamed album. Punjabi had become one of the platform’s most-streamed music languages in India, alongside Hindi and English.

For decades, one obvious route to scale for Punjabi music was absorption into Hindi cinema. This generation showed that this was no longer the only way to reach a mass audience. AP Dhillon and his collaborators released through Run-Up Records before larger companies arrived. Sidhu Moosewala increasingly released work independently. Neither needed to dilute the music before allowing it to travel.

AP has been unusually direct about the ownership question. Explaining why he had turned down film offers, he argued that an artist could accept the budget and promotional machine, but would often lose control of the record. “Sometimes, you have to eat less to bring change,” he said.

What the hell is ‘pure Punjabi’?

There could be an argument made about the “purity” of Punjabi music today, which is distinctly Punjabi, doesn’t have an English bridge, and does not let go of or dilute the Punjabiness of the music to retain a listener. In the British era, hybridization was interpreted as a bridge to the mainstream. The closer an artist moved towards British or American pop, which was a lot more familiar to the audience, the easier the industry found it to essentially acknowledge and embrace the artist. The current wave, however, can borrow from everywhere and still behave distinctly Punjabi. It does not need the collaboration on an English chorus to make the listener care. It is, in colloquial terms, sone pe suhaaga. Take the example of Diljit collaborating with some fantastic global artists, most notably Sia. He doesn’t need Sia to be relevant to his listeners. Sia doesn’t need him either. This is a collaboration on deeply equal footing. The industry has definitely noticed. In 2023, Warner Music Canada and Warner Music India launched 91 North Records, a JV led by Ikki and designed explicitly to connect South Asian artists and audiences across the Indo-Canadian corridor. Its first signings included Karan Aujla and Jonita Gandhi. Warner itself spoke about Punjabi music in glowing terms, talking about how it was moving from a regional interest to a global force.

That is definitely progress and something worth being proud of, but again, let’s ask the questions that British bhangra forgot to:

• Who owns the masters?

• Who owns publishing?

• Who develops the next artists?

• Who has decision-making authority on the current creators after they stop charting?

• Does this movement create instability?

• Do they have institutions that protect the creators of the music, or is it a replication of the same exploitative structure that eventually led to the British bhangra downfall?

These are not hypothetical questions. The new corridor has already been forced to answer a few of them. When Moosewala was murdered in May 2022, he was the most powerful independent artist the wave had produced. Within months of his death, his catalog became contested ground. His family fought publicly over posthumous releases and went to the press with questions on the rights to what he had left behind and the existing catalog, which did not have clear ownership yet. The power that Moosewala accumulated did not survive him. The fact that he was independent, which was a great thing while he was alive, left his family vulnerable. Down the line, they are still struggling with the aftermath of the financial cost of the legal battle that they had to fight.

Major labels are not automatically evil or automatically virtuous, and independent labels are not automatically the heroes. Plenty of independent artists are exploited by small operators, and plenty of major deals can be incredibly helpful to artists. The lesson here is that visibility cannot, in and of itself, be the goal. It has to be backed by ownership as the final outcome.

The Party Never Stopped

There is a new British South Asian club culture now. The ‘Daytimers’ name has been revived by a younger collective. DJs and producers are placing Punjabi folk, Bollywood, garage, jungle, bass and electronic music into rooms that are more intentionally inclusive of women, queer people and South Asian identities beyond the old Punjabi centre. Yung Singh’s sets travel online in ways the original daytimer DJs could not have imagined. The energy is alive again.

That matters because nostalgia can become another way of refusing to build. It is easy to turn the old UK scene into a playlist of bangers and a few grainy photographs. It is easy to congratulate ourselves for how ahead of its time everything was. It is harder to ask why being ahead of its time produced so little durable leverage for the people who made it.

The old scene deserves more than sentimental rediscovery. It was a serious cultural and commercial achievement. It changed what Punjabi music could sound like. It gave second-generation British Asians an identity of their own. It showed that Punjabi lyrics could travel without becoming a joke or an anthropological exhibit. It influenced the production vocabulary that later moved through Bollywood, British pop, global hip-hop and the Punjabi Canadian wave. It built labels when nobody would distribute the music, parties when nobody would host the audience, shops when nobody would stock the records and stars before the charts knew how to count them.

And it left us with a lesson it never intended to teach. Culture does not automatically become power simply because it is brilliant. A community can create a sound, find an audience and produce a global hit without retaining enough of the value to decide what happens afterwards.

Punjabi music went global twice. The first time, a generation in Britain proved that it could sound like the whole world and remain unmistakably Punjabi. The second time, a network running through Punjab and Canada proved that it no longer needed to ask the world to recognise it first. The difference was leverage.

That is why the British moment feels so exhilarating to revisit and so frustrating to understand. You can hear the future being invented in those records. You can also hear how little of the future belonged to the people inventing it.

A book about women being unwell in a world that keeps calling them fine only matters if it moves between women; if it gets underlined at 2am and argued about in a group chat the next morning. Sitting in a warehouse on its own, it’s just paper.

So when it came time to announce the book, I didn’t want a launch that was only about me and my name on a cover. I wanted the first object that carried the book out into the world to be made the way I hope the book itself gets read: passed between women, and never once carried alone.

How it actually worked

I could have paid for this box entirely on my own. That was never the problem. The problem is what a PR box actually costs. Sending the hundred boxes out came to ₹2.94 lakh. The boxes themselves, which were very cool boxes, were another ₹1.16 lakh on top. I paid for every rupee of it (because I could) but most young brands, and especially the women-run ones, can’t. A single PR push that costs four lakh isn’t an easy decision!

So I covered the entire thing and threw the doors open. I put out a call for brands that wanted in, and more than 150 of them wrote back. Twelve made the final box. It wasn’t a lottery. I went through every applicant and chose on purpose, looking for women-owned and women-championed brands and products I actually loved.

A very necessary thank-you to Komal and Nimoli from Tute Consult, who helped turn this from a mildly unhinged idea into a hundred actual boxes. Holding together that many brands, products, timelines and moving parts was no small job, and I could not have pulled it off without them. If you ever need some KILLER PR support, trust Tute BLINDLY!

Here’s what went in, and why.

The brands

Atom Eats: Truffle Potato Chips & Truffle Banana Chips

Atom Eats was started by a couple who fell for each other over food: a Mumbai flavour obsessive and a lawyer who returned from London. That sense of fun runs through the brand. They use real truffle powder rather than relying entirely on the synthetic truffle flavoring that usually assaults you the moment you open a packet.

The truffle potato chips are excellent, but the banana chips are the interesting one to me. Atom Eats says they are India’s first truffle banana chips: a very clever update to the snack half the country grew up eating IMO!

Also, every PR box should contain at least one thing you want to tear open immediately. You should be able to eat something excellent while you read, and a good chip remains one of the most underrated companions to a good chapter.

Get it → Atom Eats

Local Ferment — Kombucha

Local Ferment Co is a Bengaluru fermentary making slow-fermented kombucha with real fruit and no preservatives. More importantly, they have managed to make kombucha for people who do not already enjoy kombucha. It is fizzy and tart without tasting like something you are drinking exclusively for the health benefits.

The box desperately needed something to drink, and Local Ferment was an easy choice. Open it cold, pour it over ice and have it beside you while you read. That it also happens to be good for you is a bonus.

Get it → Local Ferment Co.

Rasa Studio — Wax Sachet

Rasa Studio is a Delhi-based studio making soy-wax sachets topped with dried flowers and spices. You hang one inside a cupboard, drawer or wardrobe, where it scents the space without requiring another plug-in plastic air freshener. Once the fragrance begins to fade, you can melt the wax and use it again!

It is handmade, non-toxic, and far prettier than anything designed to live inside a cupboard strictly needs to be. The name helped too: rasa is the feeling or emotional residue a work of art leaves behind. A scented object designed to linger felt like good company for a book.

Get it → Rasa Studio

Conelle Studio — The Flower Hour candle

Conelle is a small candle studio, and The Flower Hour is exactly what it sounds like: a floral candle hand-poured into a weighty amber jar that looks good on a table before you have even lit it. Also, it smells just INSANELY good. EVERY single person who got the box told me how good they smell!

I liked the idea that you could light it, put your phone away and read for an hour. Or twenty minutes. We are not running a monastery. The point is simply to create a small pocket of time that belongs to you, while the rest of the day waits outside.

Get it → Conelle Studio

Taalmail — Stickers & a bookmark

Taalmail is an independent art studio that illustrates everything it sells. The name comes from the Hindi word taalmel, meaning harmony, and the brand makes stickers, bookmarks, and other paper goods for people who still write in margins, leave handwritten notes, and refuse to let stationery become entirely functional.

Its bookmarks and stickers are for the readers who cannot leave a blank page alone. Use them to mark the lines that make you angry, underline the bits you want to send to a friend, and save the pages you know you will return to. The bookmark also means you can stop folding down corners, although I am aware some of you will continue doing it anyway (just like me!)

Get it → Taalmail

JuJu’s Crochet Corner — Handmade Crochet Bookmark

JuJu’s Crochet Corner is a one-woman operation making everything from tiny amigurumi creatures to the crochet bookmarks inside this box. Every piece is made by hand. It is also the smallest brand here by some distance.

Each bookmark represents a meaningful amount of one woman’s time. Putting a hundred pieces of her work into a hundred people’s homes was exactly the kind of leverage I wanted this box to create. It is probably the most tender object in the box and the one you are most likely to still have tucked inside a book years from now.

Get it → JuJu’s Crochet Corner

Bare Necessities — Sunset Waves soap

Founded by Sahar Mansoor, Bengaluru-based Bare Necessities was India’s first B Corp-certified zero-waste enterprise. It has been doing the sustainability thing since long before every second company discovered brown paper packaging and began calling itself conscious.

By the company’s count, its work has kept more than 83 million units of plastic and over three lakh kilograms of waste out of the system, while creating stable green livelihoods for women. Its soaps are handmade and cold-processed, and Sunset Waves—the lavender-and-rose bar in the box—was nominated for Best Soap at the Grazia Beauty Awards.

It is a genuinely beautiful bar of soap that replaces a plastic bottle, supports women’s employment and makes an everyday chore feel marginally less bleak. That is more than enough reason to put it in.

Get it → Bare Necessities

Antinorm — Shower in Seconds

Antinorm makes beauty products for people who do not want beauty to become a constant cognitive weight in their lives. Its entire premise is that taking care of yourself should not require ten products, an hour-long routine, constant product juggling, and a bathroom shelf groaning under the weight of your good intentions.

Shower in Seconds is a pH-balanced, fragrance-free body-cleansing spray that does not require water. It is for flights, hospital visits, post-gym emergencies, rushed workdays and all the moments when a proper shower is simply not happening. One bottle can also replace the stack of disposable wipes people would ordinarily use instead.

I wanted it because it solves an extremely real, extremely unglamorous problem. Women already spend enough time maintaining themselves. Anything that hands some of that time back is worth paying attention to.

Get it → Antinorm

Chantèro — Bequest & Dame discovery sets

Chantèro is an independent fragrance label with a real sense of theatre, from the names of its perfumes to the satin-lined boxes they arrive in. Its fragrances are formulated in France and produced in India, combining French perfumery expertise with Indian craftsmanship.

The box contains discovery sets of Bequest and Dame. Both are extraits with a 24% oil concentration, which means you are getting a genuinely rich, concentrated perfume rather than a scent that disappears somewhere between leaving the house and getting into the cab. Hot damn.

Discovery sets also make far more sense than blind-buying an entire bottle because somebody on the internet told you it smelled expensive. Fragrance is personal. Try both on your skin, live with them for a few hours and decide for yourself.

Get it → Chantèro

Atypiical — Tinted sunscreen sachet kit, 8 shades + 3-in-1 SPF

Atypiical makes tinted sunscreen for Indian skin in eight incredible shades, from fair-cool to deep-golden, rather than producing one beige tint, calling it “universal” and hoping nobody notices and complains.

Each shade is pigment-matched to disappear into the skin instead of leaving behind the grey or white cast that brown women have been told to tolerate for years. The brand tested its formulations on dozens of Indian women in Indian heat, and its 3-in-1 SPF is designed to combine three separate morning steps in one product.

The sachet kit lets you test the shades before committing to a full-size tube, which is how complexion products should always be sold online. Try them in natural light, find the one that genuinely vanishes into your skin, and ignore anyone who tells you to “make the shade work.”

Get it → Atypiical

HealCycle — Menstrual Cramp Relief Patches

HealCycle is building an app for the hormonal and mental-health part of having a menstrual cycle, especially PMS, PMDD and the mood changes that are routinely dismissed as “just hormones.” It lets women track symptoms, moods and journal entries across their cycle, then uses that information to show patterns, forecast difficult days and generate reports that can be shared with a doctor. It also offers daily recommendations, guided meditations and an AI companion called Tara for emotional-regulation support. More than 2,500 women are already using it.

The physical product inside the box is a set of three menstrual cramp-relief patches: designed to be worn beneath your clothes on painful days.This box HAD to have something for menstruation in it. A book about what women’s lives actually feel like cannot skip the days when some of us are doubled over in pain. I have time for anyone building for the unglamorous realities of a woman’s body.

Get it → HealCycle

Mevyl — Stella’s Tiara, solid perfume

Mevyl makes solid perfumes, which make an absurd amount of sense. They cannot spill inside your bag, are easy to travel with, and let you reapply your fragrance without fumigating everyone seated near you.

The perfumes come as alcohol-free, skin-friendly balms that you dab directly onto your pulse points. Each one is inspired by a well-known luxury fragrance, but costs considerably less than the bottle sitting behind the glass counter at the department store.

Stella’s Tiara, the fragrance inside the box, is Mevyl’s interpretation of Dior’s Purple Oud: oud warmed with saffron and pink pepper. It is rich, compact, and just dramatic enough. A small luxury you can carry everywhere without having to treat it like an explosive device every time you pack a suitcase.

Get it → Mevyl

That’s the box

Twelve brands, chosen from more than a hundred and fifty, most of them run by women who had every reason to be protective of their thin margins and sent me their best work anyway. None of them had to. They did it because the pitch was simple: let’s put our things in one box and reach further together than any of us could alone.

To every founder who trusted me with what she makes, thank you. You turned a book launch into something far more special. I hope people fall in love with your work the way I did.

Most of you reading this won’t receive one of the hundred boxes. But every brand inside it is linked above. If something caught your eye, click through. Follow them, buy from them, or send the link to somebody who would. A hundred boxes can only travel so far; the point of writing this was to help these brands travel further.

And if you do receive a box, don’t let it stay sealed on a shelf. Open everything. Pass something from it to a woman having a harder week than you are. When you finish the book, press that into someone else’s hands too.

The Girls Are Not Fine is out now.

Well, fake is a stretch. It’s an Alhambra motif on a chain in mother-of-pearl, natural diamond, and 18k gold. It cost me (after a friends-and-family discount) about INR 35,000 (~$370 USD). For context, something identical on the Van Cleef website retails from anywhere between $3,700 to $4,500 USD. I bought it from a lovely lady who sells these ‘real fakes’ to a lot of South Bombay gentry who refuse to pay ‘that much’ for ‘this much’ gold.

In Jamnagar, Nita Ambani turned up to her son’s wedding in what the jewellery influencer and gemstone-monger Julia Hackman Chafé memorably measured as ‘roughly a thousand kilos of emeralds’. There was a necklace built around two yellow diamonds, one of them close to a hundred carats, which reportedly took a thousand hours of workmanship. There was a 52-carat Golconda ring. Her daughter, Isha Ambani, wore a navratna necklace that took three years to make. The groom himself was pinned with a 720-carat panther-on-emerald brooch and a few Lorraine Schwartz pieces for good measure. Every single thing on every single body was commissioned from Viren Bhagat, from Kantilal Chhotalal, from a handful of private ateliers, with a couple of Western houses rounding out the bill. Place Vendôme would not have been able to sell any of this because there is no one to sell from.

Most jewellery in India revolves around the ‘melt price’. Fundamentally, what jewellery is worth is the exact amount you’d get if you pried out the stones, melted the piece, and sold it by weight tomorrow. Run a test for me here- ask your mom. She probably knows the melt price of her wedding jewellery to the gram. She’ll mention something in the lines of ‘The making charges were x%, so we have to remove that, of course’. The design is completely secondary to her in absolute terms. She loves it, of course, but when she talks about giving that jewellery to you when you get married, she’s not talking about the design. She’s talking about the gold.

A jewellery brand, on the other hand, would be the exact inverse of a melt price mentality. A brand would essentially be a premium that would far exceed the meltdown value. A Cartier Love bracelet is anywhere between 30 to 38gm in weight and is crafted in 18K gold, which makes about 75% of the total weight ‘meltable.’ The price of 26g gold? INR 3,66,912 (USD 3890). The price of a Locve bracelet? INR 6,20,000 (USD 6574) to over INR 8,00,000 (USD 8483) for plain models in India, while diamond-paved versions and special edition styles reach INR 38,00,000 (~USD 40,000). You wouldn’t even think of melting one if these. The entire foundation of western luxury jewellery (and I’m not talking about high jewellery, just luxury jewellery) across the last two centuries has been to imbibe meaning into material, and then price that meaning as an asset.

India does not work like that. Our brand recall is not tied to meaning. It’s tied to melt price. Tanishq is not a brand because Tanishq jewellery is immediately recognizable. It’s because Tanishq jewellery is made of Tanishq gold. We do not optimise for brand, unless the brand is proxy for trust.

My argument is simple. India never built a Cartier because Indian jewellery evolved as a savings instrument rather than a symbolic luxury good, and because the institutions that manufacture global prestige remain overwhelmingly European.

This essay is about why. It will take you from Jaipur to the Place Vendôme, from the Koh-i-Noor’s recutting to Nirav Modi’s prison cell, from kundan and meenakari to the Kering balance sheet, from a Tata-owned cash machine to a man in Mumbai who makes seventy pieces a year and is one of the best jewellers alive. I’ll tell you who got robbed, who robbed themselves, who’s actually cracking it right now, and why the question of where is the Indian Cartier? is not about India or Cartier at all.

The case for the prosecution

One way of looking at this (which honestly, I don’t think is the wrong way of looking) is to see India as the seam that was mined, and who can blame the plundered for not caring about branding?

When the British stole the Koh-i-Noor in 1849, they sent it to the Crown Jewellers in London. They put it on display at the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a trophy, proclaimed it too uncivilised for European tastes and had it recut from 186 carats to 109. Swap opium for diamonds and you have a parable about colonial extraction right there.

Indian stones, Indian commissions, Indian inspirations fuelled the collections of the Place Vendôme set (aka Cartier, Boucheron, Van Cleef, Chaumet, Mauboussin) throughout the 1920s and ’30s, the maharajas acting as both muse and customer. You walked into Cartier with your family tiara and left with an Art Deco resetting of it. Value-add (design, brand, margins, mythology) happened in Paris. India provided the material and, increasingly, faceless artisan labour.

Not much has changed since. Today, Surat cuts and polishes 90% of the world’s diamonds by volume. Every jewellery big-shot you can think of has Indian labour at their artisan table. Literally, we are running the world’s glitter back office.

When Pharrell Williams took creative charge of Louis Vuitton menswear last year and put on a Maharaja-themed show at the Pompidou in June of 2025, climaxing it with a model rolling down the stairs in jewel-crusted khakhi shorts as A.R. Rahman’s Eden relentlessly pumped, it was undeniably beautiful. It was also India getting brand laundered through French retail with the IP and profit accruing to…LVMH.

Cartier loaned Emma Chamberlain, a 20-something white American YouTube celebrity who, as far as I know, has no ties to India whatsoever, one of their most famous diamonds (a Maharaja of Patiala-linked necklace) to wear while they uploaded her marching up the steps of the Met in Feb ’22. Come March 2025, Diljit Dosanjh, one of the biggest Punjabi stars in the world, son of a Punjab Roadways clerk who — wait for it — built his homage of a Met Gala outfit around a love letter to Maharaja Bhupinder Singh, directly messaged Cartier asking to borrow the real thing. Cartier politely let him know it was unavailable (through his stylist).

He wore a replica instead and said afterward that the necklace was theirs and that Cartier had taken it. In fairness to the house, the piece was a centerpiece of Cartier’s own exhibition at the V&A in London that very year, so it was committed elsewhere. But it’s hard not to feel a little iffy, yeah?

You could stop reading this essay here, and it would be enough, honestly. We can agree that India didn’t fail to make a Cartier. India was what made Cartier. Not incorrect.

Take TBZ. Tribhovandas Bhimji Zaveri started in 1864, which makes it older than Bulgari, older than Van Cleef, almost as old as Cartier. So “we didn’t have time” was never the excuse; it’s had a hundred and sixty years. And today it’s a gold retailer. A big one, a listed one, dozens of showrooms, but you still walk in, they weigh the piece, quote you a making charge, and you carry it home priced by the gram. The British were gone for most of those hundred and sixty years. We had all that time to ourselves and we spent it selling gold.

A prospective diagnosis

The gold problem

Indians buy more gold than anyone else in the world. We bought 564 tonnes in 2024 but we overwhelmingly buy it as a savings instrument. Gold is probably the mosy trusted asset in India, and jewellery is its most socially (and physically) mobile form. When an Indian buys jewellery, the resale calculation occurs in tandem. The making charge (usually 5-30%) is not what you pay for the design, the labour, the craftsmanship or the brand. It’s a loss you suck up and tolerate.

You cannot build a brand premium when your customer barely tolerates a brand premium. Melt value places a ceiling on myth value. Richemont’s chairman, Johann Rupert, talks openly about competing with the vast ‘non-branded’ end of the jewellery market in the western world, and this dude owns Cartier and Van Cleef.

The fragmentation problem

The supply side of the jewellery industry is barely an industry. Over 90% of Indian jewellers are family owned. According to World Gold Council, only 15-20% of manufacturing is organized and large-scale (and that’s up from 10% a few years ago!) Our entire jewellery sector, dispute its awesome scale, draws a honestly pathetic 2.7% of India’s offered credit. Speaking of retail, your friendly neighborhood ‘family jeweller’ is running on cash, gold-loan dent, and underreported turnovers. He also makes up about ~70% of the market, with organized retail struggling to even cover 20%.

Fundamentally, this means that there has never been an Indian LVMH. No one has been able to roll up the great family houses, professionalize their businesses, hand them archiving abilities, magnify their advertising budgets and museum partnerships, get them a splashy store on Bond Street, and globalize them with generous, specialized and most importantly, patient capital. When you and I as consumers see a Big Old Brand, we don’t see the infrastructure that’s propelling them ahead. Conglomerates like LVMH, Richemont, Kering and more have spent decades and effectively infinite money turning ateliers into brands, and brands into statements. This is not a testament to the power of craft, it’s one to capital.

The karigar problem

The craft and expertise that forms the load bearing piece of this conversation is performed by people who earn, by NITI Aayog’s 2020 estimate, in the vicinity of INR 15-16,000 (~ USD 150). More than 70% of tehm have no social security or savings, and a meaningful share of them have children who are bonded labourers in workshops across West Bengal and Mumbai. Over half of all Indian jewellery is still made by hands, and those hands rarely see even a fraction of the price they command.

Beyond the morality of this devastation (which is devastating, of course), it’s a brand problem. One of a brand’s greatest abilities is to make a maker famous. Think Cipullo for Cartier, or Schlumberger and Peretti for Tiffany. The brands elevated individuals to recognised signatures they could change a premium for. Western luxury houses understand that the author is the asset. The entire jewellery economy of India, however, is built on the anonymization of the author. The maker here is a cost line, deliberated invisibilzed and fungible. You cannot build an auteur brand without said auteur, can you?

The distribution problem

The last part of this diagnosis is simply access. There are rooms where prestige is minted (and I’m not debating the fairness of this, I know it’s unfair). It’s the Place Vendôme addresses, the Bond Street and Madison Avenue flagships, the Geneva auctions, the connoisseur circuit, the museum loans, the auction-house provenance that turns an object into an investment. A piece of jewellery in a Jaipur vault and an identical one in a Sotheby’s catalogue are, as financial instruments, strangers to each other. Despite our storied and archived legacy, we have been unable to build intrigue around the speculative value of our craft.

Heirloom versus logo

Firstly, what IS a Cartier Love bracelet? Literally it’s just a screw motif from 1969 that you can slap on a bracelet, ring, necklace, pair of earrings, keychain, cake, cookie, scarf, ad infinitum, in countless “stories” but one that’s infinitely familiar as belonging to that brand, and by extension, its history. The Alhambra is a clover from 1968 that remains valuable today because it’s a repeatable logo with artificially restricted supply. The Serpenti is simply a snake you can coil around anything you like. Lock in one narrativized, protected, productized motif and you have eliminated the need for a thousand craftsmen, and can scale across a hundred stores like a franchise.

Indian high jewellery works from the exact opposite premise. Within the Indian system the stone leads. It has astrological and talismanic significance, trumping any brand signature. The settings are bespoke commissions, or else dynastic objects passed down and remade over generations rather than reordered from a menu. Craft itself gets subdivided by regional speciality. You buy the meenakari enamelling of Jaipur, or temple jewellery of the South, Mughlai kundan-setting, the thewa work of Pratapgarh, Bidri from the Deccan, filigree from Cuttack. Each is controlled by a guild and dedicated to maintaining a tradition. None of them are trademarked.

But if they can’t be trademarked, what can you? Again: story. Which opens a genuinely radical possibility: the absence of a recognizably Indian hallmarks stems not from weakness but from a profound difference in how Indian jewellery relates to craft, and to gold itself.

The ghost: the man who tried, and why he’s in a London cell

Nirav Modi. He launched in 2010 with grand, explicitly stated plans to be the first global Indian luxury diamond brand. He aimed high. To be the Indian Harry Winston. And boy did he ever run the playbook by the book. Boutique on Madison Avenue. Worship space on Old Bond Street. Hong Kong. Proprietary “Jasmine” cut to serve as his signature. Kate Winslet photographed in his diamonds at the Oscars, Priyanka Chopra rolling through his carpet. Storied craftsmanship made at such volume that it left the old guard gasping at his speed. He was, for a while, the physical incarnation of the answer to all the questions this essay asks.

Except then in 2018, it all came crashing down. Turns out the entire glittering empire was sitting on approximately INR 14,350 crore (USD 2B) borrowed from Pubjab National Bank under the auspices of fraudulent letters of undertaking. Modi skipped the country and is now sitting in a London jail cell.

Nirav Modi is epitome of what you get when you try and buy narrative capital with capital. You can’t leverage myth value because the thing you’re trying to purchase doesn’t actually exist. Modi tried to take it all in one go, and it gave him a zero balance. It doesn’t matter how you dress the gold up. One day, you have to open that safe and spend it.

Modi isn’t the only one either. You name the brand, there’s probably some Maharaja lurking behind the scenes somewhere. The error may change shape but at the heart of each of these failures is the same problem. They all bought proximity to a brand name, when what they really should’ve been doing was building a brand people would pay money to be near.

Mapping the contenders: who’s holding which piece of the puzzle

So is anyone actually doing it right? Sort of. Every single ingredient a global Indian house would need already exists in India right now. It’s just that no one person is holding more than one of them at a time.

Viren Bhagat has the hand

Bhagat is the closest thing India has to a Schlumberger. Creating out of Mumbai since 1991, he makes perhaps sixty to seventy unique pieces a year. The platinum settings he has created make the stones look like they’re floating, and have been described as “European in its engineering and unmistakably Mughal in its soul”. You will never find a Bhagat at a store (how gauche). His own store, opened in 2025, is by invitation only. He sells almost exclusively through Christie’s and Sotheby’s and intimate private viewings (I have been dying to go, but I have never been able to get access to them!) His work sits in the Al Thani collection and one of his brooches was actually hammered at USD 212,000 at a Christie’s Maharajahs and Mughal Magnificence sale.

He is also, by deliberate and admirable choice, microscopic. He is, I’d argue, standing proof that India can produce a world-class signature hand. He is also standing proof that one signature hand, however incredible, does not make a Cartier.

Sabyasachi has the story

Sabyasachi Mukherjee has the rarest and arguably hardest ingredient: he understands that the real product is the story. He understands that that you sell a universe people buy into, not a thing they buy. The brand he has created is so totally encompassing that it functions as a worldview.

He’s been stocked at Bergdorf Goodman since 2020, opened a New York flagship in 2022, and said that the next generation of the world’s greatest designers will come from India. He has truly managed to build heritage as narrative. I would argue he is the closest to what we are seeking here.

Unfortunately, the risk in fashion house jewellery is that it stays an accessory to the clothes. It’s a line extension rather than a free-standing offering that could survive without the classic Sabyasachi lehenga and a plunging choli neckline.

He is probably the strongest brand builder in this country and is attached to the strongest narrative engine. If anyone bridges craft and mythmaking at scale, it’s probably him.

The Gem Palace / the Kasliwals have the passport

The Kasliwal family were court jewellers in Jaipur from the eighteenth century, under Sawai Jai Singh II, and in the modern era The Gem Palace got into the rooms. The Met (the 2001 “Treasury of the World” show), Somerset House in London (the first Indian jeweller exhibited there), Barneys, a Madison Avenue address. Sabyasachi himself has credited them with mastering the packaging of mystery and intrigue. Unfortunately, they then splintered into a constellation of family ventures rather than consolidating into a single scaled global house. The family outgrew the brand instead of allowing it to scale.

Sunita Shekhawat has the museum

Shekhawat has been working in Jaipur Meenakari since 1996 and she opened the Museum of Meenakari Heritage, which is India’s first private museum dedicated to a single craft curated with a serious jewellery historian. This is the archive and legitimacy play that every european house made on its way up. You build the museum and the museum feeds into the brand. It converts jeweller into a custodian of civilizational narrative

Tanishq (and Zoya) has the balance sheet

Founded in 1994, Tanishq is the Tata answer. Its FY24 revenue was around INR 41,000 crore rupees, roughly an 8% share of the total market. It is the country’s number 1 branded jeweler, and it is on pure business terms the great indian jewellery success story. It has been reaching the luxe shelf with Zoya and D2C with CaratLane. It is the one player that has managed to professionalize the sector and won mass-trust in an unorganized low trust market. It won on purity and hallmarking, which is mass prestige not myth building. It conquered the melt price by being more honest and transparent about it than anyone else. Zoya is a genuine attempt to climb out to the top of the industry by making a name for itself on brand and story. The Tanishq-Zoya story is proof that patient capital and operational excellence both exist in India but are obviously pointed at trust rather than brand building. Whether Tanishq has the appetite to build a global icon as opposed to a superb domestic machine is something that time will tell.

The heritage cohort and the new-luxury cohort have the feel

Heritages houses like Amrapali, Hazoorilal, Birdhichand Ghanshyamdas (which made pieces for the Ambani weddings), and the rest are legitimate craft anchors operating mostly as regional or national players. The new-luxury, contemporary-designer wave, like Hanut Singh with his celebrity and diaspora following, plus the likes of Misho, Outhouse, Apala, Suhani Pittie and others, are distinctive design voices, mostly early-to-mid scale, several of them genuinely interesting on the global contemporary-jewellery circuit.

The disruptors have the wedge

And then the modern challengers. CaratLane (Titan bought out the founder’s stake in 2023 in a deal valuing it near two billion dollars), BlueStone (founded 2011, IPO’d in 2025 at a multi-thousand-crore valuation), and the lab-grown insurgents like GIVA, Aukera, the Dholakia-backed plays. They’re scaling, they’re digital-native, and they’re mostly playing in the affordable and mid tiers domestically, but they’re the ones building the muscle (D2C, design IP, brand storytelling unbundled from gold weight) that the prestige play will eventually require. The infrastructure for an unbundled, design-led, brand-premium Indian jewellery business is being built right now, just one or two price tiers below where the icon will eventually need to stand.

Tally it up and the picture is almost exasperating. Nobody has all six. The Indian Cartier currently exists as six different institutions, in five different cities, in tirty different vaults, and they have have mostly never been introduced to each other.

🎩 Investor hat on 🎩

If a founder were sitting across from me right now, fresh off the boat to pitch me “the first global Indian jewellery house,” this is what I would want to see, and what would make me pass.

1. Patient money. Myth value doesn’t compound on a 3-5 year timeline. This needs a family office. Or honestly, just some billionaire who wants this thing to exist more than they want the return. Somebody building not for the IPO, but for their own heirs. Every founder who tried and failed to do this on a venture clock over the last twenty years is now, directly or indirectly, either a line extension at a larger brand or an extradition request with Russian attorneys.

2. I want a name on that door. An actual person. Face. Eyes. Taste you trust. Elsa Peretti’s taste was Tiffany’s product, and whoever comes into this market will need to own the same advantage. Push it even further than one celebrity designer signing her lines. Make the karigars as famous as the boss woman (or boy) London wants to hang posters of. “We make our makers famous” is a moat in this business.

3. Distribution, but be clear about which kind. Export is export and selling precious shiny things to wealthy Indians (and their infinitely more valuable diaspora!) is absolutely a business, and a good one, but it’s also the definition of a trap because it’s winning at nothing more than India selling itself. The diaspora buys jewellery as an act of love, and love is no use to you if prestige is your goal. The first customer who can look at that logo and want it for reasons that have nothing to do with wanting the thing her parents wanted…Land THAT sale, and congratulations, you have a brand. Sell to the diaspora and watch your business do exponential spikes every December? A fantastic export company.

4. Can the brand advocate against The Weighing? This is the hard one. You’re asking your customer, a buyer whose entire culture has trained her to price jewellery by the gram over the last couple hundred years, to not do that. Just walk into a store, drop five thousand dollars on something you like, and trust that you won’t be expected to weigh it when you want to sell it? That is re-training an industry’s customer base, and half of them will kill themselves in the middle of your sermon. The other half will get you a hugely defensible moat. You have to survive the middle for long enough to get to the far side.

5. Then come to me when you’re ready to talk lab-grown. Lab grown is terrorizing the price point of the diamond itself down toward zero-dollars-a-gram, which is great news for signet and terrible news for Surat’s diamond cutters, but hear me out. When the diamond is removed from “where all the value resides” the value has to live somewhere. Guess where it clusters? Things you can’t weigh. Design. Name. Story. Narrative. High margin stuff. Strip the rock out of the equation and everything we thought we knew about jewellery hierarchy starts to unravel. That window is open. Right now. It will not stay open.

The one thing that will make me call you and pass on the spot:

Any founder who opens with “I’m the Cartier of India.” The real Cartier of India won’t say that. She’ll walk into your office with a name you can’t pronounce yet, and ask you to wait.

The real question was never about India

I opened by asking where the Indian Cartier is. By now I’m fairly sure that was the wrong question, or at least a vain and parochial one.

Where, for instance, is the Chinese Cartier? China has more wealth, more manufacturing might and arguably more state ambition than India, and its most internationally styled fine-jewellery brand, Qeelin, is owned by Kering, a French conglomerate that bought it in 2012, back when it had fourteen stores. The buzzy domestic disruptor, Laopu Gold, has gone vertical on the Hong Kong market by branding itself the “Hermès of gold” and posting staggering numbers, and analysts note, accurately, that it has essentially no pricing power beyond the gold itself and little cultural resonance past diaspora pride. And the African Cartier? Africa is where the colour comes from. Zambia’s emeralds, Mozambique’s rubies, the diamonds of Botswana and Namibia and South Africa, the raw material for a century of Western high jewellery. Roughly half the world’s rubies and a quarter of its emeralds now pass through a single miner, Gemfields, which is headquartered in London, sells nothing but the rough stones, and whose own luxury label is Fabergé, a Russian imperial name bolted on because African stones apparently can’t be a brnd unto itself. Even Africa’s biggest gemstone house had to borrow a dead European’s name to move its own rocks.

And the one genuinely African-led high jewellery house, Vania Leles’s Vanleles, which calls itself the first, sits on Bond Street. Where else? The people who dig the stones never make it into the story, and the jewels end up credited to some European maison instead of the ground they came out of. Sound familiar?

There’s only one outlier in the entire world. Mikimoto. A Japanese man grew the world’s first cultured pearl in 1893, opened his first store in Ginza in 1899, and created a truly international luxury brand that survives to this day. But study his approach. A disruption-creating technology that demanded attention. He burnt carts of low-quality pearls on camera, draped a sculpture of the Liberty Bell in pearls for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He earned Western respectability while European wholesalers petitioned the government to legally recognise cultured pearls as imitation. He courted Western approval until the West crowned him a modern miracle. Non-Western brands can absolutely create global prestige brands and Mikimoto is proof of that, but he had to do it on nearly entirely Western rules

Which, incidentally, is the true lesson behind all of this. “Cultural narrative equity” or the ability to create myth-value, to charge for a logo, to sell your country their own culture back at a profit and have everyone congratulate you on your taste is not an even playing field that anyone can mine however hard they work. It’s an economy. And the economy is owned.

Three European groups own most of the brands. Most of the flagship stores. The auction houses. The museum associations. Most importantly, they own the very language with which we define what luxury is and where it can come from. India didn’t lose at capitalism. India wasn’t allowed to play on the sports team to begin with, and you can’t win at a game where the rules are also the trophy.

The question shouldn’t be how India can’t make its own Cartier. Indians already make Cartiers for a profession; we have, for decades. We made at least three of them last summer, all for one wedding. The question is who gets to put their name on the brand and that isn’t a question of expertise, or of funding, or even, really, of colonialism though it is the result of those things too. It’s about who gets to say something is valuable within a society that has spent its entire existence ensuring that answer only has one answer.

Resources/reading:

• Gold price India (24K ~₹14,165–14,553/g; 18K ~₹10,825/g), June 2026 — your ₹3,66,912 melt figure for ~26g checks out: GoodReturns https://www.goodreturns.in/gold-rates/ · ClearTax https://cleartax.in/gold-rate-india · BankBazaar https://www.bankbazaar.com/gold-rate-india.html

• USD/INR ≈ 94.3 (June 2026) — all your dollar conversions are correct at this rate: Wise https://wise.com/us/currency-converter/usd-to-inr-rate/history · PoundSterlingLive https://www.poundsterlinglive.com/data/currencies/usd-pairs/USDINR-exchange-rate · BookMyForex https://www.bookmyforex.com/currency-converter/usd-to-inr/forecast/

• Cartier Love bracelet (18K, ~30–40g) / Van Cleef Alhambra (~$3,700–4,500 retail) — verify exact retail prices against the brand sites before publishing: cartier.com (India) and vancleefarpels.com. The weight and gold-content math are sound; the retail numbers move, so screenshot them.

• Ambani wedding jewels — Nita’s “~1,000 kilos of emeralds” (Julia Hackman Chafé), ~100-ct yellow-diamond necklace, 52-ct Golconda ring, Isha’s 3-year navratna, groom’s 720-ct panther-on-emerald brooch + Lorraine Schwartz — Harper’s Bazaar Arabia (Chafé) https://www.harpersbazaararabia.com/hbanews/ambani-wedding-best-jewellery · (Shekhawat made meenakari boxes for Nita Ambani: Robb Report India https://www.robbreportindia.com/style/bespoke/master-of-meenakari-sunita-shekhawat-reveals-her-first-collectables-range-and-shares-why-jaipur-is-a-crafts-hub )

• Cartier 1847 · Tiffany 1837 · Bulgari 1884 · Van Cleef & Arpels 1906 · Harry Winston 1932 — house histories; VCA 1906 (Alfred Van Cleef + Estelle Arpels):

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Richemont - Business Breakdown

After releasing several succinct investment cases, this new series will delve deeper into each business to provide greater clarity into what makes them truly unique. We begin with Richemont, a fine jewellery and watches powerhouse and true hidden gem in luxury. Its brands are timeless having endured centuries of wars, revolutions and recessions. The bel…

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a year ago · 13 likes · CosmicCapital

• Alhambra (1968) · Love bracelet (1969, Aldo Cipullo) · Serpenti (c.1940s) — brand-documented; cite vancleefarpels.com, cartier.com, bulgari.com archives.

• Patiala Necklace (commissioned 1925–28, 2,930 diamonds, ~962 ct, 234-ct De Beers yellow) — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patiala_Necklace · Al-Thani context https://www.youandi.com/bejewelled-treasures-al-thani-collection/

• Golconda diamonds (Koh-i-Noor, Hope, Regent, Orlov, Darya-i-Noor); Koh-i-Noor taken 1849, shown at 1851 Great Exhibition, recut 186 → 105.6 ct — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koh-i-Noor · World History Encyclopedia https://www.worldhistory.org/Koh-i-Noor/ · Bard/West 86th (the recut as colonial allegory) https://west86th.bgc.bard.edu/articles/romancing-the-stone-victoria-albert-and-the-koh-i-noor-diamond/

• Surat cuts/polishes ~90% of the world’s diamonds by volume — Indian School of Gemmology / industry https://www.isgj.org/blog/why-surat-is-the-diamond-capital-of-the-world

• Pharrell × Louis Vuitton SS26 (June 24, 2025, Centre Pompidou; Moksha Patam / Snakes & Ladders set by Bijoy Jain / Studio Mumbai; A.R. Rahman “Yaara Punjabi”) — Dazed https://www.dazeddigital.com/fashion/article/68097/1/louis-vuitton-mens-ss26-paris-fashion-week-pfw-pharrell-snakes-and-ladders-india · Hollywood Reporter India https://www.hollywoodreporterindia.com/lifestyle/fashion/inside-pharrells-india-inspired-louis-vuitton-ss26-collection · Design Pataki https://www.designpataki.com/bijoy-jain-ar-rahman-takeover-pharrells-vuitton-vision/

• Emma Chamberlain wore a Patiala-lineage Cartier choker at the 2022 Met Gala — The Glitz https://theglitz.media/why-cartier-refused-diljit-dosanjh-the-iconic-patiala-necklace-for-met-gala-2025-but-gave-it-to-emma-chamberlaine-for-met-gala-2022/ · SheThePeople https://www.shethepeople.tv/film-theatre/met-gala-diljit-dosanjh-cartier-controversy-9043459

• Diljit Dosanjh Met Gala 2025 (Prabal Gurung, homage to Maharaja Bhupinder Singh; stylist Abhilasha Devnani told NYT the original “sits sealed in a museum”; replica by Golecha Jewels; original on show at the V&A’s Cartier exhibition, Apr–Nov 2025) — SheThePeople (above) · The Pink Lookbook (the V&A/contractual context) https://thepinklookbook.com/diljit-dosanjhs-met-gala-necklace-explained/

• India bought 563.4 t of gold jewellery in 2024 (₹3,61,690 cr), surpassing China’s 479.3 t; jewellery ≈ 70% of India’s gold demand — World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends Full Year 2024 https://www.gold.org/goldhub/research/gold-demand-trends/gold-demand-trends-full-year-2024/jewellery · GJEPC summary https://gjepc.org/news_detail.php?news=india-s-gold-jewellery-demand-in-2024-drops-2-to-563-4-tonnes-22-in-value-to-3-61-690-crore-1

• Johann Rupert (Richemont chairman) on jewellery being largely unbranded — “a very big part of the market is unbranded… one can grow into that market,” WWD (Nov 2025) https://wwd.com/business-news/business-features/luxury-shoppers-buying-richemont-cartier-jewelry-hard-times-1238349428/ · “gaining market share… from branded and non-branded companies,” CNBC (May 2025) https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/18/luxury-wealthy-shoppers-spend-on-jewelry-only-if-its-the-right-brand.html

• >90% of Indian jewellers family-owned; only 15–20% of manufacturing organised; sector draws ~2.7% of India’s credit — World Gold Council (gold.org research on India’s jewellery sector). For the published piece, link the specific WGC India report.

• Karigar wages ~₹15,000–16,000/month; 70%+ without social security; child/bonded labour cases; ~55% of jewellery handmade — NITI Aayog / NILERD, “Socio-economic and working conditions of workers in the Indian gold industry” (2020). Secondary discussion: Takshni editorial https://takshni.com/gb/editorials/the-artisan-is-an-artist-reclaiming-indian-indigenous-craft-from-the-economy-of-exploitation

• LVMH / Richemont / Kering own the major houses; Kering’s roll-up included Pomellato & Qeelin (2012) — Kering, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kering

• Founded ~2010; aimed to be the global Indian luxury diamond house; Madison Avenue, Old Bond Street, Hong Kong; “Jasmine” cut; Kate Winslet (Oscars), Priyanka Chopra (ambassador); ₹14,357 cr (~US$2 bn) PNB fraud, exposed 2018; held at Wandsworth Prison, London — Wikipedia, Punjab National Bank Scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punjab_National_Bank_Scam · Wikipedia, Nirav Modi (Wandsworth) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirav_Modi · Business Today (Madison Ave / Priyanka) https://www.businesstoday.in/industry/banks/story/nirav-modi-case-pnb-fraud-11400-crore-scam-ed-cbi-raid-101200-2018-02-15

• Viren Bhagat — Mumbai since the early 1990s; ~40–70 unique pieces/year; in the Al-Thani Collection; a brooch est. $40–60k sold for $212,500 at Christie’s Maharajas & Mughal Magnificence (2019); “European in engineering, Mughal in soul”; opened a Mayfair boutique Jan 2025 — Natural Diamonds https://www.naturaldiamonds.com/in/epic-diamonds-in/viren-bhagat-the-gem-whisperer/ · The French Jewelry Post https://thefrenchjewelrypost.com/en/style/viren-bhagat-a-bombay-jeweler/ · Retail Jeweller India (Mayfair) https://retailjewellerindia.com/eminent-jeweller-viren-bhagat-sets-up-first-global-boutique-in-londons-mayfair/

• Sabyasachi — brand founded 1999; selling jewellery at Bergdorf Goodman since 2020; first NY flagship opened 2022 (Christopher Street); collaborations with Estée Lauder, Louboutin, H&M, Starbucks — WWD https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-scoops/sabyasachi-bergdorf-goodman-handbags-jewels-1236719796/ · PR Newswire https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-world-of-sabyasachi-set-to-arrive-at-bergdorf-goodman-302304501.html

• Gem Palace / the Kasliwals — court jewellers in Jaipur from the 18th c. (Sawai Jai Singh II); Somerset House; Barneys; Madison Avenue (Sanjay Kasliwal; Munnu “The Gem Palace”).

• Sunita Shekhawat — brand since the mid-1990s; Museum of Meenakari Heritage opened March 23, 2024, India’s first private museum dedicated to a single craft; curated by Usha R. Balakrishnan, designed by Siddhartha Das Studio — sunitashekhawat.com https://sunitashekhawat.com/museum · GJEPC https://gjepc.org/solitaire/sunita-shekhawats-museum-of-meenakari-a-labour-of-love/ · Homegrown (opening date) https://homegrown.co.in/homegrown-explore/step-inside-indias-first-heritage-museum-dedicated-to-the-indian-craft-of-meenakari

• Tanishq / Titan — Tanishq founded 1994 (Tata/Titan); Titan total income FY24 ₹47,501 cr (jewellery division ~₹42,000 cr; jewellery is 85–90% of Titan revenue); market share ~6–7%; sub-brands Zoya, Mia, CaratLane; launched lab-grown brand “beYon” in 2025 — Titan, Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Company · Titan Q4 FY24 results (PDF) https://www.titancompany.in/sites/default/files/2024-05/Q4FY24%20Financial%20Results.pdf

• CaratLane — Titan bought 27.18% from founder Mithun Sacheti & family for ₹4,621 cr in 2023 (implying ~US$2 bn valuation), lifting its stake to 98.28% — Titan, Wikipedia (above) · DCF Modeling https://www.dcfmodeling.com/blogs/health/titanns-financial-health

• BlueStone — founded 2011; IPO’d 2025 — India IPO https://www.indiaipo.in/news/bluestone-raises-900-cr-in-pre-ipo-funding-round

• Heritage cohort (Amrapali, Hazoorilal, Birdhichand Ghanshyamdas) & new-luxury (Misho, Outhouse, Apala, Suhani Pittie, Hanut Singh) — existence/positioning is well documented but I have not independently verified scale figures; present as “emerging/contemporary cohort,” not with hard numbers.

• Qeelin owned by Kering (deal 2012, completed Jan 2013), when it had 50 employees and 14 stores — Wikipedia, Qeelin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qeelin · Wikipedia, Kering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kering

• Laopu Gold — “Hermès of gold”; Hong Kong IPO June 2024 (HK$40.5); 2025 revenue ~RMB 27.3 bn (+221%); prices not set by gold weight; analysts note limited resonance beyond diaspora — kr-asia https://kr-asia.com/chinas-hermes-of-gold-courts-turbulent-world-after-dazzling-at-home · Mining.com / Reuters https://www.mining.com/web/chinas-hermes-of-gold-shines-despite-lacklustre-demand-for-high-end-goods/

• Africa supplies a vast share of the world’s coloured stones but owns no globally iconic house; Vania Leles (Vanleles): “These African mines and their workers are not represented in the industry conversation, and the fine creations that feature their gemstones are linked with Western brands rather than the true sources.” JCK https://www.jckonline.com/editorial-article/vania-leles-african-fine-jewelry/ · Vanleles https://www.vanleles.com/about

• Mikimoto — first cultured pearl July 11, 1893; Ginza shop 1899; publicly burned inferior pearls (1932); pearl Liberty Bell at the 1939 NY World’s Fair; won legitimacy after the 1924 Paris court ruling; Edison: culturing pearls “is one of the wonders of the world” — Antique Jewelry University (Langantiques) https://www.langantiques.com/university/mikimoto-kokichi/ · New World Encyclopedia https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Mikimoto_Kokichi · Wynn Las Vegas / Mikimoto archive (Edison quote) https://www.wynnlasvegas.com/stories/luminous-creation

• Business of Fashion https://www.businessoffashion.com/briefings/luxury/high-margin-can-richemont-keep-up-its-winning-streak/

My book is out! You can get The Girls Are Not Fine here.

I know what you think when you think influencer. You think exaggerated expressions, unfounded shock and awe at mundane things, vapid and cynical manipulation. You think pretty girl, soft job, discount code. You think of someone gasping at a moisturizer like it cured cancer. You think: not a real career.

I want to talk you out of that contempt. Not because it’s unkind (though it is) but because it is expensive. Every hour you spend feeling superior to her is an hour you spend refusing to learn the one thing she has worked out that you haven’t. Drill a level deeper than the ring light and the trending audio and you’ll find a skillset you have been trying really hard to cultivate for years and don’t even know it. The same one your reviews keep circling, the same one you’ve paid for in courses and frameworks and coaching calls, the same one that gets written on your appraisal as ‘an area for development’ year after year while you nod and promise to work on it. You don’t recognise it in her because it doesn’t arrive with a certificate or a job title. But it’s there. And the gap between the two of you is not talent, and it is not luck. It is a mindset you keep refusing to shift.

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So first, let’s talk about what makes influencers click. What makes you and me buy something a stranger is yapping about on a screen? Why do we comment ‘link’ on every third video? It’s simple, and it’s a skill you’ve been told you need to work on a thousand times: effective communication. The influencer you’re watching has mastered the art of a few things, and none of them are an accident.

First, she is an expert at breaking down value propositions in a way that actually sells something to her audience. She does not look at declared value props and recite them back to you. She simplifies them in a way that is accessible to her target market. She is not optimising for information per word, she is optimising for intention per word. She is not selling you a product. She is selling you a promise that you can be just like her if you buy this thing. Think about how violently that differs from how you communicate. You are in a meeting somewhere, burying your one good point under nine qualifiers. You are writing a deck where slide four contradicts the urgency of slide two because you were scared to commit to a single claim. You mistake density for rigour. You have convinced yourself that if you make something hard enough to understand, someone will mistake the difficulty for depth. She has convinced herself of the opposite, and she is the one getting paid. Clarity is not the dumbing-down of intelligence. Clarity is the highest expression of it, because it means you understood the thing well enough to carry it across to someone who didn’t.

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Which brings us to the second thing. She has a preternatural ability to read your mind. Well, at least it looks like that. She seems to say exactly what you’re feeling a second before you feel it, and you find yourself nodding along, because if she can read my mind, surely she’s right about everything else too. She is not reading your mind. She is guiding your thought process. When she sat down to script this, she did not start with the product. She started with how she wanted you to feel, react, spend. She decided on the outcome first and then wove the words backward from it, like a map drawn in reverse. She understands the one thing most marketing experts spend entire decks pretending to know and never actually do: how you make someone feel decides how they will act afterwards. Emotion first. Everything else is just the route there. You do it the other way around, every single time. You lead with the information and hope the feeling shows up on its own. You present the data and then act wounded when nobody is moved by it. You walk into the room with your evidence stacked up like firewood and forget that nobody has ever, in the history of being persuaded, been persuaded by firewood. They are persuaded by warmth. She builds the fire. You hand people logs and wonder why they leave cold.

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Third, she doesn’t hesitate. She talks to you with the confidence of someone who knows exactly what she has to say. Now, a lot of that is editing trickery. You can auto-cut every pause and filler out of a monologue, and she does. But here is how she actually does it, before the editing ever touches it. She records what she wants to say, and she pauses between each line, each thought. She lets herself think, consolidate, and then modulate her voice into precisely what she means. How many times have you been told to slow down and give yourself time to think through a sentence? And how many times have you ignored it, because you decided that intelligence is expressed through force and not through deliberation? You believe the person who speaks first wins the meeting. You believe the person who speaks fastest is the smartest one in the room. You have watched confident men say nothing at length and mistaken it for authority, and you have tried to copy the wrong half of what they were doing. What you keep forgetting, and what she can teach you, is that force has to be preceded by deliberation. You have to know exactly what you need to communicate before you open your mouth to communicate it. Hesitation is talking before you’ve thought. Deliberation is thinking before you talk. From the outside they can look identical for a second. They are not.

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Finally, she knows her worth. She does not mention a product in her content unless it enriches her somehow. Sometimes that’s an exclusive brand deal. Often it’s an affiliate link. She understands that people are willing to hand her their attention, which makes her an arbiter of focus, which in turn lets her control where that focus goes. Attention is the only resource that has actually become scarcer in your lifetime, and she sits on a reservoir of it. She does not fritter that leverage away to be nice. She makes money, and she is unashamed about it. She knows that what she does is worth paying for, so she makes sure she gets paid for it. She does not give brands her space because they were nice to her. She does not accept ‘exposure’ as a currency, because she knows it doesn’t clear at the bank. She does not chase likeability, because she can evoke things far more valuable than being liked. She can manufacture lust, jealousy, aspiration, hunger. She knows exactly how powerful those are. So she prices herself accordingly, and then she does not flinch when she asks for her worth.

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You flinch. You have a rate, and you discount it before anyone has even pushed back, just to spare yourself the silence after you say it. You add the apology before the invoice. You take the meeting for free because asking to be paid for your time feels grubby. You have been taught that wanting money makes you less serious about the work, when she has understood the opposite, that refusing to be paid is what tells the world your work is a hobby.

The reason you are allowed to sneer at her is that the skill is coded female. Everything she is good at: communication, reading a room, managing how people feel, making yourself watchable, making desire visible and then satisfying it, is precisely the cluster of competencies women are told are natural, effortless, innate to them. And anything a woman is told she does naturally, she is told she should do for free. Care is natural, so it’s unpaid. Beauty is natural, so it’s expected. Charm is natural, so it’s not a skill, it’s just personality. The genius of the influencer, the thing that actually enrages people, is that she took the entire bundle of feminised labour the world insists has no market value and she built a market for it. She is charging for the things you were ordered to give away. Of course she is resented. She broke an agreement you didn’t even know you’d signed.

So when you tell yourself she ‘didn’t work for it,’ understand what you are actually saying. You are saying that the work doesn’t count because women have always done it for nothing. You are not describing reality. You are defending the discount. And the discount you are defending is the same one being applied to you.

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Because the labour is real, and you know it’s real the second you try to do it. Go and shoot one video. Try to compress something true into fifteen seconds that a stranger will not scroll past. Try to write a single line that stops a thumb mid-flick. Try to say the thing you mean, to camera, without your voice doing the apologetic upward tilt at the end. Try to read your own analytics and feel nothing while a post you were proud of dies in front of you. Try to do it again the next day, and the day after, and the day after that, in public, where everyone can watch you miss. The reshoots, the testing of hooks, the spreadsheet of rates, the figuring out of which collaboration is worth her name and which one is a trap. You only get to believe it’s easy because she is good enough to make it look easy.

We vilify influencers because we’d like to believe they hacked the game. The story we tell ourselves is I worked so HARD for my skills and she didn’t, so it’s unfair that she makes more money and gets more adoration than I do. We soothe ourselves with yeah, but MY career will last longer than hers, this is obviously just luck. It is a comforting story, and it lets you keep your contempt and your inertia at the same time. If she only got lucky, then there’s nothing to learn, and if there’s nothing to learn, you never have to do the uncomfortable thing, which is to admit she is better than you at the exact skill you have spent your whole career claiming to value. Credentialism is the last refuge here. But I have a degree. But I have ten years of experience. But I have a real skill. You are bulwarking your legitimacy to institutions as if they are still the ones handing out the money. They are not. She skipped the line you are still standing in, and the reason that feels like cheating is that you have confused the line with the destination.

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What if I told you that you both have the exact same skillset? What if I told you she is, in fact, far better at the same job than you are? What if I told you that influence is a currency, and that you’re running low on it, not because you don’t have the skills, but because you keep waiting for someone to notice you and pay you what you’re owed? What if I told you that you have been treating your own influence like something that will accrue on its own if you’re patient and good and quiet, when it is in fact the one asset that does nothing at all until you decide to spend it? And what if I told you no one is coming to do that for you?

No one is coming to discover you. No one is going to walk over and hand you your worth, correctly priced, with interest for the years you waited politely in line. There is no panel reviewing your case. There is no silent authority keeping a ledger of everything you did without being asked, preparing to settle up. You already have everything she has. The communication, the read on a room, the ability to make people feel something before they’ve decided to. You have just been spending it for free on people who will never pay you for it, because you were too proud of the contempt to use the skill beneath it.

Drop the contempt. Keep the skill. Start thinking like an influencer.

So when a much younger friend told me that she thinks the guy she’s been seeing for 3 months is the one, I wrote her a list of questions I think she should ask him. It’s nowhere near exhaustive. It is, however, the list I think addresses a lot of difficult conversations couples struggle with. Here it is, in case it’s useful to anyone else currently looking at a man across a dinner table and wondering whether he’s your person for (hopefully!) the rest of your life.

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0. What is his relationship with his parents? Does he call them because he wants to or because he’ll get a guilt-soaked phone call if he doesn’t? Does he spend time with them because he enjoys their company, or because he thinks that’s what a good son does? Is he financially dependent on them? Have they paid for the car, “helped” with the down payment, covered his health insurance, or maybe gifted him some money? What is the expectation of return on that? How does he speak to his mother on the phone when he thinks you’re not listening?

1. Does he have siblings, and what is the actual family ecosystem? Is there an anointed golden child and a resented scapegoat, and which one is he? If he’s the golden child, you’re about to inherit the resentment of everyone who isn’t. If he’s the scapegoat, you are about to inherit a lifetime of him trying to prove his worth to people who don’t really care about his effort. How do the siblings speak to each other as adults? Is he friends with his siblings?

2. How does his family treat his bhabhi, his jiju, whoever the most recent person to marry into this family is? Who serves whom? Who gets interrupted? Whose plate gets filled first? Whose career is asked about with genuine interest?” Whatever is happening to her is what will happen to you.

3. What did his parents’ marriage actually look like when he was growing up? Who deferred to whom on the small stuff? On the big stuff? Who got to be tired? Who got to be the “difficult” one, and who was expected to deal with it? Who decided how comfortable the dinner table was? Whatever he watched as the primary example of ‘marriage’ for his whole life is what he thinks marriage is.

4. Has he ever been to therapy, and if not, would he go if it was needed? What does he think of men who go? If his answer involves “I just talk to my friends,” “I’m not really the type,” or “I don’t believe in that stuff,” ask yourself how he plans to process his pain when life eventually whoops his ass. The answer is going to be you, and you are not qualified. What then?

5. What is his actual income, and does he know where his money goes? If he cannot tell you within reasonable accuracy what he spends on rent, food, going out, his parents, and savings each month, he is not a financial adult; he is a financial teenager who happens to have a salary.

6. Does he have debt, and how does he treat it? Credit card dues, personal loans, EMIs on things he didn’t need, money owed to friends, money owed to family. Has he ever defaulted on anything? Has he ever been bailed out? Is that person who bailed him out going to expect repayment in the form of influence over your marriage?

7. What is he financially expected to contribute to his parents and siblings after marriage? Has he actually asked? Or is he assuming? Get a number. Monthly remittance, yes or no, how much. Siblings’ weddings: is he expected to fund part of it? All of it? Parents’ medical bills: is there insurance, is there a plan, is there a corpus, or is the plan “we’ll figure it out,” which always means you will figure it out. Is the house in his name or his father’s, and what does that mean for your marriage?

8. What happens when you out-earn him? Has it happened yet? If yes, how did he behave in the week after the money came in? Was he generous and proud, or weirdly snippy about small things? Men can intellectually support equal earning and still end up being turnips about it.

9. Joint, separate, or hybrid accounts? Does he have a thought-through position, or is he assuming you’ll just merge everything because that’s what wives do? Has he considered what happens to your money if you take a career break for children? Does it become his money that he generously shares, or does it remain yours? What’s his view on financial transparency? Full visibility into each other’s spending, or a “we trust each other” arrangement that mysteriously only ever benefits one side?

10. Does he know how to run the admin of his own life? Can he book his own doctor’s appointments, remember when his car insurance expires, file his own taxes, call the plumber, manage his own medication, and sit on hold with the bank? Or does he get a strange, helpless look when any of these things come up?

11. How does he spend on himself versus on you versus on his family? Is he generous with his parents and tight with you, generous with himself and tight with his parents, performatively generous with you in public and weird about it in private? Does he struggle to say no and then complain about it for the whole week?

12. Does he want children, how many, by when, and is any of this actually negotiable? “I’m open to whatever you want” is not an answer. Make him give you a real answer. Then ask what he thinks the first year of a baby’s life looks like in your household and see if his vision and yours are even vaguely similar.

13. If you struggle to conceive, what is his plan? IVF? For how many cycles, with whose money, with whose time off work, on whose schedule? Adoption? Does he genuinely consider it an equivalent to biological children? Childlessness? Can he imagine a full life with you and no children, or will he grieve it for the rest of your marriage?

14. Who is taking parental leave, who is doing the night feeds, who is doing the school run, who is staying home when the kid has a fever? “We’ll figure it out together” is the single most common lie told in pre-marriage conversations, and it always, always ends up with the woman figuring it out while the man takes credit for being supportive.

15. Whose career pauses when something happens, and has he ever, even hypothetically, even for thirty seconds, imagined it being his? If the answer is no, if he has genuinely never considered that he might be the one to step back, then you already know whose ambition is the default one in this marriage.

16. What religion or cultural framework are the kids being raised in, and has he actually thought about it, or is he assuming the default is his? Whose festivals are the “real” festivals in the house? Whose god gets the bigger photograph? Whose grandparents get to take the kids to which ceremonies? Whose mother tongue do the kids learn first?

17. What is his view on hitting children, yelling at children, shaming children, withholding affection from children as discipline? What was done to him, and does he describe it as discipline or as harm? A man who calls his own beatings “necessary” or “what made me who I am” is telling you what he will do to your kids the day they make him angry enough.

18. If you have daughters, will he raise them with the same expectations, the same freedoms, the same investment, same worldviews as sons? Don’t take his word because he’ll say yes. Watch how he already talks about his nieces compared to his nephews.

19. Does his family expect you to live with them after marriage? Has he told them you don’t want to? Has he had that conversation, or is he hoping you’ll either agree or be the bad guy who refuses so he doesn’t have to be? A man who cannot have a hard conversation with his parents on your behalf before the wedding is not magically going to find the spine to do it after.

20. How often will his mother visit, for how long, and who is hosting her? Is it understood that her visits are a joint project, or is it understood that she is his guest who you are expected to feed, entertain, defer to, and not complain about? What happens when her visit, which was supposed to be for a week, becomes a month?

21. What does he do when his family is dismissive of you? It will happen. If it has already happened (and look closely, because it almost certainly has), did he address it in the moment? Address it later in private with them? Address it later in private with you by asking you to adjust, or pretend he didn’t notice?

22. When his mother’s comfort and your comfort conflict, whose side does he choose? The seating at dinner, the temperature of the AC, what to order, where to go for the holiday. Watch carefully.

23. What’s his stance on the visible markers of marriage? Surname change, sindoor, mangalsutra, karva chauth, the performances of wifehood? Is he willing to take on any equivalent markers himself, or is the visible signaling of “married” a thing only one of you has to wear?

24. How does he handle the auntie-uncle pressure circuit? The relentless questions about when you’ll have kids, why you’re still working, why you wore that, why you spoke like that, and why you laughed too loudly? Does he stand between you and it, deflect it, change the subject, or does he go quiet and let you take the hits because “they don’t mean anything by it, just ignore”?

25. Does he defend you in rooms you’re not in? You will never directly know this, but you can figure it out. Does his family seem to think highly of you in ways that suggest he’s been telling them that he thinks you’re the bee’s knees? Do his friends know of your accomplishments, or are they surprised every time one comes up?

26. What does he want his life to look like at forty, at sixty, when the kids have moved out, when his career has plateaued? Has he thought past the wedding at all, or is the wedding itself the imagined finish line? Men who haven’t imagined the long arc of a life tend to be very surprised by it when it arrives.

27. If you got a serious opportunity in another city or country, would he move? Has he ever moved for a woman in his life? Has any man in his family ever moved for a woman? If women have been the ones who relocate for his whole life, you are asking him to be the first man in his bloodline to do it. That is much bigger than you can imagine.

28. Does he support your ambition the same way in public and in private? In public, he is proud, he brags about you, he shows you off, and he is the modern husband. In private, though? Is he still proud, or is there a small, cold voice in his head that tells him he expected something else?

29. How does he describe your work to his friends and parents? Does he get the title right? Does he get the company right? Does he understand what you actually do, or does he describe it as “she works in some media thing” because he never bothered to understand your work?

30. What does he do when you succeed, and what does he do when you fail? Failure is easy to be sweet about because it doesn’t threaten the status quo, and he gets to be the good guy. Success is where men’s real beliefs about their wives emerge, often subconsciously.

31. Drinking: how much? How often? What is he like when he drinks? Have you actually seen his worst? Find a way to see it before you commit.

32. Drugs: historical, current, recreational, dependent? What has he done, what does he still do, would he stop if you asked, and would he resent you for asking?

33. Gambling, including the respectable versions. Crypto positions he refers to as “investments.” Day trading that is actually betting. Sports betting apps. The casino trip with the boys that has happened more than once. FnO ‘just as an experiment’.

34. Porn: what’s his relationship with it? How often, what kind, and has it shaped what he expects sex with you to be? You don’t have to be anti-porn to ask this question. You just have to know what the man you’re sleeping with is comparing you to in his head.

35. Cheating: has he ever cheated? What does he personally define as cheating? Do not assume his definition matches yours. For some men, cheating starts at penetration. For some, it starts with a kiss. For some, with an emotional confession to another woman. For others, a conversation. Find out his definition and whether it is one you can live with.

36. How does his anger come out? Voice raised, doors slammed, things thrown, three-day silent treatments, driving fast on purpose, name-calling that gets walked back later as “just venting”? Every man feels anger. The question is who he aims it at and whether it has ever frightened anyone. Does he think of his anger as something he controls or something that controls him?

37. Has he ever been physical with anyone, ever? A partner, a sibling, a parent, a stranger in a bar, a wall, a door, a punch thrown at the floor? Men will tell you about punching the wall like it’s fine, whatever. It’s not fine.

38. Who are his three closest friends? What are their marriages or relationships like? If his three closest friends are all in marriages where the wife is exhausted and the husband is making jokes about it, you should realize that’s what you’re signing up for too.

39. How do his friends talk about their wives and girlfriends when they think no woman is listening? “Happy wife happy life” jokes, the “permission” jokes, the “ball and chain” jokes, the rolling of eyes at the mention of a wife’s name? Does your man laugh along? Does he push back? Does he actually not associate with men who talk like that in the first place?

40. Does he have female friends? Has he slept with any of them? Is there one in particular he talks about a lot, or maybe one he never talks about?

41. Are his friends happy for him about you? Are glad he’s found you? Or do they seem to be assessing you, waiting to see if you’ll be the cool wife who doesn’t mind the boys’ trips or the difficult wife who does?

42. Does he cook, clean, do laundry, do groceries, change sheets, scrub bathrooms without expecting a medal? Or only when guests are coming? Or only when you’ve cried about it?

43. Does he notice when something needs doing? Or does he wait to be told and then expect credit for doing what he was told? If you are the only one who can see the dust on the shelf, the empty milk carton, the kid’s school form due tomorrow, the wet towel on the bed….

44. What is his standard of cleanliness? How does it compare to yours? And whose standard wins when they don’t match? Does the lower standard get to be the default because raising it would be “nagging”?

45. How does he fight? Voice raised, walks out of the room, stonewalls for hours or days, goes cold, gets sarcastic, weaponizes something you told him in confidence, brings up something from two years ago, apologizes quickly to end the fight without resolving it, actually engages with the substance of what’s wrong? You will fight thousands of times in a marriage.

46. Can he say “I was wrong” without a “but,” “you also,” or a long explanation? A man who cannot apologize without qualifying it is a man who, deep down, does not believe he was wrong.

47. After a fight, who reaches out first? Always you? Always you? Is there a pattern of him waiting, knowing you will eventually crack? That is a tactic, conscious or not, and it works because you let it.

48. Does he hold grudges? For how long?

49. What does he know about himself that he doesn’t like and is actively working on? If he cannot name anything, or if what he names is one of those suspiciously charming things, he is not a man who has honest conversations with himself. You cannot have a real marriage with someone who has no relationship with his interior self.

50. How does he describe his exes? Is there a single ex he speaks of kindly, with whom he simply wasn’t a good fit? Because statistically, you will one day be an ex, and the language he is using for other women is the language he is preparing to use about you.

51. What is the mental health history in his family, including his own? Depression, anxiety, bipolar, OCD, addiction, untreated rage, suicide? None of it is a dealbreaker unto itself, but a man who refuses to acknowledge any of it is.

52. If you got chronically ill, is he the kind of man who stays present, learns the medications, and comes to the appointments? Or is he the kind of man who disappears into work and lets your mother and your sister become your real caregivers while he tells everyone how hard this has been on him?

53. If his parents get sick (and they will), what is the plan, and who is the assumed primary caregiver? Is it understood that you, the daughter-in-law, will be the one taking the lead because you are “better at that sort of thing”? Has he ever, even once, imagined being the primary caregiver to his own parents?

54. Sexual compatibility: have you actually had a real conversation about what you each want, what you each find difficult, what frequency works for both of you, what neither of you will do, and what each of you needs to feel wanted?

55. What does he do when you say no? Does he accept it? Does he sulk, negotiate, ask “why not”, or punish you for the next two days? A man’s response to a small no tells you exactly how he will respond to a big no.

56. How does he speak to people who can do absolutely nothing for him? How does he behave with the waiter, the driver, the watchman, the housekeeper, the call center agent, the auto-driver who took a wrong turn? People treat the powerful well because they have to.

57. How does he and his family treat his mother’s domestic staff, the cook, the maid, the driver they’ve had for years? Are they treated like real people with names and birthdays and families?

58. What does he think a wife is for? Ask him. Watch him try to dodge the question, watch him laugh, watch him give you an answer, watch him ask what do you mean. Press until you get a real one, and then think about whatever he actually said for a few days.

59. What does he think a husband owes to his wife, to his children, to his household, to the project of the marriage in itself? The answers most men give to this are shockingly weak compared to the answers they give to the wife version. Don’t put him in a corner on this one; ask him to take his time and think about what he thinks.

60. Does he believe in an equal marriage in the abstract while expecting a traditional one in practice? He will sincerely tell you he believes in equality, and he will mean it, and he will also be assuming that you will be the one who cooks, plans the holidays, manages the relationships, notices when the child is sad.

61. If one of you dies young, what happens? To the children, to the house, to the money, to the surviving partner? Has he written a will? Is there life insurance? Is there a plan? Is the plan “we don’t need to think about that now”? That is a plan to leave your children at the mercy of his family’s goodwill.

62. If you are both eighty, retired, and falling apart, who is taking care of whom? Can you picture it? Can you picture him gently helping you up the stairs? Can you picture yourself wanting to help him up the stairs? The image either comes easily or it doesn’t.

63. Can you imagine being bored with him? Because the wedding is one day, the honeymoon is two weeks, the early infatuation is two years, and the rest of it, decades of it, is the boring part. The boring part is where most marriages die.

64. Do you like who you are when you are with him? Not who he tells you you are, not who he makes you feel like you could be, not the version of yourself you are performing for him. The you that already existed before he arrived, does she get to stay? Does she get more room, or less?

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The right man will not flinch at a single one of these questions. Actually, untrue. He WILL flinch and he WILL get awkward, but he will push through his own conditioning and stratified worldviews to meet you where you are. He will realise that this is important to you. He will sit with you and answer them, and the answers will sometimes be uncomfortable, and that discomfort will feel like the beginning of a real conversation rather than the end of one. He will be honest about not having all the answers and will take time to think things through instead of pandering to what he thinks you want to hear.

The wrong man will tell you you are overthinking, that you are being intense, that you are ruining something nice by interrogating it. Pay very, very close attention to which of those two men he turns out to be, because that distinction is the entire rest of your life.

Send this to every woman you love who is currently three months in and starry-eyed. Consider it a small act of public service. She'll either thank you or block you, but you might just save a life!

We went home, the meltdown got handled or it didn’t, and we tried again another day, or we didn’t. The logic was simple. If a child can’t handle being out, the child should not be out.

It took me a long time to register how unusual this was. Most Indian children I knew were taught the opposite of this rule. You stop crying because Aunty is here. You smile because the photo is being taken. You don’t make a face at the food because the host is watching. You sit through the long evening because we are not the sort of family that leaves early. You behave because behaving is what good girls do. The whole vocabulary of Indian girlhood is the vocabulary of staying. Adjust. Compromise. Don’t make a scene. Sit nicely. Smile through it.

My parents, for whatever reason, opted out of this. They had decided that the plans could wait, but that a four-year-old having a hard time was not something to wait through. I don’t remember a single instance of being told later that I had ruined an evening. I don’t remember being asked to apologize for the meltdown.

When I notice I’m composing a reply with more heat than the situation actually warrants on social media, I take myself home. When I find myself refreshing a thread I have no real business refreshing, watching the quote-tweets accumulate, I take myself home. When I name-search myself on Reddit and feel the sweet-sick feeling of being perceived unwillingly, I take myself home. When someone in a meeting says something vaguely annoying and I feel myself react in a way that is wildly disproportionate to the offence, I take myself home, which in that case mostly means I excuse myself, walk to the bathroom, and stand at the sink for a full minute before going back.

The principle scales down to the smallest unit of leaving. Sometimes home is just the other side of a door.

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In adult life, taking myself home mostly means logging out. Closing the laptop. Putting the phone face down. Sometimes, literally walking out of the room. Once in a while, it’s just quite actually going home. It is not a refusal to engage. It is just leaving the place where I am no longer behaving like someone I’d want to be.

What has surprised me about this practice is how often the thing I was reacting to was not the thing I was reacting to. Some woman I have never met said something faintly stupid on the timeline and I was about to respond with the stored-up irritation of someone who hadn’t slept properly, hadn’t eaten in five hours, had spent the morning in a frustrating call about something else entirely, and was carrying fourteen unrelated grievances into a tweet that didn’t deserve any of them. I was not pissed off at the post. I was pissed off at fourteen other things and the post was simply where it came out, much like how a leak comes out at the lowest point of the ceiling and not at the place where the pipe is actually broken.

You cannot see this from inside the moment. While you are in the reaction, the reaction feels measured to its cause; the cause feels exactly worth the heat. It is only after you have left the room that you can look back and see how much of what you were about to say had nothing to do with the person you were about to say it to.

This, more than anything else, is why I trust the practice. Not because leaving makes me a calmer or more virtuous person (it doesn’t) but because leaving is the only reliable way I have found for telling the difference between a real grievance and a displaced one. The genuine grievances survive the walk away. They tend to deserve a response that is composed rather than spat. The displaced ones evaporate the moment I am no longer near the scene of the supposed crime. I come back and look at the thing I was about to fight about and I cannot, for the life of me, remember why it had felt so important.

I have, over the last decade, watched the vocabulary of mental health expand into every corner of how women are expected to talk about their lives, and I have watched it do the opposite of what it promised. We were told that this language of boundaries, self-care, holding space, doing the work, showing up, being present, accountability would let us protect ourselves from the demands the world makes of women. What it has actually done is multiply those demands without us realising. To set a boundary, you must first announce it; then you must enforce it; then you must communicate, with appropriate calmness, why it has been crossed and what consequences will follow. To take care of yourself, you must first build the capacity to take care of yourself, which apparently requires a routine, a journal, a therapist, a supplement stack, a morning pages practice, a yoga mat, and a circle of friends with whom you are doing the same work in synchronised parallel. To rest, you must rest correctly, lest your rest become avoidance. The only thing this vocabulary has not given us is permission to simply leave.

Katy Waldman wrote about this a few years ago in the New Yorker: she called it the rise of therapy-speak. Her observation was that the language of mental health had migrated out of the clinic and into the way we narrate ourselves to each other, but that this migration had inverted the function of the language. In the clinic, therapy-speak is supposed to bring you into closer contact with what is actually happening to you. In the wild, it does the opposite. It lets you describe yourself in the third person. It turns a deeply relational and nuanced process into something ego-directed and performed. You don’t say you’re hurt; you say a boundary has been crossed. You don’t say you need to be alone; you say you’re holding space for yourself. The sentence does the work of distancing you from the feeling that produced it. It is a kind of literary anaesthesia.

The deeper problem is that all of this language assumes you will stay. You set the boundary so that you can stay in the relationship on better terms. You hold space so that you can keep being present in the friend’s grief. You do the work so that you can keep doing the work. The fundamentals of contemporary emotional vocabulary are the fundamentals of staying. The option of simply going home is not on the menu, because going home is not productive. It does not yield a better-managed self at the end of it. It does not generate content. It does not produce a story you can tell other women about how you Did The Work.

This is, of course, the same malaise that runs every other part of contemporary female life. Jia Tolentino called it always be optimizing, the regime under which the ideal woman is engineered to look natural while doing the unceasing work of self-improvement, the woman whose leisure is a form of labour and whose labour is described as self-care. Anne Helen Petersen, writing about millennial burnout, observed that the demand to keep working all the time had become the base temperature of an entire generation, the background music of being alive. We define ourselves, she wrote, by the capacity to keep working, and we have lost the capacity to recognise that this is not a feature of us but a symptom of the structure we live inside. The optimization runs underneath everything. It runs underneath your skincare. It runs underneath your friendships. It runs underneath the way you drink water. Of course it also runs underneath the way you are expected to manage your feelings, which is to say: efficiently, in a way that can be put on a podcast or carousel.

For women in particular, this regime is enforced through visibility. Sarah Banet-Weiser, the scholar who has thought hardest about this, calls it the economy of visibility, a system in which being seen has become the end rather than the means, and in which feminism itself has been reorganised around the imperative of women being more visible, not more free. Mary McGill, in The Visibility Trap, makes the same observation in a darker register: visibility, for women, is not a tool we picked up. It is a condition we live inside, and an always-on culture has normalised forms of comparison, shaming, and watchfulness that an earlier generation would have recognised as surveillance. To leave the visibility, even for an afternoon, is to invite the suspicion that you have something to hide, or that you have been driven off, or that you are sulking, or that you couldn’t cut it. It is, in any case, never neutral. There is no clean exit from a system whose first principle is that women must be seen.

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The Indian girl is raised, from approximately the moment she can hold her own head up, on a curriculum of staying. Adjust kar lo. Compromise karna seekho. Thoda samjho. She learns very young that her job in any room is to absorb whatever the room throws at her without producing a visible response. The Matchmaker on Netflix, asking a different girl every week if she is ready to compromise, was not delivering radical content. She was articulating the central instruction of Indian femininity.

This is the exact opposite of the rule my parents made. Most Indian girls are taught that the meltdown is the failure and the audience is the cure: stay in the room, swallow the feeling, don’t make Aunty uncomfortable, smile for the photo, be a good girl, where good is a synonym for absorbed. My parents had decided that the the children, the girls, did not have to tolerate the audience. This was an inversion of a script I did not know I was meant to learn.

The script does not stop at the household. The woman who has been raised to adjust in marriage is the same woman who is told, twenty years later, that she must develop a thick skin if she wants to exist online. The Indian woman who logs off mid-discourse is thin-skinned. The Indian woman who blocks is running away. The Indian woman who simply stops responding is can’t take a joke.This vocabulary makes leaving impossible to do without paying a social cost the woman is then blamed for incurring.

Urvija Banerji wrote a piece for The Swaddle a few years ago called The Price of Fighting Every Feminist Battle. Her argument was that there should not come a point in fighting for our humanity where we have to sacrifice our mental wellbeing, and that staying quieter in our daily lives was sometimes the right way to preserve the energy for the bigger fights. She framed it as a kind of feminist accounting: you cannot spend everything every day. The piece was met, predictably, with the charge that Indian feminists were running away from discourse, which is, I notice, the same accusation a four-year-old in a temple would be facing if she announced she wanted to go home.

The vocabulary of staying, the marriage vocabulary, the optimization vocabulary, the visibility vocabulary, the therapy-speak vocabulary that promised to free us and then trapped us inside a more elaborate cage, is one vocabulary. It assumes that the self is a project, that the project must be continuously visible, that visibility is the proof of the project, and that any movement away from the visibility is a failure of the project. The whole edifice depends on women never going home.

It also depends on us forgetting that going home was always available to us.

Because the thing is, we already have a vocabulary for this. It is older than therapy-speak by approximately two and a half thousand years. The Bhagavad Gita has a line that says, more or less, that only the foolish do not know when to engage and when to withdraw (pravrittim cha nivrittim cha janaa na vidur aasuraah). Devdutt Pattanaik has written that the central tension in Indian thought has always been between pravritti and nivritti, engagement and withdrawal, and that no Indian tradition has ever resolved this tension in favour of one over the other. Both are necessary. The householder and the hermit are both legitimate forms of being a person. Vairagya, the Sanskrit word that gets translated as dispassion or detachment, is not the absence of feeling, it is the discrimination, the viveka, between which feelings are worth your engagement and which are not. Ekanta is not loneliness. It is the positive form of solitude. Kaaya-viveka is the bodily withdrawal that is supposed to precede clarity, not follow from its absence.

Arundhathi Subramaniam, the poet, has a line I keep coming back to. We’re capable of stillness, she writes, even as we gallivant. You can be on a ten-city tour and still be capable of stillness. You can be a public woman and still know how to go home. The Indic tradition has been holding this for a very long time. It just got drowned out by the louder, more profitable vocabulary of constant availability, which wants you to set boundaries about your unavailability while never actually being unavailable.

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I am writing this halfway through my book tour.

The book is The Girls Are Not Fine. The tour is structured the way most Indian book tours are. It is dense, back-to-back, optimised for maximum coverage in minimum time, on the implicit logic that an author on the road is an author generating press, and an author generating press is an author moving copies, and an author moving copies is the only kind of author the publishing industry loves.

I asked, instead of the usual dense schedule, for three cities at a time. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Then home. Then three more cities. Then home. Then three more. I designed it carefully. I was, I will admit, a little proud of the design. Look at me, trying to be balanced!

And then, this week, the system did not hold.

I was supposed to be in Bangalore today. I am not. I am at home in Mumbai, because my body simply went down. A stye swelled one eye half shut. My nose started bleeding for no reason. The psoriasis I have spent years managing flared across my skin. I did not decide to take myself home. I was sent home. The body filed the paperwork without consulting me, and the schedule I had been so proud of turned out not to have built in enough, or not the right kind of rest.

I hated it. I did not lie on my sofa in serene communion with my own limits. I lay there furious. Furious at my eye, my nose, my skin, at the city I was not in, at the readers in Bangalore who had signed up, at myself for building a tour I still could not survive. There was no vairagya in it. There was no graceful withdrawal. There was a woman who had written, with some confidence, about the wisdom of going home, being forced to go home against her will and discovering she was just as bad at it as everyone else.

Everything I have said so far about taking yourself home is true, and I stand by it, but it describes the voluntary version. What this week taught me is that the voluntary version is a privilege you lose the moment you need it most. If you do not take yourself home when it is still your decision, you do not get to keep making it your decision. The body takes the decision. And when the decision is taken, it feels like failure, because that is what it is. It is the failure to have left earlier, collected by a creditor who does not care that you were planning to pay.

My parents’ rule, the one I have been building this whole essay on, had a feature I glossed over the first few times I described it. The child did not decide. The child, mid-meltdown, did not raise a hand and calmly request to be taken home. The child was incapable, in that exact moment, of knowing that home was the answer. That is what it is to be a child having a meltdown. The parents decided. The rule existed because the person who needed it could not be trusted, in the moment of needing it, to invoke it. I had rewritten the rule, in adapting it for myself, into something more flattering: I had made myself both the child and the parent, and assumed the parent in me would always catch the child in me in time. This week, the parent was asleep. The child melted down in the middle of the outing. And there was no one external, no actual mother with actual car keys, to make the call before the body made it instead.

I don’t fully know what to do with that yet. I am writing this with one functional eye, so I am not at the height of my analytic powers. But I think what I am trying to say is not take yourself home, it is wise and good. It is closer to: you will go home either way. That is not in question. The only thing in question is whether you go while it is still a decision, with your dignity and your eyesight and your skin intact, or whether you go the way I went this week, resentful and far too late to feel like anything but a defeat.

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The obvious objection to all of this is that going home is just avoidance framed by empowering language.

You can call it vairagya or taking yourself home or strategic withdrawal or whatever Sanskrit-inflected vocabulary pleases you, but in practice it is logging off when the conversation gets hard, blocking when the criticism gets too close to home, leaving the dinner when the conversation turns toward something you don’t want to defend, or just retreating when you’re asked to stand and fight. The Indian woman who adjusts and the Indian woman who can’t take a joke and logs off are two faces of the same conditioning, and the conditioning is to never actually engage. The liberated thing would be to stay in the room.

This objection assumes there is a single thing called the conversation and that all leaving is a leaving of it, undifferentiated. The rooms my parents removed us from were not conversations. They were rooms. Removing the child from the room was not avoiding the feeling. It was attended to in the car, on the sofa, in the bath, at dinner, sometimes for days. What was avoided was the spectacle. The feeling, freed of the audience, was allowed to be the size it actually was instead of it being shrink-wrapped.

This is the distinction the objection refuses to make. Avoidance is leaving so you don’t have to deal with it. Going home is leaving so you can deal with it elsewhere, in a form that doesn’t damage the people in front of you. The first is burying the feeling. The second is relocating it.

You can tell which one you are doing by what comes next. Avoidance is followed by silence, hardening, a rewriting of events to absolve yourself, and a resentment that erupts later somewhere far from its cause. Going home is followed by the laundry and the bath, and either a clearer return or a considered decision not to return. The processing has happened; it has just happened somewhere private, which is where most processing belongs.

The objection is also made selectively, in the direction of women. The man who logs off is busy. The woman who logs off is dramatic. The man who declines to engage with criticism is above the fray. The woman who declines is thin-skinned. This is not an accident. The vocabulary of avoidance has been built around women because women are the ones whose continuous availability the system depends on.

The people who police women’s leaving are almost never the people the women are leaving. The reader who came to my Indore event is not the person upset that I am home on Tuesday. The friend whose dinner I left early is not the one writing essays about how women who leave dinners are avoidant. The actually-affected parties are usually fine. They realised that the version of me they had access to had run out, and they would rather have me at full strength next month than at half strength tonight. The objection is being made by people with no stake in the specific room I left. They object to the principle of women leaving rooms because it threatens an ecosyste, that runs on women not leaving them.

And finally, my parents’ rule had heft. They did not negotiate. They did not weigh whether the meltdown was warranted or whether the child was being reasonable. They did not perform a drawn-out announcement of their intention to leave with apologies to the host and a public processing of the family’s needs. They just left. The version of boundaries contemporary therapy-speak has taught us (announced, negotiated), would have been useless to my parents. It would have turned every meltdown into an argument about whether the meltdown qualified as a meltdown. The whole point of the rule was that it didn’t have to be argued for.

The adult version works the same way. I do not, when I take myself home, sit and adjudicate whether the thread or the meeting or the dinner or event or coffee or pitch has earned my departure. I do not consult my notes on whether a boundary has been crossed. I notice I am no longer behaving like someone I want to be in a room with, and I leave the room. The leaving is the response to the noticing. It is not the conclusion of a long internal court case in which I am simultaneously prosecutor, defence, judge, and jury.

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Women would be less exhausted if they understood they do not have to defend their leaving. It does not require a justification. It does not require a thread of explanation. It does not require a soft-launch on close-friends Stories about how you’re taking some time for yourself. It just requires leaving. The justification, if any, can come later, to the people who are actually owed one, who are almost never the people demanding it.

A child has the right to be removed from a situation she cannot handle without arguing for the removal. That is the part of the rule I have most struggled to translate into adulthood, because the contemporary world insists that adult women earn every removal through documented suffering. I am refusing to earn it. I notice. I leave. I go home. The argument, if there is one, can be had later, on my sofa, with the sister as a witness, in a form that does not require me to win.

I am writing the last sentence of this essay with one eye still half-shut. The rule held. The rule held badly, this week, because I had been a bad steward of it, but it held. I am home. Bangalore will happen, or it won’t. I will go back out, or I won’t. The next time I notice, I would like to leave a little earlier. I would like to not have to be sent. But if I have to be sent, I would like to remember that being sent is also a form of the rule applying.

The car keys come out. Somebody puts you in the car. You go home.

This is, for me, a deeply destabilizing condition. For weeks, I have been a human Gantt chart. Proofread the PDF, approve the A+ page, coordinate 100 PR boxes, schedule the sends, confirm the moderators, draft the email, and send the email. The work was a buffer. It was how I kept the actual fact of the book, that it exists, that it is leaving my hands, that strangers will read it on a Monday morning commute and decide things about it and about me, at a manageable distance.

The buffer has thinned out to nothing. The boxes have started shipping. The book is printed. The launch is at Crossword Kemps Corner at 6:30 PM tomorrow, and no matter how many times I open and close my inbox, there is nothing left to fix.

So I am sitting with it.

The Girls Are Not Fine is a book about what it costs women to want things, to want big, public, ambitious, unapologetic, incredible things. I wrote it because I needed to understand my own life. I wrote it because I kept meeting women who looked like they had everything and felt like they had nothing, and I wanted to know why. The thesis, roughly, is that we are not fine, that we haven’t been fine for a long time, and that the question is what we do with that fact. (To read more about why the book is called what it is, read this excerpt published by Vogue India!)

It is a slightly absurd book to be launching while not fine.

I have been told, by various well-meaning people, that I should “enjoy this moment.” The moment is not enjoyable in the way “enjoy” usually implies. It is not a glass of wine on a balcony. It is more like the bit at the airport where you’ve already checked your bag, and you cannot uncheck it, so you can either spiral about whether you packed your charger or you can find a coffee. I am, for the record, finding a coffee. But the spiraling about the charger is also there, all the time, in the background.

What I keep coming back to is this: I made a book, and tomorrow it stops being mine. I mean it in a literal, slightly horrified way. For two years this book lived in a Google Doc only I had access to. Then a smaller circle of people. Then PRH. Then blurb-givers. Then ARC readers. Each ring out, the book belonged to me a little less. Tomorrow the rings collapse, and it belongs to whoever picks it up.

I do not get to control what they do with it. They will read sentences I rewrote eleven times and not notice. They will read sentences I dashed off in twenty minutes and quote them in their stories. They will misread me on purpose and by accident. Some people will love the book. Some will hate it. Some will not finish it. Some will underline every page.

The book is going to live a life I do not get to be in.

I think that is what I was actually preparing for, all those weeks of tasks. Not the launch, not really. The surrender.

What I know tonight: I love what I made. I am proud of what I made. I do not know if it will sell, by which I mean justify the bet a major publisher made on a 31-year-old writing nonfiction about women and ambition in India in 2026, and I cannot make it. What I can do is show up at Crossword tomorrow at 6:30, in something black, with my hair done, and talk about the book with Shephali and Ankita and Vidhya in front of a room of people who have decided, on no evidence other than my own conviction, that this matters.

That is already more than I had any right to ask for.

If you are coming tomorrow: thank you. If you preordered: thank you. If you are reading this newsletter at all: thank you. The book exists because, somewhere in the last few years, you told me the things I was writing were worth reading. You’ll probably never know which version of you said which thing on which day.

I do, I do, I do, and I carry it in my heart.

See you tomorrow.

H.

What that Bollywood agency was actually doing (though they’d never admit it, obviously,) was pricing a creator business using the only framework they know. Reach as a vanity metric. They have spent two decades in an industry where a star’s value is determined by their last box office number, their magazine cover count, the directors they know, the paparazzi they can hustle, and their PR cycle. They looked at an influencer manager and saw the same thing with a smaller scope of work.

They were wrong. The business my friend built isn’t a contact list. It’s a trust arbitrage. And trust, in 2026, is the only currency in the attention economy that actually converts to sales. You can’t acquire that from a Bollywood rolodex. You can’t manufacture it with a ₹8 crore ad film. You build it by showing up in someone’s phone, in their own language, talking about things they actually care about, consistently, for years. That’s what creators do. The Bollywood agency didn’t understand what they were trying to buy, which is, incidentally, exactly why the industry they come from is in the trouble it’s in.

The easiest way to understand what’s happening is to stop thinking of this as a media shift and start thinking of it as a pricing error. Bollywood is mispricing trust because it still treats attention as the asset and reach as the proxy. Brands are buying that trust inefficiently, paying for borrowed feeling that doesn’t convert the way it used to. Creators, on the other hand, are compounding trust in public, over time, in front of the exact audience that will eventually be asked to buy something. The asset isn’t the content. It’s the relationship the content builds. And right now, that relationship sits with the creator, not the platform, not the studio, and definitely not the agency trying to spreadsheet its way into understanding it.

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Bollywood really wants you to believe this is a rough patch. A few bad films, bad luck, audiences will come back, Bollywood is forever, We Are India, etc. They won’t. Or at least, not in the way they’re hoping.

In 2024, original Hindi films lost ₹1,800 crore at the box office compared to the year before. This was the year Stree 2 happened. The best-performing original Hindi film in years couldn’t compensate for how badly everything around it collapsed. Roughly 70-80% of Bollywood films don’t recover their production and marketing costs. Bade Miyan Chote Miyan cost ₹350 crore to make. It earned ₹111 crore. Akshay Kumar, who built his whole brand on being reliable, on showing up, on delivering the Great Indian Man, gave his eighth flop in ten releases.

People aren’t going to the movies anymore. India had 1.46 billion theatrical admissions in 2019. By 2025 that number was 832 million. Fewer than 150 million Indians go to a cinema even once a year. PVR INOX is closing over 130 screens. The audience didn’t stop loving stories, and consistent rise in OTT subs tells us that. They just stopped caring about the specific people the movie industry decided were worth caring about.

While all of this is happening, while the revenues are falling and the footfalls are tanking, the stars kept demanding more. Star salaries eat roughly 70% of production budgets before filming starts. Karan Johar said it best: “When the budget is 40 crore, you asked me for 40 crore.” Dharma Productions, the studio that basically defined Bollywood cool for twenty years, saw its profits fall 94.5% in one year. Had to sell a 50% equity stake. Meanwhile Maddock Films, which bets on content and not stars, is operating at a 20.9% profit margin.

And then there’s South Indian cinema, which Bollywood keeps framing as competition but is actually just a mirror. South Indian films earned more at the Indian box office than Hindi films in 2024. 31% of what Hindi cinema collected last year came from dubbed South Indian films. Worth noting that this trust collapse is specifically a Bollywood problem, not an Indian cinema problem. South Indian celebrities still move product in a way their Hindi counterparts increasingly don’t, because the movie industry they come from hasn’t broken the same promises. Pushpa 2 alone was 20% of Hindi box office. Aamir Khan actually said it correctly for once: South films do what Bollywood used to do. Big emotions. Mass appeal.

The nepotism piece ties all of this together. Over 30 star kids launched since 2015. Most of them flopped. The Archies. Janhvi Kapoor’s 0% success ratio for original Hindi releases in 2024. Most people would rather watch a star kid fail than succeed at this point, not because anyone wishes them ill, but because every failure is the audience saying: we see the game and we’re not playing.

When your product is this visibly rigged, when everyone can see who gets the roles and why, people stop trusting the whole ecosystem. And that trust collapse bleeds directly into endorsements.

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Shah Rukh Khan selling Lux worked because of what Shah Rukh Khan meant. He was the middle-class Delhi boy with no filmy background, no godfather, no unfair advantage, no last name that opened doors. Just hunger and talent and charisma and a face the camera (sometimes) loved. He arrived in Bombay with nothing and became the Badshah. That story was the product. When he vouched for something, it carried the whole weight of that myth- the idea that this country rewards merit, that talent wins, that the dream is real and available and he was proof of it. You weren’t buying soap. You were buying into the promise he embodied.

The nepo era destroyed that foundational myth. It said: actually, last name wins. It said: the dream was always more access-restricted than we told you. And the moment that myth breaks, SRK’s origin story stops feeling like a promise and starts feeling like an exception. The dream curdles. The vouching stops working. The endorsement becomes just an ad. And we have plenty of those already.

Think about the last time a Bollywood star felt like someone you actually knew.

Take your time. I’ll wait.

Hard to place, right?

You can probably tell me their PR narrative, the humble origins story, the transformation arc, the carefully managed relationship timeline, the planted Reddit posts, the Viral Bhiyani placement. You know the version of them that lives in press junkets and magazine profiles and Instagram posts where the lighting is uniformly good and the caption is clearly written by someone else. But you don’t actually know them. And somewhere along the way, you stopped pretending you did. You stopped reaching for that feeling.

I noticed it happening to me in slow motion. I’d watch an interview and clock, almost immediately, which question had been pre-approved. I’d see a “candid” moment and mentally calculate the PR strategy behind it. I’d watch someone cry on a chat show and feel nothing, because I’d seen the same cry on three other chat shows and it had started to feel like a set piece. I’d watch someone look ‘shy’ about a relationship rumour and think, ‘eh, do you have. Movie coming out?’

Now think about the last creator who recommended something to you that you actually bought. Or changed your mind about something. Or taught you something. Or showed you a fun hack that kind of entered your life seamlessly. Or made you feel seen in a way you weren’t expecting from someone you’d never met.

Different feeling entirely.

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It’s not that influencers are more honest. Some (most) of them are completely full of it. The gifted PR packages described as personal favourites, the “I’ve been using this for months” posted six days after the brand deal was signed, the wellness content that is essentially just selling you anxiety about yourself, the curated ‘Pinterest lifestyle’ that’s quite clearly a lie. The audience knows. They always know.

But even knowing all of that, the relationship still works in a way that the Bollywood endorsement doesn’t. Creators are accountable to their audience in a way that Bollywood stars simply cannot be. When a creator posts something their audience hates, they hear about it immediately in the comments, in the DMs, in the quote tweets, in the declining engagement numbers that their next brand deal depends on. The feedback loop is right there, visible, fast and merciless. It keeps them calibrated. Not honest, necessarily, but calibrated. They know where the line is because the line has been drawn for them in real time, repeatedly, by the exact people they need to keep trusting them.

Bollywood stars live inside an ecosystem specifically designed to protect them from that feedback. The PR teams, the interview pre-approvals, the curated access, the mythologising, all of it exists to create, curate, and manage distance. To keep the image intact. To make sure you never see anything that wasn’t meant to be seen. You were buying into the fantasy, and the fantasy required that you not look too closely.

The problem is that in 2025, looking closely is just what we do. We have parasocial relationships with people who post from their actual bedrooms. We watch someone process a breakup in real time. We see the bad skin days and the disagreements with brand managers and brands overreaching and the moments where someone is clearly exhausted and posts anyway because the algorithm punishes absence. We have been trained, by years of this kind of content, to identify intimacy. And once you’ve developed that muscle, the managed distance of a Bollywood star doesn’t feel aspirational anymore.

I think about the Clinic All Clear ad. Virat and Anushka, selling shampoo. It worked because people had a feeling about them; Years of match days, stolen glances, hands held at the airport, magazine covers and a wedding that felt like a national event. You weren’t buying shampoo. You were buying proximity to something you loved. The product was the feeling. But that machine doesn’t produce the feeling anymore. Not for everyone. Not for the generation that matters most to brands right now. They didn’t grow up with Virat and Anushka the way we did. They grew up with someone on their phone at midnight, showing them a skincare routine in bad lighting, getting into arguments in their comment section, recommending a serum they’d actually been using for six months before they mentioned it, who walked them through a crush-situationship-relationship-wegotengagedomg trajectory. That person is who they have feelings about. The kind that converts to sales.

Feelings aren’t transferable. You cannot buy someone else’s parasocial relationship and redirect it toward your product. The brand that paid ₹8 crore for a Bollywood face is paying for a feeling the audience may no longer have. The brand that paid ₹50,000 for a mid-tier creator is paying for a feeling that is very much alive, embedded in a relationship the creator has been building for years, that the audience shows up to voluntarily.

80% of Indian Gen Z trusts influencers over celebrity endorsements.

The last thing I’ll say here, and it’s the thing I feel most strongly about: I would rather patronise a rich influencer who owns their privilege than a Bollywood star performing middle class because they think it will make me like them more. At least the influencer isn’t lying to me about who they are. The performance of relatability is so much more insulting than just being unrelatable. One is a gap. The other is a con. The audience figured this out before the brands did. They always do. The brands are just now starting to follow the money.

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Let’s talk about what a mid-tier influencer actually makes. My case study here is an influencer with 150,000 followers, posting consistently, monetizing reasonably well. She’s not a megastar. She doesn’t have some insane viral moments, maybe a few reels that breached 500k views. She is doing 2-4 brand deals a month at anywhere between ₹40,000 and ₹2 lakh per post. She can make ₹5-6 lakh a month on an average month. And, perhaps most importantly, that income has nothing to do with anyone else’s decisions. No producer greenlit it. No director cast her. No box office number validated it. No PR cycle generated it.

Now think about what a Bollywood star’s income actually depends on. A hit. Everything flows from the hit: the brand deals, the appearance fees, the magazine covers, the relevance. The hit determines the fee which determines the brand interest which determines the next hit’s budget. It’s a chain, and every link in it is someone else’s decision. The producer has to greenlight the film. The director has to cast you. The audience has to show up. The critics can’t destroy it opening weekend. The OTT deal has to come through if the theatrical doesn’t. At every stage, someone else holds the key. The Bollywood star is, structurally, dependent on external validation in a way that a creator with 150,000 engaged followers simply isn’t.

This is the thing that is genuinely underappreciated about the influencer economy. It’s not just that the money is good. It’s that the money is decoupled. An influencer’s income is a function of their own consistency. A Bollywood star’s income is a function of other people’s decisions. In an industry that is increasingly making bad decisions, that distinction matters enormously.

Micro-influencers in India deliver engagement rates of 4-8% on Instagram. Mega-celebrities deliver under 1%. The conversion rate gap is roughly 60% in favour of mid-tier creators when reach is comparable. The ROI is 4.2 times higher. And the cost differential is almost comical. A nano-influencer charges ₹500 to ₹5,000 per reel. A single ad film with an A-list Bollywood star costs ₹8-40 crore before you’ve spent a rupee on media. Hindustan Unilever is the number that ends the argument. In FY25, HUL increased influencer marketing spend by 40% while cutting total advertising expenditure. They went from 700 creator relationships to 12,000. Their chairman said it at the AGM: 40% of ad budget now goes to digital. Unilever’s global CEO said it even more plainly: he wants one influencer in every zip code in India. Not one Shah Rukh Khan. One person in each of the 19,000 zip codes across the country who the people in that zip code already trust.

The D2C brands made this move years earlier and have the valuations to prove it. Muuchstac was built entirely through micro-influencer campaigns, zero television, zero Bollywood and was acquired by Godrej Consumer for ₹450 crore. Godrej’s CEO called it the future model. SUGAR Cosmetics built its brand through 20,000 influencer partners, going from 2 products to 450 SKUs. boAt captured 32% of India’s earwear market. Co-founder Aman Gupta was explicit about why: their consumer doesn’t watch TV the way previous generations did. Mamaearth spent ₹744 crore on marketing in FY25, with influencers at the core of that spend, and built a listed company worth thousands of crores in the process. None of these brands were built on a Bollywood face. All of them were built on distributed trust at scale.

The celebrity endorsement isn’t dead, obviously. Virat Kohli’s brand value rose 21% after his 2023 comeback. Shah Rukh Khan’s brand value is not going anywhere immediately. But these are increasingly exceptional cases in an industry where the average is collapsing. The exception is being used to argue against the trend, and the trend is unambiguous. Celebrity-endorsed ad volumes declined 12% in the first half of 2025. Only 29% of ads now feature a celebrity at all. 47% of brands now prefer micro-influencers over celebrities and macro creators. The money is moving. It has been moving for a while. The only people who haven’t fully clocked it yet are the ones still pricing influencer agencies like PR firms with a social media tab open.

There's another cost nobody puts in the deck. A-list Bollywood celebrities are genuinely painful to work with, and the pain is a feature, not a bug. The entourage, the green screen requirement, the 30-minute window, the manager who is a nightmare, the creative restrictions that make a live location shoot essentially impossible, all of it is a pricing signal. If you're trying to move from ₹4 crore to ₹6 crore, making yourself harder to access is a legitimate strategy. You're not paying for the performance. You're paying for all the frills around it. And those frills put a ceiling on what the work can actually be. The best ad you can make with someone like that is maybe a 7 out of 10, because you're shooting on a green screen in a studio on their schedule. Meanwhile, a creator with a million followers will show up, have opinions, care about how it looks on their page, and make something better because their audience will judge them for it if they don't.

Think about what Farah Khan represents in the industry. She made Om Shanti Om. Main Hoon Na. Happy New Year. She is not a struggling director looking for relevance. She is someone who sat behind the camera for decades manufacturing the very star power we’re talking about. She choreographed the songs that made Shah Rukh Khan iconic, she directed the films that made Deepika a household name. She understood the machine better than almost anyone. And then she picked up her phone and started making reels about food and her kids and roasting her famous friends, and somehow that content is more engaging than anything she’s produced theatrically in years.

What Farah figured out, consciously or not, is that the thing audiences actually wanted was never the spectacle. It was the person behind the spectacle. The machine was so loud and polished for so long that nobody could hear the actual human being. The moment she stepped out from behind the camera and just started talking, there was an audience immediately there, waiting. They’d been waiting for years. They just had no way to access her.

Farah Khan choosing Instagram Reels over a film set isn’t a retreat. It’s an upgrade. The economics are better. She has a direct relationship with audience, no studio greenlight required, no box office pressure, no press junket where she has to be nice about a film she knows is mediocre. The creative control is better. The feedback is immediate. The shelf life, paradoxically, is longer, because she’s building a relationship rather than launching a product.

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And she is not alone. Look at who is actually crossing over and in which direction. Prajakta Koli went from YouTube to Bollywood and OTT. Bhuvan Bam (26 million YouTube subscribers) is now doing critically acclaimed web series. Dolly Singh went from Instagram comedy to the Cannes red carpet. Kusha Kapila went from satirical Instagram sketches to film roles and reality TV judging. The creators are moving into film and television as a prestige play and as a way of adding range to an identity they already own. They’re not doing it for the money. They’re doing it because they can afford to.

The Bollywood stars going the other direction are doing it for completely different reasons. They need the recurring revenue. They need the direct audience relationship that their film careers used to provide and no longer do. They need a platform that doesn’t require a hit every eighteen months to justify their existence.

Alia Bhatt has a YouTube channel. 1.6 million subscribers. Kartik Aaryan has one. Around 619,000. These are not bad numbers for a regular person. For someone whose face is on billboards across the country, they’re humbling. Ajey Nagar, who started making videos in his bedroom in Faridabad, has 45 million YouTube subscribers. The gap isn’t about effort or even likability. It’s about where the relationship was built. Alia’s audience knows her through films, through a carefully managed public persona, through Karan Johar’s godfathering her, through her amorphous existence- Alia Bhat simply exists. CarryMinati’s audience chose him, repeatedly, over years, for all the good and bad he is. That kind of loyalty has to be earned from scratch.

The other thing that’s broken is the star-making machine itself. There’s no new Shah Rukh Khan because there can’t be. The conditions that produced Shah Rukh Khan don’t exist anymore. He arrived in an India with limited television, no internet, no OTT, no social media, an India where cinema was genuinely one of the few places mass culture was made. He became a fixture because the channels through which fixtureness was created were narrow, and he occupied all of them. Today those channels are infinite. Attention is distributed across millions of creators, thousands of platforms, billions of pieces of content. The kind of singular, total cultural dominance that made the Khans possible is structurally unavailable now.

There is no new bachcha being manufactured. And the ones being launched are being launched into an audience that has more options than any previous generation and is ruthless about exercising them. They don’t have to watch. So increasingly, they don’t. The shelf life of a Bollywood star in 2025 is short and getting shorter. The shelf life of a creator with a genuinely engaged audience is, if managed well, indefinite. Bollywood wants to become Instagram. Instagram has no particular desire to become Bollywood.

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In 2015, influencer marketing was the experimental line item. The thing you tried with 5% of budget while the real money went to the TVC with the Bollywood star and the big media buy. Influencers were scrappy, unproven, and faintly embarrassing to take seriously. You had to convince your big boss that yes, the kid with a front camera can, in fact, sell things. The Bollywood endorsement was the signal that your brand had arrived. It was as much about the brand’s self-image as it was about actually selling anything. That logic hasn’t fully died. It should have, but it hasn’t. There are still marketing teams who greenlight a celebrity deal because it makes the board presentation look impressive, and because nobody ever got fired for hiring Shah Rukh Khan. The institutional safety of the celebrity endorsement outlives its commercial utility by years.

Celebrity endorsed ad volumes declined 12% in the first half of 2025. Only 29% of ads feature a celebrity now. 47% of brands prefer micro-influencers over celebrities. 70% of Indian brands are maintaining or increasing influencer spend. The influencer marketing industry is growing at 25% annually while the overall ad market grows at 10-12%. This is a reallocation happening in real time.

The framework I’d give any brand trying to figure out where to put their money is simple. Celebrity is renting a feeling. Influencer is renting a relationship. A feeling is a one-time transaction. You pay for it, it works or it doesn’t, it fades. A relationship compounds. Every piece of content a creator makes within an ongoing brand relationship adds to the trust that the previous pieces built.

Which doesn’t mean celebrities have no role. They do. One celebrity naam ke liye, for the press release, for the board, for the brand equity signal that still matters in certain categories and certain markets. And everyone else in the budget is an influencer. Not just because it’s cheaper, though it is, but because it converts. Because the 4.2x ROI differential is real. Because 60% higher conversion rates are not a rounding error. Because Muuchstac was acquired for ₹450 crore on the back of micro-influencer sales and zero television.

The mistake most brands make when they come around to this logic is that they try to use influencers like they used celebrities. One post. Big fee. Move on. It doesn’t work that way. The product is the relationship, which means the investment has to be in the relationship. You need longer partnerships, genuine integration, letting the creator actually talk about the thing in their own voice rather than handing them a script. The brands that have figured this out are treating creators as evangelists rather than as billboards.

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The agency story I started with is the whole thing in miniature. A Bollywood-affiliated talent house looked at a creator business and saw a cheaper, smaller version of what they already do. They priced it accordingly. What they actually looked at was the future of how trust gets built, distributed, and monetised in this country, and they couldn’t see it because they’ve spent thirty years in an industry that runs on a completely different operating system. They will eventually overpay for something in this space. They always do. They’ll buy the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time, or the right thing and then run it using the wrong frameworks. The world will move on.

Somewhere in a brand meeting this year, someone will approve a ₹20 crore campaign built around a face everyone recognises. The film will be shot beautifully. The lighting will be perfect, the edit tight, the music engineered to the nth degree. The media plan will be airtight. It will run exactly where it’s supposed to, at exactly the right frequency, and the numbers will look reassuring in the deck the next morning. The team will post about its success on LinkedIn. People will see it. They just won’t do very much about it.

And on the same day, in the same country, a girl will prop her phone up against a stack of books and film a 40-second video in bad lighting, explaining why she actually uses a product. She’ll ramble a little, correct herself midway, forget a word, laugh, keep going. The comments will fill up before she’s even done replying to the first few. Someone will ask a question she didn’t think to answer. Someone else will say they tried something because of her last video. A few thousand people will buy the product before the campaign even goes live.

No one will write a case study about that second moment. It won’t show up in a board presentation. It won’t feel as controlled or as certain in its success. But if you look closely at what actually happened, at what made someone pause, consider, and then act, it will be sitting there in plain sight, in a video that looked like it cost barely anything.

Grateful to Bhaktee Modgil and P.G. Aditya for feedback!

My book, The Girls Are Not Fine, is now available for preorders! Get your copy here.

I’ve been thinking about marriage the way I think about my career recently. I’m in my thirties. The people around me are either getting married for the first time or, increasingly, getting divorced. The ones who are happily partnered have this ineffable quality of settled energy that I find myself studying the way I study a series C pitch deck: what decisions led to this outcome? What was the initial pitch? What was the founder impetus? What was the key insight? What did they know that the others didn’t? Is it replicable, or was it luck?

I’m not someone who dismisses marriage as a trap or romanticises it as a destination. I think it is a decision, probably the most significant one most women will ever make. I’ve started to believe it deserves at least the same rigour we’re supposed to bring to every other consequential choice in our lives. Not because love doesn’t matter, but because love without discernment increasingly feels like a terrible decision to take.

So I did what I always do when a question is keeping me up at night. I went looking for data.

I reached out to thirty women in my life. The criteria: These had to be women I know but not well enough to know their husbands, they have to be women I look up to, these have to be women I respect, women whose careers I admire, women who seem to genuinely like their husbands when they talk about them, and I asked them two questions. What keeps your marriage alive? And what’s the one lesson about partnership you wish someone had told you before you chose?

I was braced for the Chicken Soup For The Soul kind of advice. Communication is everything. Never go to bed angry. Choose each other every day. Love beats all. All of it true, probably, and all of it useless because it tells you nothing!

When I looked at the patterns, every single woman’s answer collapsed into the same outcome:

Don’t marry a loser.

That was it. Thirty women. Most of them happily married, a few divorced and remarried, a few still married and very honest about how hard it is, some separated. They all arrived at the same place. The whole game, they said, is who you pick. Everything after that is maintenance on a decision that was either the best you ever made or the worst.

I posted a version of this on Twitter, because that is what I do when I have a thesis I want to pressure-test.

The men lost their minds.

I posted the finding before I’d defined what a loser was. The definition was supposed to be this essay and essays take time. And before I got to the definition, men were in my mentions calling me a loser. Telling me I was bitter and alone. Explaining, at some length, that they were not losers. Asking who I thought I was.

I honestly found it genuinely interesting. Not upsetting, because men have said waaaay worse to me, but just interesting. I had posted a word. No context. No criteria. No list of offending behaviours. No call outs. No metrics. Just the word “loser,” attached to the advice not to marry one. And a substantial number of men had looked at that word, decided it applied to them, and reacted accordingly.

There is a whole body of research that explains exactly why this happens (of course there is). Psychologists Joseph Vandello and Jennifer Bosson have spent the better part of two decades studying what they call precarious manhood, the idea that male status, unlike female status, is treated as something that must be continually earned and can be revoked. Womanhood is viewed as relatively stable and biological; manhood is a performance with no guaranteed tenure. In studies across 62 nations, Bosson et al. found this belief is effectively universal, varying in intensity but not in direction. The consequence is that men with precarious self-concepts become hypervigilant for anything that could threaten their status, and when threat is perceived, they respond with either aggression or withdrawal, depending on how their masculinity norms were originally installed.

But the most useful piece of research for understanding my Twitter comments section comes from a different tradition. Roy Baumeister, Laura Smart, and Joseph Boden published a landmark review in 1996 identifying threatened egotism (not low self-esteem, but high and unstable self-esteem) as the primary driver of hostility and aggression. The people most likely to react angrily to perceived criticism are not people who feel bad about themselves. They’re people whose self-image is favourable but precarious, and who respond to any potential downward revision with pre-emptive defence. The threat doesn’t even have to be directed at them. The mere existence of a category that could apply is sufficient to activate the alarm.

So when men read “don’t marry a loser” before I had defined what a loser was, the ones who reacted with hostility were not reacting to the content. They were reacting to recognition. Something in the word had already triggered a provocation before any evidence had been presented. The research predicts this to the tee: identity-protective cognition, as legal scholar Dan Kahan has extensively documented, means people don’t evaluate threatening information to find truth. They evaluate it to survive the threat to their self-image. The reasoning comes after the feeling of exposure, and it is almost always in service of dismissal.

I genuinely do not think most of these men were bad people. I think they were scared of a word that seemed to know something about them. And that, it turns out, is extremely useful information about who they are in a relationship.

Back to the research, because the data on what a bad partner actually costs a woman is stark enough that I think it warrants its own section before we get to the composite portrait.

Sociologist Allison Daminger’s 2019 study, published in the American Sociological Review, broke down what she calls cognitive household labour into four stages: anticipating what needs doing, identifying options, making decisions, and monitoring outcomes. She found women doing more cognitive labour in 26 of 32 heterosexual couples studied, and that men participated roughly equally only in the decision-making stage, the most visible component, while women dominated the anticipating and monitoring, the invisible preparatory work that happens continuously in the background. Her follow-up research puts the cognitive labour split in heterosexual couples at approximately 80/20. Among queer couples, that gap narrows to roughly 60/40 and doesn’t divide along gendered lines at all, which tells you something important: this isn’t about personality types or natural aptitude. It’s about who was trained by their environment to perceive the cue that a thing needs doing.

Even in genuinely egalitarian marriages, Pew’s 2023 data shows wives spending more than double the hours on housework and caregiving that husbands do, while husbands spend roughly three additional hours per week on leisure.

And then a child arrives, and everything accelerates. Yavorsky, Kamp Dush, and Schoppe-Sullivan tracked dual-earner couples through the transition to parenthood using time diaries rather than self-report surveys (which matters, because when you ask men how much housework they do, they consistently report something closer to 50-50.) The time diaries told a different story. Before the baby, men and women contributed roughly equal unpaid hours. After the baby, women added more than two extra hours of work per day. Men added forty minutes. The perception gap is remarkable. Both men and women believed their contributions had increased equally, which is why you cannot trust a man’s self-assessment of how much he does around the house. He is not lying to you. He genuinely doesn’t know.

The career cost of the wrong partner has been quantified too. Danish economists Henrik Kleven and colleagues tracked earnings trajectories across parenthood and found that women’s employment falls by roughly 25% and earnings by about 33% relative to men’s after their first child, a gap that persists for over two decades. Men’s and women’s earnings track nearly identically before children and diverge sharply after. Sociologist Michelle Budig put a number on the maternal wage penalty: women lose approximately 4% in wages per child, while men receive a pay increase of roughly 6% per child. Mothers are less likely to get called back for jobs, are rated as less competent, and receive wage offers thousands of dollars lower than childless women. Fathers are called back more often than childless men.

This is the stakes of the decision. Not whether he’s nice, not whether he loves you, not whether the relationship feels good right now, not whether your friends think he’s a good guy, not whether he gives you the tingles. Who you choose will determine how much time you have, how much energy you have, whether your career stays yours, whether the ambition you arrived with is still intact a decade from now, or whether it has silently contracted to fit inside someone else’s comfort level.

Okay. Now I can define what a loser is. Because the women I spoke to were very clear that it wasn’t what most people picture.

The loser is not usually the obviously bad option. If he were obvious, women wouldn’t choose him. The loser is recognisable only in retrospect, or to people who know what they’re looking at, or to the friend who’s been with a loser, or to a psychologist (I guess?!) or to the woman who’s spent five years trying to figure out why she feels so exhausted all the time despite nothing specifically being wrong.

The composite definition, assembled from thirty women who have loved it, lived it, left it, or narrowly escaped it, is this: a loser is a man who thinks of marriage as something he is being given rather than something he is building. A man who believes the baseline is that you take care of him, and anything extra he does is a bonus worth remarking upon. A man whose career is a priority and yours is a lifestyle choice. A man who takes pride in what you accomplish but feels no responsibility for what you carry.

He’s not a monster. He often loves you, in the way people love a great vacuum cleaner, in that it make their lives easier. But there’s a particular mode of thinking he cannot exit, one in which he is the protagonist and you are the support infrastructure, and if you try to renegotiate that arrangement, the relationship starts to feel, to him, like it’s being threatened.

A loser is the man who “helps” with the housework, and the verb is the tell. Helps, as if it were your project and he were a generous volunteer. A loser is the man who needs to be asked, every time, because asking is apparently not a skill he has identified a reason to develop. A loser is the man who says he’ll “babysit” his own children when you leave the house, because the language of babysitting assumes childcare is your default responsibility and his is an act of temporary coverage.

In the Indian middle-class context, you are not just choosing a person. You are choosing a family, a set of expectations, and, most critically, a man’s willingness to protect you from the parts of those expectations that aren’t yours to carry. A loser in this context is not just the man who won’t share the housework. He’s the man who is privately supportive but publicly spineless. Who will help you cook dinner for twelve people but won’t tell his mother that hiring a cook is a reasonable thing to do. Who will have an apologetic smile on his face when he throws you under the bus for an obscene familial request and then say something like ‘Yaar, mummy papa hai na.’ Who calls himself progressive but expects you to perform the bahu role on festival days, family visits, and every occasion where his family is watching.

What a good partner does (and I have seen this, it exists) is establish the terms early. He makes clear to his family, before it ever becomes a point of conflict, that his partner’s participation in their customs is her choice and not their entitlement. He doesn’t ask her to call his parents mom and dad. He lets her build her own equation with them, on her own terms. He treats her as his partner, not as someone who has stepped into a predefined role that his family designed before she arrived. That’s not a high bar. But it is one that a surprising number of men cannot clear, because clearing it requires them to occasionally disappoint the people they grew up trying to please, and that, for a certain kind of man, is simply not on the table.

Here is the manifestation of loser that took me longest to understand, because it looks most like love when you’re inside it: the gentle resentment of your success. He’d never say he’s threatened. He’d be horrified at the suggestion. He would probably tell you (and believe himself while saying it) that he’s your biggest supporter. But watch what happens when you’re the one being celebrated. When you get the promotion, the visibility, the recognition, the raise, the LinkedIn kudos, the crappy corporate gift bag. Watch how his energy shifts shape. Watch whether the jokes he makes about your success don’t quite land as jokes, because they aren’t really jokes, are they?

Several women described the same arc: the relationship was good when they were equally matched or when she was slightly behind. It began to corrode when she pulled ahead. A thousand small withdrawals accumulated into a wall she couldn’t see clearly until she was already on the wrong side of it. A 2021 study by Lamarche, Atkinson, and Croft found that men who received low “masculinity scores” in an experimental setting reported less commitment to their romantic relationships. They compensated for feeling inadequate by espousing less interdependence. The resentment and withdrawal aren’t intentional. They are, in the vocabulary of precarious manhood theory, threat responses. This obviously doesn’t make them less damaging. It just explains why you can’t argue your way out of them.

The divorced women told me the hardest part.

You cannot un-loser a man. A loser is a loser until he decides not to be one. You cannot love him into transformation. You cannot patience him into a better version of himself. You cannot out-communicate or out-therapise or out-endure him into change. The women who believed they could (and some of them believed it with tremendous conviction and real love) didn’t fix him. They spent their best years trying, and came out with less of themselves than they’d brought in.

One friend said “I married him thinking he had potential. And I spent seven years confusing potential with promise. Potential is what he could be. Promise is what he’s committed to becoming. Those are not the same thing. You cannot build a life on potential.”

The ones who are genuinely happy (and there are some, more than I expected!) did not luck out. The framing of marital happiness as luck is one of the more damaging stories we tell women. The happy ones chose carefully. They paid attention to data points most people dismiss as too small to matter: how he talked about his exes, how he handled it when things didn’t go his way, how his energy changed when she succeeded, whether he could apologise without the apology becoming a second argument about her behaviour. They trusted their instincts even when the instincts were inconvenient, even when inconvenience arrived after three years of investment. They made a decision with their eyes open, and now they’re reaping the returns on a good early call.

The ones who are divorced all said some version of the same thing too: I knew. Somewhere under all the reasons I had for staying, I knew. There were signs I saw and talked myself out of because I loved him, or because I’d already been with him for years and the sunk cost felt real, or because everyone around me was getting married and I didn’t want to be left behind, or because log kya kahenge? (classic). All of those reasons felt, in the moment, like enough. None of them were.

The research on masculine defensiveness isn’t just an explanation for my X comments section. It’s also a portrait of something genuinely sad. A 2019 study found that men who hold traditional gender ideology and find themselves economically dependent on their partners carry significantly higher physiological stress markers. The body measures the cost of an identity that can’t accommodate reality. A man whose self-worth is so tightly tied to a particular performance of masculinity that any deviation from it registers as existential threat is not, on any available evidence, a man who is having a good time. The loser I described, the man who withdraws when you’re celebrated, who resentfully monitors the gap between your success and his, who needs to be the protagonist in a story that’s increasingly about you, the one who’s a bit of an oblivious numpty, is not a happy person. He is a person whose self-concept is so fragile that it cannot coexist with your thriving.

That is worth knowing. He isn’t doing it to you. He’s doing it to himself, and you happen to be in the way.

So here is the composite advice from thirty women, assembled across thirty separate conversations:

The quality of your marriage will be determined almost entirely by who you choose. Not by how hard you work at it, not by the depth of your love, not by the sophistication of your communication frameworks, not by borrowed lessons, not by hoping for miracles. By who he was when you chose him and who he is willing to keep becoming. Everything else is maintenance on that original decision, and no amount of maintenance can repair a foundation that was wrong from the start. The research across decades, methodologies, and twelve different countries confirms exactly this: the partner variable is structural, not situational.

I’m still thinking about marriage. Still, if I’m being honest, a little scared of it. But this advice has changed how I understand the decision. I used to believe a good marriage was something you built together from whatever you had. I now believe a good marriage is something you protect together, but only if you chose each other well in the first place.

Don’t marry a loser. Everything else follows from that.

My book, The Girls Are Not Fine, is now available for preorders! Get your copy here.

Most things you consume online right now are almost good.

Almost good is not good. It’s not bad, either. Almost good almost clears the bar. Almost good almost gets it.

You know it. You recognise it. “It’s not that we have too much information, it’s that we’ve lost the ability to sit with uncertainty.” “It’s not burnout, it’s a crisis of meaning.” “It’s not about productivity, it’s about presence.” The structure that looks like an insight because it has the shape of one. The setup, the reversal, the landing, the punch, the aha. But when you press on it, there’s nothing underneath. No remainder. No specific mind that had to arrive at it the hard way. It could have been written by anyone. It was, increasingly, written by no one.

This is what almost good actually is: the shape of thinking without the thinking. The outline of a feeling without the feeling inside it.

I’ve been thinking about why, and I think it is this: it is too resolved. It has no remainder. A piece of real creation always has something in it that the maker didn’t fully understand when they made it. A question they were working out by writing it. A feeling they couldn’t name that ended up in the syntax. Real work has a shadow. AI work doesn’t. It is all surface, lit evenly from every angle, and that is what makes it feel like a vessel rather than a thing.

And yet we keep calling it good. Because we’ve been trained our whole lives to treat polish as a proxy for effort. A finished thing meant someone had done the work to get there. That’s not true anymore. AI is genuinely better at completion than it is at the work. It can take something half-formed and make it whole with a fluency that most human writers spend years trying to develop. Which means we’ve done something weird: we’ve made the hard thing easy and the easy thing hard. People today are more able to create a polished product than an unpolished one. We have inverted the difficulty curve.

For this essay, I define grotesque as not just unfinished but monstrous in its unfinishedness. We are not just talking about something in process; we are talking about something in process, and its incompleteness attacks the viewer in one way or another. This creates an aesthetic of provocation. The idea is not just incomplete; it is almost offensive in its incompleteness. It feels like a titillation, as if I shouldn’t be watching this at all. I shouldn’t be watching this uncompleteness at all, but I get to. It feeds into a larger voyeuristic want of a user who is fatigued by the polished and complete.

Now, if we keep this definition of the grotesque at the centre of this argument, we ask ourselves: can you manufacture the grotesque?

Theoretically, you can. AI can create rough drafts for you. AI can create the flubs for you. AI can create all the things that would imply the process. Imperfection can be generated as part of the process. I’d argue that as you generate things on AI, the first drafts are often quite horrible, but are they grotesque, as defined by this essay? I don’t think so. The problem with the grotesque and the titillation and the voyeurism that the grotesque creates is that it has a very ineffable quality. There is something deeply human about it, which means that you either recognise it or you don’t, and you either project it or you don’t. It’s a binary. There is no halfway house between the grotesque and the not-grotesque.

That creates a class of creators who are ineffably human in their quality, but it also creates an entire class of creators whose opacity makes us deeply suspicious of their outcome generation.

I like to look at Brandon Sanderson, live-streaming himself, figuring out a plot problem in real time, getting it wrong, reversing, getting it wrong again. The audience is watching him think rather than watching him perform having thought. Another artist who defines what the grotesque looks like in practice is Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin doesn’t know why something works until it works. He says so. He is so honest about his own lack of certainty that the absolute lack of artifice becomes the marker of credibility. These people understand, whether consciously or not, that the finished thing carries a lesser weight of proof. The proof has to live somewhere, so now the proof has moved upstream into the mess.

Compare them to creators who are almost hermetically opaque, who only post finished work and describe their output in mystified terms, like it came to them in a dream. A few years ago, that read as artistic, almost spiritual. Right now, it reads as deeply suspicious. Not because opacity is new. Artists have guarded their process fiercely for years. But because the stakes of that opacity have changed.

I now question opacity, not because of opacity unto itself. There are artists who are fundamentally opaque, and that opacity is the context of their art (take Banksy). I question the opacity of artists who have the capacity to show us the background of their work and choose not to, because then I wonder: what are they hiding? Is it just a process, as I would have assumed ten years ago, or is it more?

I started creating on the internet when I was 14 years old. I don’t recommend it, but it means that there is almost 16 years of what I think of as digital provenance.

There are people who have followed me for ten years, some for more. They have come in and out of my life. They have followed me, unfollowed me, followed me back again. That’s perfectly fine, because they have seen my process evolve. That is accidental trust. I never intended it to be a proof of existence, but it is now a proxy for faith in my process because they have seen me build it in real time around them. They have seen me be wrong. They have seen me be embarrassingly confident about things I later had to walk back. They have seen the bad writing and the better writing and the bad writing again. That history is a timestamp. Proof of prior existence. It functions now as provenance in a way I never planned for and could not have manufactured.

My provenance is embarrassing. It is a 16-year-old writing poetry on Ask.fm that she thought was profound. It is the Facebook statuses I cannot delete, and I would not delete them even if I could. It is the first essays that were trying too hard, the opinions held with too much confidence, the phases, notably, the activist phase, the startup phase, the I-have-figured-out-investing phase. All of it is somewhere on the internet, indexed, searchable, occasionally screenshot and sent to me with a laughing emoji. That archive is not curated. I did not build it as a trust strategy. It is just the residue of a person figuring herself out in public over a very long time. And that residue is now, weirdly, one of the most valuable things I have. Not because it is good. Because it is real, and because nobody would bother to fake sixteen years of being publicly mediocre on their way to being occasionally good.

Now I look at someone who starts creating today, with no 15 years of provenance behind them, and I genuinely don’t know what happens there. Can trust even be built in this era? Is it possible to create the same faith that somebody who has been creating for 30 years has earned? I honestly don’t know. Because trust takes time, and time is now a deeply complicated variable. AI has compressed the time to output. So the new creator is stuck in a genuinely strange question: Do I put out output fast enough to stay visible? Do I go slower and hope that slowness reads as intentionality? Does being slower elicit trust, or does it just mean fewer people find you?

Access was democratised. It is easier than ever to arrive at output. It is easier than ever to arrive at a finished product. But the act of building trust remains the mainstay of very few. It’s either people who can show their process compellingly enough to compress the timeline, or people who have simply been around so long that their provenance does the work.

The person this hurts most specifically is not a vague “new creator.” It is the 22-year-old from a small town who is genuinely talented, who has something real to say, who did not have the access or the safety or the platform to figure herself out publicly when she was younger. She arrives now with better tools than I had at 14, honestly. But no provenance. And she is trying to build trust in an environment that has seen too much almost good to extend it easily. The barrier to entry for creative credibility is higher now than it has ever been, precisely because the barrier to entry for creative output has never been lower. That gap, between how easy it is to make something and how hard it is to be believed, is where a whole generation of creators is currently stuck.

There is a concept I harp about called founder lifetime value. It doesn’t ‘exist’, per se, I just made it up.

How many times can you make a mistake, recover, and keep it from becoming the permanent story about you? The answer, almost always, is a function of runway. Financial runway, yes, but also social runway. The founder who went to IIT and whose father knows three partners at the fund gets more attempts. More iterations before one bad call defines him. The founder who scraped in from nowhere gets fewer. Sometimes just one.

I think the same is true for creators. The grotesque requires runway. It requires the security of knowing that one bad piece of work will not become the headline. That the audience will hold it as a data point in a larger story about you, not as the story itself. And that security is not evenly distributed.

A woman with an established platform posting a shitty first draft reads as vulnerable and humanising. The same shitty first draft from a creator without that platform or provenance reads as not ready. The grotesque is a luxury. Transparency is a class position.

Nothing made this clearer recently than what happened to Pujarini Pradhan, who creates online as lifeofpujaa. She is a woman from a small village in East Midnapore, West Bengal, who builds her following by discussing books, films, and feminism in English, from her home, in a cotton saree, no metropolitan apartment in the background. Nearly seven lakh followers. Brand deals with Netflix and Audible. And then, almost on cue, the accusations: industry plant. Fake. Too polished for someone like her.

Too polished. For someone like her.

The argument, such as it was, collapsed quickly. She had an agency for brand deals, which is completely standard, and she shot and edited her own content. But the accusation itself reveals the specific trap that a creator from a background with no history of being taken seriously faces. She was suspicious precisely because she succeeded. Her consistency read as evidence of a hidden hand. Her brand deals read as incongruous with her setting. Her fluent, accented English read as something that needed to be explained. When she said “they were fine with me until I started earning money” she is right. The mess was fine. The success was the problem.

This is the impossible position: she could not afford to be grotesque, because grotesque requires the audience to already believe in you enough to watch you recover. And the audience had decided before she started that someone from where she came from did not have that kind of credit with them. She had no runway. So every stumble was a verdict, and every success was suspicious.

This is who the democratisation paradox actually hurts. It is the creator who comes from a background where being taken seriously was never the default. Where the margin for error was always thinner. Where one bad take, one inconsistency gets read not as process but as proof of what the audience already suspected. You cannot show your mess when your mess is all the evidence some people need to dismiss you.

So when I say that visible process is the new credibility, I also mean that it is so much easier to say if you are someone who already had the credibility to begin with.

Let’s talk about the word authenticity. We accuse people of not being authentic. We say authenticity is what draws viewers in. But is authenticity not also a form of curation? It is curation done specifically with the intent of projecting an image of relatability. The authentic self you perform online is still a performed self. The difference is just in how well you’ve hidden the performance.

When I think about what authenticity actually looks like in practice, one of the most interesting cases to me is Becca Bloom. She is openly a billionaire. She does not pretend otherwise. And you would think that would be a problem, because your average billionaire is not particularly well-liked, and there is nothing organic about a billionaire. But people love Becca Bloom. They welcome her. They engage with her. Because she puts up a performance of authenticity so convincing that the billionaire part becomes almost incidental. No billionaire is going out of their way to do brand deals. She is. And we don’t question it too much, because she comes across as amiable, accessible, and easy to consume. That is authenticity as technique.

And this is where the real problem is. Because if authenticity is curation, and curation can be learned, then authenticity can be faked. The manufactured mess. The curated unfinishedness. The aesthetic of someone who is figuring it out. We are going to get very good at this, and audiences will sense it, and the cycle will tighten until even rawness requires verification.

There is also the trap inside the trap. The minute you know your rough draft is public, it isn’t really a rough draft anymore. The musician posting her flubbed take made an editorial decision about which flub to post. The writer sharing her cutting-room floor curated her cutting-room floor. I am writing this essay knowing it will be read, and that knowledge is shaping it in ways I cannot fully account for. The second you introduce an audience, you introduce a performing self. And what you’re showing is not your process but your process’s public-facing representative, which is a different thing.

I have been thinking about this personally. When I was younger, my parents had a rule: if it is not something you could discuss in the living room with your family, don’t post it online. I have more or less kept to that for 16 years. Does that make me inauthentic? I don’t know. I edit and curate what I put out in the world. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more suspicious of who consumes me online. I’m fairly convinced that among the people who do, there is a large, vocal part that consumes me out of jealousy or envy. It’s not the kind of audience I would choose if I could choose. But I can’t curate my audience. So I control the variable I can, which is me. Is that authenticity? Is it strategy? I genuinely don’t know where one ends and the other begins, and I’m not sure the distinction matters as much as we pretend it does.

So what is actually left? If the finished product is gameable, and the process is gameable, and authenticity itself is gameable, what isn’t?

I think it is irresolution. But a very specific kind of irresolution. Performed irresolution always ends with a lesson. It says “I don’t know” and then three sentences later it knows. It cashes out into a take because that is what the algorithm rewards and what the audience came for. Genuine irresolution ends without knowing. It doesn’t resolve because there isn’t a resolution yet. AI is structurally incapable of genuine irresolution because it always knows where it is going, even when it is pretending not to.

Genuine irresolution also has stakes. When you don’t know something and that not-knowing has actual consequences for your life, it reads differently than not-knowing as aesthetic. The person who is genuinely uncertain about whether to leave a marriage sounds different from the person performing uncertainty about their “journey.” You can feel the difference even if you can’t name it.

And genuine irresolution is particular. It is not “I don’t know what success means anymore” that is performed. It is “I don’t know whether the version of me that finishes this book is someone I am going to like” that is specific. The more universal the uncertainty, the more suspicious I am of it. Particularity is the tell. The detail that is too strange and specific to have been generated. The thing that could only have come from one mind in one life at one specific moment.

Which is maybe what we are actually looking for, underneath all of it. Not authenticity. Not process. Not the grotesque. Just evidence of a located mind. A particular mind with a history and stakes in what it is making. Not trying to be all minds or the most optimised mind. Just this one, here, now, working something out, and genuinely unsure how it ends.

I could not have written this book if I hadn’t spent 16 years creating a map to myself in public. I earned an audience, and now I am leveraging that audience to sell a book, and I am aware of exactly how that sentence sounds. I am also aware that there are people who would call me an influencer for it, and there are times I want to say, “But I’m not an influencer, I’ve been writing seriously for years, there’s a difference.” And then I stop, because does that distinction actually matter? Or is it just me doing the thing this whole essay is about? Curating which version of my credibility you’re allowed to see.

What I know is this: I don’t think I could have written this book at 22. Not because I wasn’t capable of the thinking, but because I hadn’t yet accumulated enough public becoming for anyone to trust that the thinking was mine. The book exists because the provenance existed first.

And that is what this essay is actually about. Not me. But the question of what it means to be a creator in a world where you are incentivized to bleed not just for the art but for the distribution. It is already so hard. There is no money in it. There is so much luck involved, ugly and arbitrary luck. What does it mean to be a creator in an era where even that luck has to be manufactured by a machine, and if you are not good enough at operating the machine, the machine will penalise you for it?

I do not have a lesson here. What I have instead is a harder question than the ones we usually ask about authenticity, process, or AI. It is not just what feels real anymore. It is who gets to look unfinished in public and survive it.

Because that privilege is not evenly distributed. Some people get to show the mess and have it read as depth. Some get to fail in public and have it folded into a larger story about talent. Some get to revise themselves in front of an audience that has already decided they are worth waiting for. Other people get one bad draft, one awkward video, one slightly off note, one stupid statement online, and it becomes proof that they were never serious to begin with.

This is not about whether AI can imitate the rough draft. It can. Not whether authenticity can be performed. It can. But whether, in a culture this suspicious and this saturated, a new creator can still build the kind of trust that used to emerge slowly and accidentally, over time. Whether a person without provenance can still become more than almost good.

Maybe that is what we are actually defending when we talk about art, or writing, or voice, or process. Not purity. Not even originality. Just the right to become in public without being destroyed by it.

The Girls Are Not Fine, published by Penguin Random House India, available 30th April 2026 everywhere books are sold :)

This cover is a piece of my heart- I wanted it to be bright and wonderful because the women I know and love are bright and wonderful despite, well, everything.

It took us so many iterations to get here, but I’m so happy. It feels exactly like the inside of my head :)

(Comment below or respond to this email and I’ll send you the preorder link!)

You’re in a room with a billionaire who could buy your entire current (and probably future) net worth as a rounding error, and he’s talking about MBAs the way people now talk about Blackberry phones- with the mild, almost affectionate contempt reserved for things that made sense once and don’t anymore. You’re nodding. Your phone is in your pocket, and on it, if you opened it right now, is a screenshot of an admit letter to an MBA program you’ve been dreaming of attending for the last 4 years.

You don’t open your phone. It sits like a stone on your chest, and for a minute, you struggle to breathe.

Ambition in your twenties is weird. The gap between the thing you’re working towards and the thing that actually matters has a way of revealing itself at the worst possible moment. You spent years building toward something, and somewhere between the application and the admit, the goalposts have shifted. You arrived at your destination, but the people you were hoping to meet have left. They’re on stages, laughing about how your long-awaited inflection point doesn’t count anymore. Your ambition is now their punchline.

A few years ago, Vogue UK ran a piece asking whether having a boyfriend was embarrassing now, and the reason it spread the way it did was that it articulated something awkward: that wanting the expected thing had started to feel embarrassing.

The MBA is getting the same treatment. And so is everything else you were told to want. The title, the package, the relationship, the five-year plan. There’s a phrase for what this generation is collectively experiencing right now, and it’s not burnout, it’s not a quarter-life crisis, it’s not anxiety, though it can look like all three. It’s destination fatigue. The exhaustion of having followed directions carefully, arrived where you were told to arrive, and found that the people you were trying to impress had already moved on to somewhere else entirely.

The MBA is just where destination fatigue is most visible right now. It’s the most expensive destination to reach, and the most public one to question

In 2024, approximately 23% of Harvard MBA graduates were unemployed three months after commencement. At Indian business schools, placement figures that used to be the entire point of the marketing have gotten harder to locate on annual reports. Surveys put nearly half of MBA graduates in India as unplaced in their graduation year.

These are the programs that were supposed to translate your ambition into something the market could reliably process. Unfortunately, the market itself has stopped being reliable.

Here I should tell you something about myself, because it’s relevant: I went to Lady Shri Ram College, and later to Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar, and I have no illusions about what those names did for me or what doors they opened without me having to knock. I am an absolute beneficiary of institutional access.

What I’m interested in is not whether credentials matter. Of course they do. What I’m interested in is this specific, strange moment where the credential that was supposed to remove uncertainty has started, itself, to feel uncertain.

What do you do when the translation service you were depending on to navigate a new language breaks down when you’re still mid-sentence?

Srishti Gupta, who is the director of the Masters program at Tetr, described traditional management education to me as “a socially acceptable pause button.” Pausing is a fantastic thing to do, in my opinion. The issue is that you need to know you’re consciously pressing pause. I think that a lot of people who go into MBA programs don’t. That ambiguity was, of course, part of the appeal. The degree was designed to absorb uncertainty: it gave you access to institutional infrastructure while you figured out what your future looked like, and then created a pipeline to that future by throwing structured resources at you.

What’s broken now isn’t the desire for that access. It’s the outcome of the access itself. The MBA still absorbs uncertainty. What it no longer reliably does is resolve it.

Most of us come from backgrounds where credentials are a proxy for permission. If you didn’t grow up surrounded by founders or family friends who casually raised capital at thirty, the MBA was the door that the world had agreed to leave unlocked for people willing to work hard enough to reach it. It offered a seductive premise: one of a correct sequence. If you followed it, the world would make space for you. You may not get everything. But you will land a job that your parents could brag to your relatives about.

That promise mattered enormously. For first-generation professionals, people switching careers from backgrounds that would get filtered out by ATS resume scanners, people for whom a name-brand admit was the first credential they had access to, people who didn’t come from access or privilege, the MBA carried a satisfying heft.

I have never done an MBA. What I have done is spend years making choices I then had to explain at length. I have written the LinkedIn posts. I know the particular mental gymnastics of making a decision and then immediately constructing the story that makes it make sense to other people. And I know the exhaustion of explaining yourself so many times that you can’t quite remember why you took the said decision in the first place.

Shahrose Bhat, who has spent years working directly with young people as they navigate what they want to build and who they want to become, noticed the shift not in rankings but in the questions students were asking. “Earlier,” Shahrose said, “the question was which brand name opens doors. Now, it’s what can I actually build?” He’d watched high-performing students turn down elite admits to go somewhere where outcomes mattered more than logos.

This is not a rejection, I think. It’s a renegotiation to demand access to proof.

“Proof of work” has become the dominant frame in the language of anti-credential ambition. It’s the idea that seriousness is no longer asserted in advance, but inferred backward from what you’ve already built. It’s the residue that real work leaves behind.

Sarthak Kaul, who leads program delivery and outcomes, put it plainly: over sixty percent of resumes look identical now. Titles without numbers. Frameworks without evidence of decisions made when something was actually at stake. What distinguishes a candidate, he told me, is clear ownership.

It makes obvious sense because credential inflation is real and pretty simple: when a signal becomes widespread, it stops being distinguishing. An MBA once placed you inside a small pool; now it places you inside a very large one, all the people you share the pool with speak the same language, learn the same frameworks, and have completed variations of the same assignments, studied vaguely the same cases. Scarcity creates value. The MBA is not scarce.

But “proof of work” has developed its own performance problem. The hustle content, the polished martyr-founder LinkedIn, the I quit my job and built this from a notebook in Bali post. This aesthetic of productive struggle has become exactly as formulaic as the credential it claims to replace. Except it’s harder to see through, because at least the MBA is still giving you a real credential. The “building in public” performance, on the other hand, can look indistinguishable from real building from the outside, while being substantially nothing.

More uncomfortably, the proof-of-work credential carries its own gatekeeping problem, just a less visible one. The twenty-three-year-old whose parents can cover rent while she tests a business idea has a fundamentally different relationship to “early contact with consequence” than the one for whom a failed venture means having to move back home and fend off marriage talks. I learned so much from that failure is a sentence that only sounds profound when there’s a safety net underneath it. When there isn’t, the failure is just a failure, and the lesson is a material cost

This is where the time I spent at Tetr comes in.

The program works like this: students are placed in real operating environments. Shanghai, then Dubai, then Madrid. They build actual ventures. They work with real suppliers. Deals collapse. Teams fragment. Their investment money can run out. The consequence is real.

Tarun Gangwar, Co-Founder at Tetr, told me that the program was built around a specific observation: that most education systems are optimised to produce people who are very good at being students. Excellent at reading a room, figuring out what’s being asked for, and delivering it. Which is a useful skill, he said, until you’re in a situation where nobody is asking for anything and where you have to generate the question and the answer simultaneously. “We wanted to build an environment where the default mode of operating was initiative, not response.” That’s a harder thing to teach than any framework. It might be impossible to teach in a classroom at all. So they stopped using classrooms as the primary unit.

Here’s what makes it structurally unlike anything I’ve seen in business education: grades are replaced by revenue. Success at ‘assignments’ is generating revenue, and if you couldn’t, explaining why. The faculty aren’t (just) academics with research portfolios; they’re CXOs, operators, founders, and practitioners. These are people who have made the wrong hiring decisions, rebuilt supply chains under pressure, and have honed a sense of taste and judgment that doesn’t come from a syllabus. Learning happens through the friction of trying to sell something to a customer who does not care how good your thesis was.

Ayush Jain, who works on curriculum design at Tetr, described what most programs do as teaching people “how to sound right before they’ve had to be right.” That sequence, he said, matters more than we admit. And that is fundamentally what a traditional MBA does, right? A key feature of mid-management is articulation arriving before accountability.

One student I spoke to, twenty-two, sharper than she was letting on, described the moment she stopped thinking of what she was doing as learning. She was in Dubai, mid-negotiation with a supplier who’d changed payment terms overnight. Full prepayment or no stock. She had five hundred dollars and one viable sales window that week. “There’s no framework for that,” she told me. “There’s just: what are you willing to live with?”

What struck her wasn’t the decision itself or whether it was correct. It was the sense of honesty that came with it. “Everybody stopped posturing,” she said. “When something real is on the line, no one performs anymore. You’re all just trying not to make the wrong call.”

Several students from the first cohort of the undergraduate program have gone on to raise funding for the ventures they started during the program. These are businesses that existed before they graduated, with customers and revenue already attached to their names when they walked into any room. Others have been hired directly by the operators and CXOs who taught them, not through a placement process but because those people watched them work under pressure for months and made an offer. Amitoj, Head of Careers of the Undergraduate Program, told me the career conversations look different too. “They don’t come in asking what opportunities are available,” he said. “They come in with a track record. The conversation starts in a completely different place.”

Sejal Srivastava, from Tetr’s founding team, calls this the difference between intellectual risk and real risk. “In a classroom, the downside is interpretive,” she said. “You can be wrong and it’s just an interesting lesson to learn. Here, the lesson is financial, reputational, real. You can’t hide inside good arguments.”

I believe her. I also believe this might not be the best thing for everyone. There is a real psychological cost to being wrong early and publicly, and that cost is not equally distributed across temperaments, financial situations, or family expectations. Students who come from environments where a public failure carries family-level weight are not in the same program experientially as students for whom a failed venture becomes a war story they tell at their Series A fundraise celebration. Tetr is filtering for a specific relationship to uncertainty. That filter is not neutral, and the program is most effective when it acknowledges that rather than papering over it.

Jessica Varghese, who works closely with Tetr students on their student experience, told me the thing she hears most isn’t a fear of failure. It’s a fear of irrelevance. It’s the fear of realising the world has been moving without you while you were inside a seminar room arguing about a case study from 2014. Failure feels temporary, she said. Irrelevance feels permanent.

I think this is the real truth underneath the MBA anxiety, more than the placement stats or the credential inflation. Students aren’t just calculating financial return. They’re asking whether the path moves them closer to the person they’re trying to become. The return on self is slowly becoming the new ‘return on investment’. A degree structured around deferred contact with consequence can’t always make a promise of that return.

The MBA was always a bet on a particular kind of future. You delayed. You invested. You trusted that what came out the other side would give you legitimacy to navigate the world you want to be a part of. That bet worked when the future was stable enough to bet on. It works less well when industries reorganise faster than syllabi update.

Ambition still exists as concretely as it always has. What has altered is the tolerance for delay in the presence of ambition.

And there are two genuinely different kinds of people trying to navigate this, who need genuinely different things, and we do both of them a disservice by pretending the paths are the same.

The first person uses the MBA well. They know exactly what they need it to do. They’re making a specific career switch, targeting a narrow set of organisations that recruit through predictable pipelines, or they want structured time to think without immediate consequence, which is a legitimate want. They don’t want an MBA that changes their life. They want a degree that makes it easier to live in the one they have.

The second person is incapable of walking a straight line.

This person has usually already tried the straight line. They took the internship, got the return offer, sat in the first year of the job and felt the low-grade dread of being good at something they don’t care about. Or they watched someone two years older do exactly what they were planning to do and felt, looking at that person’s life, not inspired but warned. They want to know what they’re actually made of before someone else decides for them.

These people are smart. Restless. Increasingly aware that what the MBA is optimised to deliver isn’t quite what they want. They want proximity. Friction. They want to find out whether their instincts hold before the stakes are so high that being wrong is no longer something you can recover from publicly. They are not walking away because the MBA is beneath them. They’re they’re because they suspect it might not be enough, or worse, that it might give them the illusion of growth without facilitating any.

Rayan Irani, who works with Tetr students through their operational phases, told me the hardest adjustment isn’t technical. It’s psychological. Students keep looking for the right answer. They’ve been schooled, literally, in the production of correct answers on demand. Eventually they realise there isn’t one. There is only the decision they can live with, given the constraints they have and the information they don’t, and the willingness to own it when it turns out to be wrong.

The geographic structure is designed to accelerate this realization. Dubai compresses speed through go-to-market pressure and sales windows that close whether or not you feel ready. Shanghai confronts students with the humbling enormity of supply chains and negotiations that they have to learn how to do in real-time. Madrid adds brand, culture, customer psychology.

Dubai teaches you that speed is a skill, not a personality trait. Shanghai teaches you that your assumptions about how business works are largely assumptions about the West, and that finding out otherwise while a supplier is changing terms on you is not a comfortable classroom. Madrid teaches you that customers are not rational, that brand is not an afterthought, and that the gap between what you think you’re selling and what someone is actually buying can be the difference between a business and a hobby.

Ayush described the three-city structure not as a curriculum decision but as a deliberate destabilisation. “Every time a student starts to feel settled, like they’ve figured out how things work, we move them,” he said. “The feeling of having figured it out is usually the moment right before you stop learning.” The discomfort of arriving somewhere new, of having to rebuild your operating assumptions from scratch, is, he argued, the whole point. Most education tries to reduce that discomfort. Tetr is trying to raise your tolerance for it.

Moving through these three contexts trains what I’d call contextual adaptation: not just global exposure in the résumé sense, but the ability to notice which of your instincts travel across markets and which collapse the moment your underlying assumptions change. That is not a minor skill to develop at twenty-two with money on the line.

Verdicts are, I think, what got us into this rhetorical mess. The “MBA is dead” crowd needs it to be dead so their alternative looks more attractive. The “MBA is eternal” crowd needs it to be eternal so their investment looks more secure. Both are defensive. Neither is quite telling the truth.

Here is what I actually think: the MBA has moved from default to decision. From the structure that stands behind you to the structure you have to stand behind. A traditional MBA could hold many kinds of ambition without asking you to specify which one you were carrying. That elasticity is mostly gone. The MBA now works best when you know what you’re using it for, and that requirement for clarity is exactly what makes it feel, to people who don’t yet have it, slightly exposing.

If what you want is coherence, which might look like a bridge through a career switch, or time to think without immediate consequence, the MBA can still do that. There is genuinely no shame in wanting the structure. Most of us have wanted exactly that at some point and just called it something else.

If what you want is proximity to industry, early contact with consequence, feedback that arrives before you’ve finished theorising, the chance to find out whether you can actually operate before the stakes are unrecoverable, then the sequence has to change. Responsibility has to arrive earlier. The learning has to happen inside the pressure, not in preparation of it.

Tetr is built for the second group. The students I spent time with weren’t anti-education. They were, if anything, more hungry to learn than most. They just wanted to learn the way it actually teaches them what happens when something real is at stake. They wanted genuine consequences for getting it wrong.

There’s an obvious question I’ve been skirting, and I want to answer it directly: if the MBA is the wrong call and building is the point, why not just go build your thing? Why pay for a program at all?

It’s a fair question. Most people who say “just start” are talking to someone who already knows what they want to start, already has a co-founder or a network or a family situation that makes failure something you can bounce back from, or someone who already has enough context about how businesses actually work that the first six months won’t be entirely wasted on avoidable mistakes. That person exists. She is not the majority. The majority of twenty-two-year-olds who want to build something don’t yet know what, don’t have the market exposure to make an informed bet, and don’t have anyone in their corner who has done it and will tell them the truth when they’re wrong. “Just start” is genuinely good advice if you have all of those things. It is moderately useless advice if you don’t.

What Tetr is offering isn’t a replacement for starting. It’s a compressed, structured version of the first two years of starting. You start with capital, with real markets, with peers who are in it alongside you, with practitioners who will tell you when your thesis is wrong before you’ve spent eighteen months on it. You still get the credential at the end, which matters in contexts where credentials still matter. But you arrive at that credential having already shipped something, having already been wrong and having faced consequences for it. The question isn’t Tetr versus just building. It’s Tetr versus building alone, without structure, without feedback, and without the peers who are also building right next to you and will notice if you’re coasting.

The embarrassment around MBAs is a signal. It’s the LinkedIn post that keeps getting longer and when you’re watching someone two years younger than you ship something real while you’re still in a seminar room preparing to be ready. It’s your ambition telling you that the path you’re on and the person you’re trying to become are not quite moving in the same direction.

The billionaire in that room wasn’t wrong, and neither are you for wanting what you wanted. The problem was never the destination. It was that the map was drawn by people who’d already arrived somewhere else and handed it to you without mentioning that the terrain had changed. Destination fatigue doesn’t mean you stop moving. It means stop moving toward things you chose at twenty-one because they seemed like the right answer to a question the world has stopped asking.

The gap between where you are and where you actually want to be is real, and what fills it is entirely up to you.

Some people will close it with structure. They’ll seek a degree that gives them the bridge they need. That’s a real answer and a legitimate one.

Some people will close it by stepping into something before they feel ready, which is to say, immediately. By choosing the environment that doesn’t protect them from finding out what happens when their decisions have real consequences. By deciding that the most important thing they can do right now is accumulate contact with reality and not the simulation of it.

Tetr exists for the second group. It is not for everyone, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It is for the person who read this essay and felt, at some point, that they were being described. The person who is tired of making choices they are supposed to make and wants to start making ones that feel aligned to their idea of growth. The person who doesn’t want to spend two years preparing for the real world and would like to find out, now, what they’re actually made of.

If that’s you: the capital is real, the markets are real, the teammates are real, and the question — what are you willing to live with — is the only one that has ever mattered.

The next cohort is open. Find out if it’s for you at www.tetr.com.

I’ve been fortunate to get access to some of the most impactful startups in the country through my writing, and I’m so excited to extend that privilege to you! Once a month, you will receive a deep dive into an incredible Indian startup via my A Week Inside…series.

You’ve seen it. Lips slightly parted. Eyes wide with appropriate warmth. Head tilted just enough to signal humility. A smile that says “I know, can you believe it?”. I have been making this face for so long that I sometimes catch it in photographs and can no longer tell if it’s a performance or if it has simply become my face. The face of a woman receiving something in public.

I am grateful, sometimes overwhelmingly grateful for the people who read what I write, for the editors who took chances, for the investors who listened, for the bosses who offered mentorship, for the people who’ve offered me witness. Gratitude lives in me as something real. I return to it when I’m alone with myself, and it doesn’t look like the face. It looks like fierce joy.

That’s not what this essay is about.

This essay is about the other thing. The performance. The ritual. The very social tax that women pay, over and over and over, for the crime of receiving something they deserved. The tax that is not collected in money but in public deference.

How the Tax Works

You earn something. A book deal. A seat at the table. A platform. A title that took years to grow into. And then, before you can fully inhabit the thing you earned, you must pay for it. In the public enactment of humility that signals to everyone watching that you know, you really know, that you could not have done this alone.

Men receive. Women thank.

I have watched men walk into rooms they were given and immediately begin rearranging it for their comfirt. I have watched women walk into the same rooms and immediately look for whom to acknowledge. The disturbing part is not that gratitude is expected. It is how swiftly and personally ingratitude is punished. The woman who receives without visible deference is not read as confident. She is read as uncouth. As someone who has forgotten her place, gotten above herself, failed to understand the terms of the arrangement. The backlash is not really about her attitude. It is about what her attitude implies- that maybe she deserved this, and if she deserved it, the people around her weren’t being generous at all. They were just recognising something that was already true. And that is intolerable. Because it removes their role in her story.

High-power individuals smile when they feel like smiling. Their positive expression correlates with actual positive emotion. Low-power individuals smile regardless of how they feel. For them, the smile has no relationship to internal state. It is an obligation. Replace smiling with gratitude, and the mechanism of the tax becomes clear: women are not expressing thankfulness. They are performing it. And the performance is compulsory and has nothing to do with how grateful they actually are.

This is also why the tax is psychologically expensive. There is a difference between feeling an emotion and staging it. Displaying feelings you don’t have is associated, across decades of research, with burnout and dissatisfaction. You know the feeling. You’ve stood at a podium or in an interview or across a dinner table, performing gratitude and feeling something drain out of you. That drain is the tax being collected.

The group most socially required to perform gratitude is also the group that actually experiences it most genuinely. Research consistently finds that women report higher trait gratitude than men, are more willing to express it, and derive more psychological benefit from it. The emotion is real. The performance is demanded of the people least in need of the reminder to feel it, and exempts the people for whom gratitude is apparently too threatening to their sense of self to produce. So we perform the thing that is already in us, on command, for an audience that is checking to make sure we haven’t forgotten our place. And men feel nothing, and no one asks them to.

Whose Capital Is It?

When a woman performs gratitude, she is not expressing a feeling. She is generating capital for whoever is positioned as her benefactor. Her visible thankfulness becomes their symbolic capital: proof of generosity, evidence of good judgment, confirmation that they were the kind of person who recognised something before everyone else did. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu identified this mechanism. Gratitude, he wrote, creates “durable obligations” that function as social currency, binding the receiver to the giver in ways that accrue value for the giver far longer than the original act warranted. Your thank you is their asset. Your deference is their prestige. And you are left holding the achievement, which is now slightly less yours than it was before you started thanking people for it.

This is why the backlash against ungrateful women is so disproportionately personal. It is not really about manners. It is about asset protection. A woman who receives without performing gratitude is not just being rude, she is refusing to generate the capital that her success was supposed to produce for the people around her. She is keeping the whole story for herself. And that is a kind of theft, in the logic of the tax: you were supposed to share the narrative of your own achievement, and you didn’t.

Research on what happens when women succeed without performing communality is remarkably consistent. They are rated as less likeable, more hostile, and less worthy of future support. Not less competent. Less likeable. The punishment is social, not professional, which makes it harder to name and easier to sustain. And the remedy, when researchers tested it, was the communality signal: provide information that the successful woman is warm, is a mother, is grateful, and the penalties disappear. Public gratitude, then, is not a nicety. It is armour. Women perform it not because they are told to but because they have learned, through accumulated experience, what happens when they don’t.

In India, this tax has a name. Ehsaan. The word sits at the intersection of kindness, favour, and obligation. It describes the bond created when one person does something significant for another. Unlike “thank you,” which is transactional and complete, ehsaan is open-ended. It does not expire. You carry it. And in a culture structured around collective obligation and family honour, the debt of ehsaan falls most heavily on women who are expected to feel it toward the families that raised them, the husbands who married them, the in-laws who accepted them, the industries that gave them a chance. Gratitude is not just interpersonal. It is cosmological. You owe the universe, expressed through every person who ever did anything for you, and the appropriate response is a lifetime of performed thankfulness.

Indra Nooyi became CEO of PepsiCo in 2006. On the night she found out, she drove home to tell her family. Her mother sent her out to get milk. When Nooyi returned, her mother told her: “When you enter this house, you’re a wife and a daughter and a daughter-in-law. Leave that crown in the garage.” When she visited India afterward, neighbours came to congratulate not her but her mother for having raised her so well. The achievement was routed back through the family system. Nooyi herself later reflected that she believed a man in her position would have been given more room to simply inhabit his success, that men seem to be allowed to celebrate their work without being constantly reminded of their responsibilities elsewhere. The crown was always in the garage. The question is only whether you put it there yourself or whether someone takes it from you at the door.

What strikes me most about this is the efficiency. The tax does not need enforcers. It does not need explicit instruction. Women police each other, police themselves, pre-emptively perform the gratitude before anyone has asked for it, because the alternative has been made clear enough. We build someone else’s capital before we have even finished counting our own.

The Compounding

The tax is not flat. It is regressive. The more you achieve, the more theatrical the thanks must become, and the more the story of how you got there gets rewritten to foreground everyone except you.

Researchers gave participants an identical case study about a successful venture capitalist. Half read it with the name Heidi. Half read it with the name Howard. Howard was respected and well-liked. Heidi was rated as equally competent but significantly less likeable. She was selfish, political, not someone you’d want to work with. The achievements were identical. The feedback was not. What this study captures is not just bias against women but the specific mechanism of the tax: success in a woman reads as something taken, not earned. And something taken requires justification. The justification is gratitude.

Studies also find that among high-achieving women, feelings of fraudulence do not diminish with success. Sixty-three percent of female executives report grappling with imposter syndrome, and crucially, the feeling grows with the achievement. The higher you go, the more convinced you become that you have somehow ended up somewhere you don’t belong, that the room will figure it out eventually, that the appropriate response to being in the room at all is a kind of permanent, low-grade apology enacted through visible gratitude. Imposter syndrome, ultimately, is the psychological interior of the gratitude tax.

I have a platform. A large one, built across fifteen years of sitting alone and writing things and putting them into the world and doing it again and again, through the years when no one was reading and the years when a few people were and the years when it finally became something with a shape and a name and a following. I built it the way you build anything- slowly, through accumulated labour, through countless unpaid hours, through the discipline of showing up when it felt pointless. And then a point came when the platform opened doors, when it became a reason for people to want to work with me, to offer me things, to take my calls.

And the thing I have noticed is the implication that follows me into those rooms. The suggestion that the opportunity is a product of the platform and the platform is a product of luck, and therefore I should be, fundamentally, grateful. That I am an influencer who “gets opportunities” because of her following, as though the following descended from the sky fully formed, as though fifteen years of labour produced it through some passive, ambient process that required nothing of me. As though I happened to an audience rather than built one.

A man with an equivalent platform would be called a founder. He would be described as having built something, as having identified a gap, as having executed with vision. The platform would be evidence of his capability. For me, it is reframed as circumstance, something I was handed, or fell into, or only benefited from. And because it is circumstance rather than achievement, the appropriate response is gratitude. To whom? To the algorithm, I suppose. To the audience that chose to show up. To the universe that was kind.

This reframing is not accidental. It is the compounding of the tax at work: take a woman’s achievement, locate the luck within it (because luck exists in every achievement, including men’s) and then elevate the luck until it becomes the primary explanation. She didn’t build the audience. The audience found her. She didn’t earn the opportunity. The opportunity opened up. She didn’t write the book that got published. She had a platform that made the book publishable. In each case, the woman is subtracted from the story of her own success, and a benefactor (circumstance, timing, luck, the kindness of others) is installed in her place. And then, naturally, she should be grateful to the benefactor.

The compounding means there is no level at which the tax stops being collected. A study tracking women across 103 countries found that 87% reported being penalised for their achievements at work. Not despite them, but because of them. The Tallest Poppy Study called it by its folk name: tall poppy syndrome, the cultural impulse to cut down whoever grows too visibly. It is not that women are punished for succeeding. It is that they are punished for succeeding without sufficient acknowledgment that they had help. The poppy is not cut for being tall. It is cut for appearing not to have noticed how much water it was given.

When Women Refused

In May 2019, the actress Constance Wu learned that Fresh Off the Boat, a show she had been the lead of for five seasons, a show that had made her career, had been renewed for a sixth. She tweeted her frustration. Not at the show, not at the cast, not at anyone in particular, just a flicker of disappointment that the renewal would interfere with another project she had been hoping to pursue. The internet responded as though she had committed an act of violence. She was called ungrateful, a diva, a disgrace to Asian American representation. She was told she should be thanking the show on her knees. She was told she didn’t deserve what she had. What the public did not know, and what Wu revealed years later in her memoir, was that she had been sexually harassed on set by a senior producer for years. The tweet was not ingratitude. It was an eruption from someone who had been performing gratitude for a workplace that had been actively harming her. Constance Wu attempted suicide in the aftermath of the backlash. She retreated from public life for three years. She later wrote: the message she received, with total clarity, was that she had not been grateful enough for the opportunity to be abused.

Anne Hathaway won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 2013 and became, almost simultaneously, the subject of a coordinated cultural hatred so intense it was given a name: Hathahate. Her crime was not ingratitude in the traditional sense. It was enthusiasm. She was too visibly delighted by her own success, too earnest in her acceptance speeches, too transparently pleased to be there. She prepared for her speeches, which was reported as evidence of calculation, inauthenticity, trying too hard. When she tried to be warmer and less polished, she was accused of performing warmth. When she was polished, she was accused of being cold. There was no version of publicly inhabiting her own achievement that was permitted. Roles dried up. She later reflected that she had spent years believing the hatred was about something she had done, something fixable, some miscalibration in her public presentation. It wasn’t. It was about the fact that she had not seemed sufficiently surprised to have won. She had not made the face.

Katherine Heigl had the temerity, in 2008, to publicly observe that the film Knocked Up was “a little sexist.” She also withdrew herself from Emmy consideration that year because she felt the writing had not given her enough to work with. It was an opinion that, coming from a man, would have been called professional standards. Coming from her, it became the founding document of a reputation. “Difficult.” “Ungrateful.” “Not a team player.” The escalation, as she later described it, was swift and total: a few candid opinions became ingratitude, ingratitude became difficulty, difficulty became unprofessionalism, and unprofessionalism became un-hireable. She was effectively blacklisted from Hollywood for the better part of a decade. Her co-star Ellen Pompeo vindicated her publicly in 2022: Heigl had been right, Pompeo said, and if she had said the same things today, she would have been celebrated as a pioneer. She was simply ahead of the moment. The tax, when Heigl refused to pay it, was collected with interest.

The most recent controlled experiment in this space is Rachel Zegler versus Jacob Elordi. Both made dismissive comments about franchise films that had launched their careers. Comments that, in substance, were essentially identical. Elordi called the Kissing Booth films “ridiculous” and said openly that he had not wanted to make them. The response was warm: he was praised for his honesty, his self-awareness, his willingness to evolve beyond his early work. Zegler made similar comments about the original Snow White and was savaged. Ungrateful. Disrespectful. Did she not understand what the role had done for her? Same behaviour. Same basic sentiment. The gender changed and the verdict reversed. A man who owns his success completely, including the parts he doesn’t like, is admired for it. A woman who does the same is punished for it.

I want to include Kangana Ranaut here, and I want to be transparent about something first: I find her politics genuinely repugnant. When Ranaut called Karan Johar the flag-bearer of nepotism on national television in 2017, the backlash that followed was not primarily about what she said, which was, by most reckonings, accurate. It was about the fact that she said it at all. That she, an outsider from Bhambla, Himachal Pradesh, someone who had clawed her way into an industry that had not wanted her, would sit across from one of its most powerful gatekeepers and refuse to perform the gratitude that her presence in that room required. She did not make the face. She was tone-policed, accent-policed, talked over, and dismissed. The Wire noted at the time that much of the harshest criticism came from women within the industry, women who had paid their own version of the tax and found her refusal to pay it threatening. That is the efficiency of the system. It does not even need men to enforce it.

What connects all of these women is not ingratitude. Not one of them was actually ungrateful. What connects them is a single moment of failing to perform thankfulness at the required register. And in each case, the response was the same: not criticism of the specific thing they said, but a totalising verdict on their character. Difficult. Ungrateful. Got above herself. Forgot where she came from. The language is always the same because the offence is always the same. They kept the story of their own success for themselves. And the tax, when you don’t pay it voluntarily, is collected by force.

The Book Launch, The Acknowledgements, The Platform I Built

My book comes out in April. I have been writing it, in some form, for years, and in its current form, the form that has a cover and a publisher and a launch date and a ten-city tour, for the better part of two years. It is a book about Indian women and the systems that constrain them. It is, in the way that all honest books are, also a book about me.

At some point in the writing process, I had to write the acknowledgements. This is, in theory, a simple task: thank the people who helped you make the thing. In practice, writing acknowledgements as a woman with a public platform and a history of saying what I think is an exercise in extraordinary complexity. Because the acknowledgements will be read. Not warmly, necessarily, but carefully, by people looking for evidence of one thing or another. Who did she thank? How effusively? Did she thank the right people? Did she seem grateful enough, or too grateful, or grateful in the wrong direction? The acknowledgements are, in miniature, the tax. A public ledger of your debts, calibrated for an audience that will audit them.

I wrote mine knowing they would be audited. I wrote them carefully and honestly and with real feeling for the people in them, but and I also wrote them with one eye on the performance, which is to say I wrote them as a woman who has learned what happens when you leave something out, or phrase something wrong, or seem insufficiently moved by your own good fortune. The real gratitude and the performed gratitude sat next to each other in the same document, and I could not always tell which was which. That is perhaps the most corrosive thing the tax does: it contaminates the genuine feeling. You cannot always find the border between what you actually feel and what you have learned to perform, because you have been performing it for long enough that the performance has shaped the feeling.

The launch circuit is its own version of this. There is a mode I go into, and I can feel it activating like a gear shift, when I am in public-facing book-launch mode. I become warmer, more accessible, more visibly moved by things. I perform enthusiasm at a register I don’t always feel. I thank interviewers for having me, thank audiences for coming, thank booksellers for stocking it, and thank the whole apparatus of literary culture for existing in a way that allowed my book to enter it. This is, partly, genuine. I am genuinely glad. But it is also partly the tax, the understanding that a woman launching her first book must be visibly grateful for the privilege of being taken seriously, must not seem to have expected this, must make the face.

The implication (and it is always an implication, always deniable, always wrapped in something that sounds like a compliment) is that I should be grateful. That the book exists because I got lucky with an audience, and the audience was generous enough to make me publishable, and therefore the appropriate response is a kind of permanent thankfulness to the ecosystem that produced the opportunity. I should be grateful to my followers. Grateful to the algorithm. Grateful to the moment. Grateful to everyone except myself, because myself is not a comfortable place for a woman’s success to live.

I am tired of being grateful for things I built.

What It Would Mean to Simply Receive

I am not arguing for ingratitude. The absence of performed thankfulness is not the answer any more than performed thankfulness is. What I am arguing for is the right to receive as if you were always going to.

This is a version of receiving that men do, largely without thinking about it. Taking the room. Sitting down fully in the chair. Not scanning immediately for who to acknowledge, not pre-emptively softening the fact of your success with visible humility, not performing surprise at your own arrival. Simply being there, as though there was where you were always headed, as though the thing you earned was always going to be earned by you. This is not arrogance. It is, I think, the appropriate relationship to your own work. You did the thing. The thing produced a result. You are now in the room the result opened up. You belong here. You were always going to be here.

Women are trained out of this relationship so young and so thoroughly that reclaiming it feels like arrogance even when it is not. The feeling of entitlement to your own achievements has been so thoroughly associated with bad women, difficult women, women who forgot their place, that many of us have learned to experience our own success as a kind of gift rather than a result. And gifts require thank-you notes. Results do not.

The philosopher David Graeber, writing about debt, made an observation that I have not been able to shake: gratitude, unlike financial debt, can never be quantified or discharged. A financial debt has a number attached to it. You can pay it off. You know when you’re done. Gratitude has no such mechanism. It is open-ended in the way that ehsaan is open-ended — it creates a permanent relationship of obligation that the receiver can never fully exit. And this is, he argued, one of the primary mechanisms through which hierarchies reproduce themselves: not through force, but through the cultivation of debts that can never be repaid, that keep the debtor in a permanent posture of deference toward the creditor. The tax does not just cost you something in the moment of paying it. It keeps you in debt. It is designed to.

What would it mean, then, to simply receive? Not to be ungrateful, but to feel gratitude on your own terms, without converting it into a public performance calibrated for an audience that is checking to make sure you haven’t gotten too big for yourself? To write the acknowledgements from the inside rather than from the outside? To walk into the room you earned and rearrange the furniture, just a little, just to see what it feels like to be someone whose arrival is the point?

I think it would feel frightening for a while. I think it would feel like arrogance, because we have been taught that a woman who receives without performing gratitude is arrogant. I think it would feel like ingratitude, even when it isn’t. I think there would be a period of recalibration between the thank you that comes from inside and the thank you that comes from fear.

But I think, on the other side of that recalibration, there is something that has been missing from every public success I have watched women navigate and every public success I have navigated myself: the simple experience of having earned something and knowing it.

The book comes out in April. I wrote it. I am not surprised it exists. I am not overwhelmed by my own good fortune. I am not, most of all, grateful to anyone for the fact that it is real.

I am glad. That’s mine. The rest can wait.

Unfortunately, we’re the guests, not the hosts. And we’re so thrilled to be invited that we haven’t stopped to ask who’s cooking, what’s in the food, or whether the house we’re dancing in could collapse on us.

Let me give you one number that tells the whole story. India now accounts for roughly 19% of the global user base for leading AI apps, more than the United States. Our AI app downloads grew 207% year-on-year in 2025, the highest growth rate of any major economy on the planet. And our share of global AI app revenue? One percent.

India’s relationship with AI right now is the relationship of the world’s most enthusiastic consumer with a product that was never designed for them. The tools we’re adopting were built by American companies, trained on American data, designed for American use cases, and optimised for American users. That they work at all in India is a testament to the brute-force generality of large language models. That we’ve mistaken “works at all” for “works well” is a testament to how badly we want to be part of this moment.

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The Wrapper Economy

Let’s start with what India is actually doing with AI.

The honest answer, if you look past the press releases, is: we’re integrating. We’re plugging APIs into existing products. We’re building thin layers on top of foundation models that someone else trained, with data that someone else collected, to solve problems that someone else defined. We’re a wrapper economy, and we’ve gotten very good at pretending that wrapping is building.

This isn’t a dig at the startups. I get it. When OpenAI gives you an API that can do in seconds what would have taken your team months to build, the rational move is to use it. The entire Indian IT services industry was built on this exact logic- take what the West builds, implement it cheaper and faster, capture the arbitrage. It worked for decades. It made Bangalore what it is.

When you’re an IT services company, you understand the technology. You can see the code. You can modify it, adapt it, learn from it and eventually build your own version. The knowledge transfer, however slow and imperfect, happens. You start as an implementer and you can, if you’re ambitious, become a builder. This was the promise of Indian IT, and to some real extent, it delivered.

With AI, the dynamics are inverted. When you wrap an API, you don’t own the model. You don’t own the training data. You don’t own the research that produced the capability. You don’t understand (and I mean this literally, because nobody fully does) the failure modes, the biases, the blind spots. You can’t peek under the hood. You can’t reverse-engineer your way to understanding. The API is a black box by design, and your access to it is conditional on someone else’s pricing decisions, someone else’s terms of service, someone else’s strategic priorities.

You’re building a business on a foundation you can’t inspect, can’t modify, and can’t replicate if the API pricing changes tomorrow or the provider decides your use case is no longer supported. We saw early versions of this when OpenAI changed its pricing and a dozen Indian startups had to frantically rework their unit economics overnight. That was a preview.

And yet, this is what we’re celebrating. X number of AI startups in India. Y amount of funding. Z percent growth in adoption. The numbers are real. The progress is an illusion.

People will say: This is how it always starts. India started as an outsourcing destination and built Infosys, TCS, Wipro. We started by implementing someone else’s technology and built world-class capability. Give it time. The wrappers of today will become the platforms of tomorrow.

Maybe. But I’d note two things. First, the knowledge transfer dynamic is fundamentally different this time (more on that in a moment). And second, of the roughly 10,000+ AI companies worldwide, only about 15 are working on foundational models. India’s Sarvam AI was selected in 2025 to build the country’s first sovereign LLM under the IndiaAI Mission. That’s one company, selected by the government, in a country of 1.4 billion people. It’s a start. It’s nowhere near enough.

The IT services path worked because the knowledge was transferable. You could learn Java by writing Java. You could understand enterprise architecture by building enterprise systems. The learning was embedded in the doing. With AI, the doing, wrapping an API, teaches you almost nothing about how the underlying model works. You’re not learning by building; you’re learning by consuming. The skill you’re developing is integration, not invention. And integration is a commodity.

I spend a lot of time looking at early-stage startups, and I’ll be honest, the Indian AI startup ecosystem right now feels like a gold rush where everyone’s selling shovels they rented from someone else. The pitches are confident. The TAM slides are enormous. The underlying innovation is, in most cases, a prompt and a prayer. There are exceptions, of course. Companies doing genuinely interesting work on Indian language processing, on context-specific applications, on infrastructure that matters. But they’re outnumbered ten to one by wrappers wearing the costume of invention.

Building on top of someone else’s intelligence is not the same as building intelligence. And the longer we confuse the two, the deeper the dependency gets.

Someone will argue that wrappers are a feature, not a bug: that distribution comes first, and distribution creates data, and data eventually becomes models. In theory, yes. In practice, distribution doesn’t automatically translate into usable training data, especially in India, where consent is vague, privacy norms are uneven, data is fragmented across languages and formats, and the incentives push companies to collect what’s easy, not what’s representative or safe.

Worse, without Indian benchmarks and evaluation frameworks, more usage just means more unmeasured failure at scale. And even if distribution does generate valuable data, the value doesn’t magically stay here unless we own critical infrastructure (models, compute, datasets, evaluation, deployment rails), we’re still feeding someone else’s flywheel.

The investment numbers make this painfully clear. India’s share of global private AI funding stood at less than one percent in 2024. The companies building the models we depend on, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, raised over $86 billion in 2025 alone. India’s entire AI startup ecosystem raised $1.34 billion. We’re not in the same conversation. We’re not even in the same building.

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The Context Problem

Every major foundation model in production today was trained primarily on English-language data, primarily from Western contexts, primarily reflecting Western assumptions about how the world works. It’s just what happens when the people building the models live in San Francisco, and the training data comes from the internet as they experience it.

So when these models get deployed in India, and they are getting deployed at scale, in healthcare, in education, in financial services, in agriculture, they carry those assumptions with them.

A medical AI trained overwhelmingly on Western clinical data doesn’t know how diseases present differently in South Asian bodies. It doesn’t account for the fact that an Indian patient’s relationship with a doctor, with disclosure, with treatment compliance, with the role of family in medical decisions, is shaped by a completely different set of cultural forces. It doesn’t know that a prescription that makes sense in a country with robust insurance might be financially catastrophic for someone paying out of pocket. It doesn’t understand that when a woman in rural India describes her symptoms, she may be using language that doesn’t map to the clinical terminology the model was trained on, not because she’s imprecise but because her framework for understanding her own body was built in a different knowledge tradition.

An education AI trained on American pedagogical frameworks doesn’t understand that a kid in Tier 2 India isn’t just operating in a different language, they’re operating in a different epistemological universe. The way they learn, the way they’ve been taught to learn, the role of rote memory, the relationship with authority and questioning, none of this is in the training data. When an AI tutor is “patient” and “encouraging” in the way a California edtech company imagines patience and encouragement, it may be completely misreading the dynamic of what a 14-year-old in Lucknow actually needs.

A financial AI that’s been trained on Western market structures doesn’t understand the informal economy, the role of gold as savings, the way credit works in a joint family system, the trust dynamics that make certain financial products land and others fail. It can give you technically correct advice that is practically useless for the person receiving it.

And yet we’re deploying these tools. Fast. At scale. Because the adoption numbers are exciting and the alternative, building context-aware AI from the ground up, is slow, expensive, and doesn’t fit on a pitch deck.

The AI we’re consuming was trained on a world that doesn’t look like ours, and we’re pretending the gap doesn’t matter because the outputs look smart. They’re fluent. They’re confident. They’re convincingly wrong in ways that are very hard to detect unless you know what to look for.

And most consumers don’t know what to look for. Which brings us to the scariest part.

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The Literacy Gap

This is perhaps the thing that worries me most.

India leapfrogged into the smartphone era. Hundreds of millions of people went from no internet to a supercomputer in their pocket in the span of a decade. The result was extraordinary: UPI, Aadhaar, the digital public goods revolution. But it also created a massive literacy gap. People who could use the tools couldn’t evaluate the tools. They could tap and swipe and transact but couldn’t necessarily tell the difference between a legitimate app and a scam, between actual information and misinformation, between a product that served them and a product that extracted from them.

The consequences of that gap are still playing out in misinformation epidemics on WhatsApp, in digital fraud, and in the exploitation of data from populations who never meaningfully consented to its collection.

We’re about to replay this exact dynamic with AI, but at a higher level of abstraction and with higher stakes.

When ChatGPT or Gemini or any of the AI tools people are increasingly relying on gives you an answer, do you know what it’s drawing from? Do you know what it can’t access? Do you know the difference between a confident hallucination and a genuine insight? Do you know when it’s reflecting actual knowledge versus pattern-matching its way to something that sounds right?

Most people don’t. And honestly, most people shouldn’t have to! In an ideal world, the products would be designed to make these limitations transparent. But they’re not. They’re designed to seem authoritative, because authority drives engagement, and engagement drives adoption, and adoption is the metric everyone’s chasing.

In India, this gap is compounded by language, digital literacy levels, and the sheer speed of adoption outpacing any kind of consumer education. It’s just not possible to balance them. We don’t have the regulatory infrastructure. We don’t have the media literacy ecosystem. We don’t even have the vocabulary in most Indian languages to talk about what AI is doing and where it falls short.

I think about this with women especially. The women I write about, the women who read this newsletter- ambitious, navigating complex lives, juggling seventeen roles with inadequate support. AI is being marketed to them as the great equaliser. The assistant they never had. The tool that will finally reduce the mental load. And it can do some of that, genuinely. But it can also do something more insidious: it can become another authority that they defer to without questioning, another voice that sounds confident and is sometimes catastrophically wrong, another system that extracts their attention and data while promising empowerment.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot through the lens of what I call #SheAIT- the question of what it would look like if AI tools were actually designed to reduce women’s mental load rather than just increase their productivity. Because those are different things. Productivity tools assume you know what needs to be done and just need help doing it faster. Mental load is the invisible work of figuring out what needs to be done in the first place- the tracking, the anticipating, the remembering, the emotional labour that never shows up in a task list. Most AI tools are adding to the pile of things women need to manage, not reducing it. And because these tools weren’t designed with this distinction in mind, because, unsurprisingly, the teams building them don’t experience mental load the way women do, the gap persists even as the marketing promises otherwise.

I’ve watched women in my own circles use AI to draft difficult emails, plan meals, research symptoms, navigate bureaucratic processes — and I see how quickly the relationship tips from use to dependence. How the question stops being “is this right for me” and becomes “the AI said.” How a tool that was supposed to save time becomes another thing to manage, another output to quality-check, another source of information to integrate into an already overcrowded decision-making process.

We have adoption numbers. We have pitch decks. We have ministers announcing AI missions. What we don’t have is a population that can critically evaluate the AI tools it’s increasingly dependent on. And the people building those tools have zero incentive to close that gap, because an uncritical consumer base is, from a business perspective, ideal.

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What We’re Not Building

So what should India be building?

Not more wrappers. Not more “AI-powered” apps that are really just a text box connected to GPT-4 with a Hinglish prompt. Not more products that treat India as a market to be captured rather than a context to be understood.

India should be building the things that are genuinely hard and genuinely ours.

Language models that aren’t just translated English but actually understand how Indian languages work- the code-switching, the register shifts, the way meaning is constructed differently across languages, the fact that a single conversation in any Indian city might move through three languages in as many sentences and the AI needs to keep up without flattening that richness into English-with-extra-steps.

Evaluation frameworks that can test AI performance against Indian realities, not just Western benchmarks. If your AI health tool gets a 95% accuracy score on an American test set and you’re deploying it in Maharashtra, that number is meaningless. Where are the Indian benchmarks? Who is building them? Who is funding them? This is the unsexy, infrastructure-level work that no one wants to do because it doesn’t produce a demo you can show at a conference. But without it, we’re flying blind and deploying powerful tools and measuring their performance against someone else’s reality.

Consumer education infrastructure, not as a nice-to-have, not as a CSR checkbox, but as a core component of any AI deployment at scale. If you’re putting AI in front of a hundred million Indians, you owe them more than a terms-of-service page in English. What would it look like if every AI product deployed in India was required to include a plain-language explanation of what it can and can’t do, in the language its users actually speak? What if AI literacy was part of the school curriculum the way basic computer literacy was a generation ago? These aren’t radical ideas. They’re obvious ones that nobody’s implementing because they don’t show up on a growth chart.

Regulatory thinking that goes beyond “copy the EU” and actually grapples with what AI governance looks like in a country of 1.4 billion people at wildly different levels of digital sophistication. The EU’s AI Act is thoughtful, but it’s designed for a fundamentally different context with higher baseline digital literacy, stronger institutional infrastructure, smaller and more homogeneous populations. India’s AI governance needs to be Indian.

And most importantly, India should be building a culture of critical consumption. Not anti-AI because I’m not a doomer, and I think these tools are genuinely powerful. But critically pro-AI. A culture that asks: who built this, what data did they use, what does it get wrong about my context, and what am I not seeing?

We don’t have that culture yet. What we have is a culture of dazzled adoption, where the speed of uptake is treated as proof of readiness.

It’s not. Speed of adoption without depth of understanding is just a faster way to become dependent.

NASSCOM’s own AI Adoption Index tells the story in miniature: India’s enterprise AI maturity score moved from 2.45 in 2022 to 2.47 in 2024. Two years of breathless AI hype, and the needle barely twitched. Eighty-seven percent of Indian enterprises remain stuck in the middle stages of AI maturity. We adopted the tools. We didn’t develop the capability.

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The Agentic Turn

I think there’s actually cause for optimism, but only if we’re willing to think differently about what “using AI” means.

There’s a term floating around tech circles right now: “agentic AI.” In the technical sense, it refers to AI systems that can take actions autonomously. Not just answer questions but actually do things. Book a flight. Write and execute code. Manage a workflow end-to-end. It’s one of the buzzwords of 2025, and like all buzzwords, it’s being used to sell a lot of things that don’t deserve the label.

But I want to reclaim “agentic,” not as a description of what the AI does, but as a description of what the user does.

Because right now, most people interact with AI passively. They type a question, they get an answer, they accept it. The model is the agent; the user is the audience. This is how these tools are designed to feel: effortless, frictionless, magic. You don’t need to understand how it works. You just need to ask.

American users of AI chatbot apps spend 21% more time per session and log 17% more sessions per week than Indian users. We download more but engage less deeply. We’re drive-by consumers.

This is exactly the wrong posture for a country consuming AI tools that weren’t built for its context.

Being “agentic” as a user means something fundamentally different. It means treating AI not as an oracle but as a tool, one that requires skill to use well, judgment to use wisely, and critical distance to use safely. It means learning to prompt with precision, to interrogate outputs, to understand enough about how these systems work to know when they’re likely to fail you. It means being the driver, not the passenger.

The difference between someone who uses Google and someone who is good at using Google is vast. The first person types a vague question and accepts the top result. The second understands how search works. They know about operators, they know how to evaluate sources, they know what Google is optimising for and how that shapes what they see. They know that the first result isn’t necessarily the best result. They know how to dig. Same tool, completely different relationship with it.

AI requires this same shift, but at a much higher level of sophistication. Because the failure modes are less visible. A bad Google result is obviously bad because the link is broken, the source is sketchy, the information doesn’t match. A bad AI output is often beautifully articulated, supremely confident, and subtly, devastatingly wrong. It’s the intern who writes a perfect memo with the wrong numbers. It reads well. It sounds authoritative. And if you don’t independently verify, you’ll make decisions based on fiction.

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What Agentic Actually Looks Like

At the individual level, agentic AI use looks like understanding the toolset, not in a “learn to code” way, but in a “learn to drive” way. You don’t need to be a mechanic to drive a car, but you do need to know what the brakes do, when the fuel is low, and what that weird noise means. With AI, this means understanding the basics: what a language model is, what it can and can’t do, why it hallucinates, what “context window” means and why it matters for your output. This is not arcane technical knowledge. This is basic literacy for the century we live in.

It means treating prompting as a skill. The gap between a naive prompt and a skilled prompt is the gap between a useless output and a genuinely useful one. This isn’t about memorising tricks. It’s about understanding that you’re not having a conversation, even if it feels like one. You’re giving instructions to a pattern-matching engine, and the quality of your instructions determines the quality of the output. Specifying context. Giving examples. Telling the model what not to do. Iterating instead of accepting the first draft.

It means making critical evaluation a habit. Every AI output should be treated as a first draft written by a confident intern who may or may not know what they’re talking about. Some of it will be brilliant. Some of it will be subtly wrong in ways that are hard to catch. Your job is to know the difference, or at least to know when you can’t tell the difference, which is when you need to verify through other means.

And maybe most importantly, it means knowing when not to use it. There are things AI is extraordinary at, and there are things it shouldn’t be trusted with. Knowing the boundary and being willing to do the slower, harder, human thing when the stakes are high enough is a form of mastery, not Luddism. The most agentic thing you can do sometimes is close the tab.

For an Indian user, being agentic also means actively compensating for the model’s contextual blind spots. It means knowing that when an AI gives you dietary advice, it’s probably thinking in terms of Western nutrition science and Western grocery stores. It means knowing that when it drafts a business email, it’s defaulting to American professional norms that might land differently in your context. It means developing the habit of asking: What is this tool assuming about me that isn’t true? That’s a higher bar than what’s expected of an American user interacting with a tool designed for their context. It’s also a more powerful skill to develop, because it generalises. Once you learn to question one tool’s assumptions, you can question anything.

At the ecosystem level, agentic looks like Indian developers and entrepreneurs treating Indian complexity not as a bug to be patched but as the design constraint that drives innovation. The messiness of Indian languages, markets, and infrastructure isn’t a problem to be solved with a better wrapper. It’s the problem space that could produce genuinely novel AI approaches if we stopped trying to fit ourselves into Silicon Valley’s frameworks.

It looks like consumer education as infrastructure. Schools, media, government, basically everyone who touches the public, treating AI literacy not as a tech issue but as a civic one. The same way we (eventually, imperfectly) built public understanding of how to use the internet, how to evaluate news sources, how to protect personal data. Except faster, because the stakes are higher and the adoption curve is steeper.

And it looks like demanding more from builders. Both foreign and domestic. If you’re deploying AI in Indian healthcare, prove it works on Indian patients. If you’re building an education tool for Indian students, show me the evaluation framework that tests for Indian educational contexts. If you’re wrapping an API and calling it an Indian AI product, be honest about what you’ve actually built and what you’re renting. And if you’re an investor funding Indian AI, and I say this as someone who has spent years in the early-stage ecosystem, stop rewarding adoption metrics and start asking about contextual accuracy. How well does this thing actually work for the people it claims to serve?

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The House

I know how this piece sounds. It sounds like I’m saying India is behind, India is failing, India needs to wake up. And in some ways, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.

But I’m saying it because the opposite narrative, the one that dominates right now, that India is booming, India is adopting, India is the next great AI market, is more dangerous than pessimism. It’s the sound of an entire country consuming a technology it doesn’t understand, built by people who don’t understand it, and calling the whole farce innovation.

The stakes aren’t abstract. They’re in the healthcare recommendations that don’t account for Indian bodies. The financial advice that doesn’t account for Indian markets. The educational tools that don’t account for Indian classrooms. The government deployments that move fast because the technology is exciting and move wrong because the evaluation was absent. They’re in the small business owner in Surat who trusts an AI-generated contract because it looks professional. They’re in the student in Patna who submits AI-generated research and doesn’t know the citations are fabricated. They’re in the farmer in Telangana who follows AI-generated crop advice that was optimised for Iowa.

Every one of these is a trust problem. And trust, once broken at scale, is very hard to rebuild.

I don’t think this is settled yet. India has the talent, the scale, and frankly the necessity to become genuinely agentic with AI. We need to be not just using it, but shaping it. The developers are here. The problems worth solving are here. The users who could become the world’s most sophisticated AI consumers are here, because the gap between what AI offers by default and what they actually need is so wide that closing it requires a level of critical intelligence that Silicon Valley’s core users have never been forced to develop.

I keep coming back to UPI (and yes, I know, every Indian tech essay is legally required to mention UPI). UPI worked because India didn’t try to copy Visa’s homework. It looked at the problem- how do you move money in a country where most people don’t have credit cards- and built something genuinely new. Something that was native to the context, not imported and adapted. The result wasn’t just a better payment system for India; it was a payment system the world now wants to learn from.

That’s what agentic looks like at the national level. Not “Indian AI” as a brand exercise. Not “Made in India” as a label slapped on a wrapper. But genuine innovation born from the specific, messy, complicated reality of what India actually needs from this technology, which is not the same as what America needs, or Europe needs, or China needs.

But none of that happens automatically. It happens when we stop confusing adoption with understanding, when we stop celebrating wrappers as innovation, and when we start treating AI literacy not as a nice-to-have but as essential infrastructure for a country that’s betting its future on a technology it hasn’t yet learned to question.

The party is great. The music is loud. The adoption numbers are fantastic.

But somebody should check who built the house.

If this resonated, share it with someone who needs to hear it, especially if they’re building in AI, deploying AI, or investing in AI in India. The conversation needs to shift from “how fast are we adopting” to “how well do we understand what we’re adopting.” That shift starts with us.

Swipe. Swipe. Dead baby. Swipe. Cute dog. Swipe. Swipe. Woman crying about AI deepfakes being sent to her family. Swipe. “Drawing boundaries doesn’t make you a villain” and “you are not responsible for other people’s reactions to your healing.”

Really? No shit.

Elsewhere in the ecosystem: journal prompts for your inner child (my inner child is a dumbass, but thank you), somatic stretches to release trauma from your hips (I’m sure my psoas is holding thirty years of repression but I’m not convinced a Instagram yoga flow is going to fix it), breathwork to regulate your nervous system, and a persistent implication that if you are still struggling, you probably just haven’t found the right modality yet. Have you tried tapping? Have you tried cold plunges? Have you tried journaling?

Journaling always helps, apparently. Sometimes I don’t have the energy or the words. Sometimes I open the notebook and stare at it and nothing comes out because the feelings are not structured. They do not have a beginning, middle, and an insight at the end. They’re just there. Unprocessed. Inconvenient. The blank page doesn’t judge me, but I judge myself for having nothing to offer it. Weren’t feelings supposed to be writable? Isn’t that what all the prompts promised?

Have you tried asking for help?

I have tried asking for help. Sometimes what comes back is another carousel. Sometimes it’s a recommendation to try EMDR, or a podcast episode, or a reminder that I should really look into somatic therapy. Sometimes it’s “I hear you” followed by silence. Sometimes it’s a list of resources offered with the gentle finality of a case being closed. Sometimes it’s not help at all, it’s a referral to the concept of help, which is not the same thing.

The carousel keeps spinning. Another pastel slide. Another gentle serif font. Another phrase that sounds like wisdom but dissolves the moment you try to hold it. You are not your thoughts. You are worthy of love. Healing is not linear. These are not insights. These are refrigerator magnets. They ask nothing of anyone except the person reading them.

I have lost my ability to be kind without outcome

The thing is, these slides aren’t wrong. Drawing boundaries isn’t villainous. You’re not responsible for everyone else’s reactions. Sure. Fine. But somewhere between the slide and the soul, something got lost. The goal became: how quickly can you package your pain into something legible? How efficiently can you box and sort and sift yourself into something palatable?

I’ve caught myself doing it. A friend calls, mid-crisis, and I’m halfway to offering her a borrowed diagnosis before she’s finished her sentence. I’m already categorizing: attachment style, trauma response, nervous system dysregulation. I’m trying to speed up the process of understanding what’s difficult, as though naming it faster will fix it faster. As though the point is the label and not the person.

Why am I DSM-ing you?

I miss feeling sad. Not burnt out, not emotionally dysregulated, not anxiously avoidant — just sad. I don’t know how to describe my own misery in my own words anymore. My mouth has been stuffed with catch-all phrases that abstract the gnarly stuff into convenient little social ziplocks. I pick them up one by one, sniff from them, and present them to others like I’m being helpful. The feelings have been taxonomized so thoroughly that I’ve lost access to the raw material underneath. Every emotion arrives pre-labelled. Every struggle comes with a framework already attached.

I have lost my ability to be kind without outcome. I can’t just sit with someone and say “yeah, this sucks, let’s be sad together.” No. I must diagnose, suggest, solve. I must make it legible. I must make it a problem with a solution, because that’s what support looks like now. Feeling with someone isn’t enough. You have to offer them a framework. You have to demonstrate that your presence is useful, productive, moving things forward. Otherwise what’s the point of you?

Just suck on it, I guess

I should be clear: I’m not outside this. I am the carousel version of a friend. That’s all I have to give right now. I barely have space for my own feelings, so the idea of holding someone else’s is exhausting. So I do what I’ve learned to do. I cut emotions into smaller and smaller slices. I meal-prep my capacity to care. I freeze it into little cubes of therapy-speak and offer them to the people I love, silently praying they won’t expect me to thaw anything out. Just suck on it, I guess. It’s all I have.

Here. Have some validation. Have an “I hear you.” Have a “that sounds really hard.” Have a gentle suggestion that you might benefit from talking to someone. Someone else, to be precise. Someone professional, someone whose job it is to hold the weight I cannot. I love you. I mean it. But I am handing you to a system because I cannot be a system for you.

This is what we’ve been trained to do. Somewhere in the last decade, the vocabulary of therapy escaped the clinic. Words that were meant to help someone make sense of their inner life in a protected setting became the default way we talk about emotions everywhere. Instagram slides. Group chats. Dating profiles. Performance reviews. First dates. Breakup texts. The language spread so fast and so thoroughly that we barely noticed when it stopped being a tool and started becoming a test.

The Escaped Langauge

It happened gradually, then all at once. First it was just therapists talking to patients. Then it was self-help books, which had always borrowed clinical language but kept it contained. Then it was podcasts, millions of hours of intimate conversation about attachment and trauma and nervous systems, available to anyone with earbuds and a commute. People started listening to other people’s therapy. They started learning the vocabulary without the context, the interventions without the relationship, the insights without the slow work of arriving at them.

Then it was Instagram, where complex psychological concepts got flattened into slides and carousels and infographics designed for engagement. Attachment theory became a quiz. Trauma became an aesthetic. Healing became content. The algorithm rewarded simplicity, so the ideas got simpler. The algorithm rewarded engagement, so the ideas got more provocative. “You were parentified” became a way to explain any difficult childhood. “That’s a trauma response” became a way to explain any difficult behavior. Everything became diagnosable from the outside by people who had never met you.

Then it was everywhere. The language seeped out of its original container and flooded the culture, and now we’re all swimming in it, whether we asked to or not. We use clinical terms in casual conversation. We diagnose strangers on the internet. We speak about our own minds with the detached authority of people who have read the Wikipedia page but not the textbook.

Now we are all fluent. We know what it means to be triggered, to have boundaries, to be doing the work. We know how to identify our attachment styles and name our trauma responses. We speak of nervous systems and emotional regulation and inner children with the confidence of people who have read the right threads. This fluency has become a marker of maturity. If you can describe your damage clearly, if you can name it, historicize it, link it to a pattern, you are taken seriously. You are granted patience. People nod. People stay. If you can’t, if you are messy or inarticulate or stuck in a loop, people get uncomfortable. You’re seen as feral. Unprocessed. Not yet ready for polite company.

The language is supposed to give us insight. But what it often gives us is a performance requirement. There is now a culturally approved way to suffer. You are expected to be self-aware quickly, to explain yourself clearly, to reassure the people around you that this will resolve. Pain is permitted, but only if it is boxed up. Only if you can narrate your own healing arc while you’re still in the middle of it.

Compression, not healing

This is how a vocabulary that claims to expand empathy ends up shrinking it. We gain better words, but we lose tolerance. We become excellent at describing pain and worse at enduring it in other people. Language starts replacing presence.

No one is taking responsibility because no one can. So much of what we’re feeling, the precarity, the exhaustion, the sense that the ground keeps shifting, comes from systems we were never meant to survive on our own. The economy, the algorithms, the pace, the constant ambient dread. The cost of living that keeps climbing. The job market that keeps tightening. The news cycle that keeps delivering fresh horrors. The platforms that keep us engaged by keeping us anxious. These are not personal problems with personal solutions. But there’s nowhere else for them to go.

So we hand them to each other. And then we feel guilty, because we know it’s too much. We know it’s inhuman to expect a friend to metabolize what an entire system has produced. So we self-edit. We shrink the ask before we even make it. We pre-package our distress into something manageable because we know no one has the capacity for the full unprocessed weight of it.

This is what the therapy-speak is actually for. It’s not a language of healing. It’s a language of compression. It lets us make our pain smaller, easier to hand off, and less likely to overwhelm whoever receives it. We’re not learning to feel better. We’re learning to take up less space while we feel bad.

And the compression works in both directions. We shrink our own pain to hand it over. And we shrink other people’s pain to receive it. A friend says she’s struggling, and I find myself, almost automatically, translating her experience into something I can manage. Oh, that sounds like burnout. That sounds like an anxious attachment pattern. That sounds like you need to set better boundaries. I turn her into a case study because a case study has an endpoint. A case study doesn’t require me to feel alongside her. It just requires me to offer the right framework and move on.

The goal is no longer understanding. The goal is containment. Keep the feeling bounded. Keep it from spilling over. Keep it from asking too much of anyone, including yourself.

This isn’t an accident. Systems are designed this way.

Holding someone is expensive. It takes time that could be productive. It creates friction. It resists efficiency. And worse, it creates implication. Once you stay with someone’s pain, you become responsible for it. You might have to adjust expectations, extend timelines, acknowledge that something is wrong. You might have to change. Institutions are trained to avoid this. It’s safer to offer resources than involvement. It’s safer to point toward a tool than to stay.

This is why companies offer wellness programs instead of reducing workloads. Why they give you resilience training instead of structural change. Why they hand you a mental health day instead of sustained flexibility. These gestures signal care without redistributing anything. They address symptoms while protecting the system that produces them. You are sent away to regulate, journal, meditate, and return once you’re easier to deal with.

Think about it: every corporate mental health initiative is designed to make you better at surviving the conditions, not to change the conditions themselves. You get a meditation app, not a manageable workload. You get a webinar on stress management, not a conversation about why everyone is stressed. You get an Employee Assistance Program with six free therapy sessions, not a restructuring of the expectations that made you need therapy in the first place. You get a mindfulness workshop, not time to actually rest. The institution gets to say it cares. You get to feel like the problem is yours to fix. The system remains untouched.

This is the genius of it, really. By turning systemic problems into personal wellness opportunities, institutions offload the cost of care onto individuals while taking credit for providing support. The company didn’t burn you out, you just didn’t use the meditation app enough. The workplace isn’t toxic, you just need to work on your boundaries. The expectations aren’t unreasonable, you just need to get better at managing your stress. Every solution points inward. Every failure becomes yours.

And this logic is seductive, because it offers a feeling of agency. If the problem is your regulation, you can work on it. If the problem is your boundaries, you can set them. These are all things you can do alone, in private, without anyone else having to adjust. That’s the appeal. It lets everyone else off the hook. It’s so much more convenient to have a million individuals working on themselves than to have one system admit it’s broken.

But when you fail, you fail alone too. If you burn out despite the meditation app, that’s a personal failure. If you can’t regulate despite the resources, that’s a you problem. The system gave you tools. What more do you want?

The same logic has crept into how we treat each other. Holding someone means tolerating a mess without knowing when it will end. It means you can’t exit by saying “I tried to help.” Advice allows exit. Presence does not. So we reach for frameworks instead. It lets us feel supportive without having to reorganize our time, expectations, or emotional bandwidth. We get to feel like good friends while still protecting ourselves from the inconvenience of actual involvement.

And of course, this lands differently on women.

Women aren’t just encouraged to manage their feelings, they’re expected to manage the room. Emotional regulation isn’t a personal skill; it’s a job requirement. Smooth the conflict. Anticipate the reaction. Absorb the discomfort. Read the mood. Defuse the tension. Do it invisibly, or you’re not doing it well. Do it while also doing everything else. Do it while smiling.

So when the culture tells women to “do the work,” it doesn’t arrive as support. It arrives as confirmation. You were already supposed to be doing this. Self-awareness isn’t a tool for women; it’s a baseline expectation. Fall below it and you’re failing at your role. You are not a woman in pain; you are a woman who has failed to manage her pain correctly.

Men get to have circumstances. Stress. Pressure. A hard quarter. A difficult project. A lot on their plate. Women get pathologized. The same anger that makes a man “passionate” makes a woman “unregulated.” The same tears that make a man “honest” or “vulnerable” make a woman “unprofessional” or “emotional.” The same exhaustion that makes a man “overworked” makes a woman “unable to cope.” We are permitted to struggle only if it doesn’t show. Hurt, but stay pleasant. Heal, but make it invisible. Fall apart on your own time, and come back put together.

Even boundaries operate unevenly. Women are constantly told to set boundaries, but we’re also expected to manage the emotional fallout of those boundaries. You can say no, but you’d better say it gently. You can draw a line, but you’d better explain yourself for doing so. You can protect your energy, but you’d better make sure no one feels rejected by your protection. You can refuse, but you’d better do the emotional labor of making the refusal palatable. The boundary is yours; the cleanup is also yours.

Be self-aware enough to regulate, but warm enough to not seem cold. Be boundaried enough to protect yourself, but accommodating enough to not make anyone uncomfortable. Be healed enough to function, but not so healed that you stop being useful to everyone else’s emotional needs. Be autonomous, but remain available. Be strong, but stay soft. Be less, but also somehow more.

This is why women are so tired. Not because self-reflection is useless, but because it’s demanded endlessly while nothing else changes. Awareness is expected to compensate for everything. Insight instead of relief. Understanding instead of adjustment. Clarity about what’s wrong instead of anything actually getting fixed.

We become extremely good at naming what’s wrong. And then we are left alone with it.

The Fly in a Beartrap

I keep thinking about what it would mean to opt out of this. To stop performing emotional fluency. To be allowed to struggle without having to narrate my own healing arc. To just be sad, without someone asking what I’m doing about it.

But opting out isn’t really available, is it? The performance requirement isn’t just cultural pressure, it’s tied to how people decide whether to stay. If I can speak the language, if I can demonstrate insight, I get patience. If I can’t, I get abandoned. The fluency is protection. The compression is survival. I learned these things because not learning them had consequences.

The very skills that make us visible to others are the same skills that keep us from being fully held. We learn to translate our pain into something manageable, and then we wonder why no one stays long enough to see the unmanageable parts. But we hid those parts. We had to. Because we knew, correctly, that the unmanageable parts were too much to ask for. We pre-emptively protected everyone else from the full weight of us, and now we’re lonely in a way we can barely articulate.

The loneliness is strange because it exists alongside connection. We have friends. We have people who care about us. We have group chats and check-ins and people who ask how we’re doing. But the connections feel thin. They feel conditional. They feel like they depend on us staying within certain bounds. Being honest, but not too honest. Being vulnerable, but not too vulnerable. Being in pain, but not for too long, and not in a way that asks too much of anyone.

So we become very good at being easy. We pre-emptively apologize for our own needs. We offer reassurance before anyone asks for it. I’m working on it, I know this is a lot, I don’t expect you to fix it, I just needed to vent, sorry to dump this on you. We make ourselves small before anyone can ask us to shrink. We manage other people’s discomfort at our own pain. We perform okayness even when we’re not okay, because not-okayness has costs. We have learned, through experience, that people stay longer when we are easy to be around.

And this works, in a way. People do stay. But they stay with the managed version. The version that has already been processed enough to be palatable. And somewhere underneath, the unmanaged version sits alone, wondering if anyone would stay for that too. Suspecting, probably correctly, that they wouldn’t.

And then we feel lonely, and we don’t quite understand why, because weren’t we doing everything right?

What the hell is a conclusion?

I don’t know what the alternative is. I’m not going to pretend I have a framework for care that isn’t broken, or that I’ve figured out how to hold people without rationing myself. I haven’t. I’m still handing out frozen cubes. I’m still flinching when someone’s pain looks like it might require more than I have. I’m still reaching for the carousel language because it’s the only language I know, and because the silence underneath it is terrifying.

I catch myself, sometimes, mid-sentence, offering someone a framework when what they needed was just for me to stay. I hear the therapy-speak coming out of my mouth, and I don’t know how to stop it. It’s become the default. It’s become the only way I know how to show I care, even though I suspect it’s also a way of keeping my distance. The language lets me be helpful without being present. It lets me give something without giving myself.

But I know something has been lost. I miss the sadness that was just sadness. I miss being able to say “this is hard” without immediately being asked what I’m doing about it. I miss the version of friendship where presence was enough, where you could just be in it together, undefined and unresolved, and that counted as something. Where you didn’t have to perform progress. Where you could fall apart without someone trying to help you put the pieces back together. Where being held didn’t require you to first prove you were holding yourself.

I think I miss being allowed to not be okay without it becoming a project. Without it becoming a problem I’m supposed to solve before I’m allowed to bring it to anyone.

I don’t have a conclusion. I don’t have a call to action or a five-step framework for reclaiming authentic emotional connection. I don’t have a carousel slide that fixes this. That would be too easy, and also too ironic.

I just have this: the suspicion that healing was never supposed to be something you do alone in order to become easier to be around. That care is not a resource to be optimized. That sometimes the point is just to stay. Just to witness. Just to sit in it together without anyone having to be fixed or improved or moved along.

I don’t know how to get back to that. I’m not sure we can get back to it. Maybe we have to build something new, something that doesn’t exist yet, something without a name or a framework or a content strategy.

But I know we’re not going to therapy-speak our way there.

“Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let’s start with the Emerson of it all, because it’s embarrassingly easy, especially if you live on the internet, to develop a persecution complex the moment there’s friction. Sometimes I’m wrong. Often, I’m careless. Sometimes I say something that lands badly because I put it badly, or because I’m writing from a place of privilege, or because I’m trying to be snappy and I overdo it, and I end up sounding like an idiot. If you put your thoughts in public, people get to push back.

What I want to describe is not this contradiction. It’s what happens after the contradiction, the moment where an innocuous (albeit stupid) post stops being a post and becomes an object other people can pick up and use. It stops being something you said and starts being something you represent. It becomes an informal little moral Rorschach test. People don’t respond to the words; they respond to the version of you those words allow them to conjure. And once that conjuring begins, the ritual goes out of hand quickly- it’s hard to control ghosts once you’ve brought them to life. You can almost feel the crowd deciding what the story is going to be, not because everyone coordinated, but because everyone is responding to the same incentive. Online, “sounds sure” gets mistaken for “is true.” It’s the finality of the tone that does it. If you can flatten a whole person into a verdict and declare it, you get the likes, you get the retweets, you get to feel like you “said it.”

This is where my recent Twitter situation ended up. The trigger was a tweet that was, at minimum, clumsy. The tone was wrong, framing wrong, incredibly underthought. I understand why it irritated people. If I could write it again, I would write it differently, and I’m not saying that to pre-empt criticism so much as to prevent the conversation from getting stuck in the boring binary of “HK is innocent” versus “HK deserved everything.” I’m not trying to litigate the original offence in any case. The part that scrambled my head wasn’t even the (well-deserved!) initial pushback; it was how quickly the pushback stopped being about the tweet and started being about my character, my life, my motives, my supposed history, and then, because the internet is bored and imaginative, about a bunch of things that never happened. If you’ll forgive the strange metaphor, I felt a bit like a cigarette being passed around at a house party. By the sixth or seventh person, no one knew who lit it, whose lighter was used, or if someone accidentally burned themselves on it.

I understand the social contract of visibility. I benefit from being visible; I like writing; I like being read; I like having opinions and putting them where people can argue with them. I’ve gotten opportunities and money and access because people know who I am. I’m not going to act like I stumbled into public life and now I’m shocked there are consequences. But I also don’t think we should pretend that every dogpile is “accountability” just because it uses the vocabulary of socially sanctioned morality. There is a difference between criticism and a crowd deciding you are contemptible and then reverse-engineering the moral language that makes contempt feel like it is a public good. There is a difference between “that was wrong” and “this person is rotten.”. That difference is what I want to write about, not because I’m a special snowflake this shouldn’t happen to (honestly, it should), but because it’s a pattern I keep watching happen, and once it happens to you, you understand that something else is going on under the language of ‘principled disagreement.’

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The hatred comes first

There’s a theory of the internet that says pile-ons happen because people care about justice, and sometimes that’s true. Real harm exists. People with power do awful things. Communities need norms, and norms need enforcement. Callouts can be corrective, and sometimes the only reason certain patterns of abuse get interrupted is because of public consequence. I’m not claiming all outrage is fake, or that “accountability” is a myth invented by bored people who like fighting. I’ve seen the other side too, where everyone lets a bad actor keep acting badly because it’s inconvenient to confront them. I’m not nostalgic for a kinder, gentler world where no one is ever criticized. That shit was not actually kinder or gentler!

But I think online pile-ons have specific contours that make them so…strange? Unsettling? We don’t arrive at condemnation by thinking. We condemn, and then we go looking for the reasons that make it feel principled. Unfortunately, it’s not as theoretical and easy to understand when you’re the person being discussed like a case study (LOL).

Jonathan Haidt’s work on moral psychology basically argues that we don’t usually reason our way to moral judgment; we have a fast, intuitive reaction, and then we come up with the reasons that make the reaction feel principled. This is not a particularly flattering thesis, yeah? It basically says that a lot of our “ethical clarity” is just a gut feeling and “I think this might be true” stacked together under a trench coat. It suggests that what we experience as careful moral thought is often post-hoc storymaking; our brain scrambling to produce a narrative that makes what we already feel sound like it was always obvious.

There’s an old set of experiments in psychology that elaborate on this phenomenon. They give people a scenario that triggers immediate disgust, and then they remove all the obvious reasons you could cite for why the scenario is wrong. The classic one is consensual incest between adults, written in a way that eliminates coercion and harm. No pregnancy, no trauma, no social consequences, everyone involved is fine. People still instantly say it’s wrong, which is fair enough as a gut reaction; it’s a squirmy scenario. The interesting part is what happens next.

When the researcher asks participants to explain why it’s wrong, and then refutes their reasons one by one based on the details of the story, people don’t update their moral verdict. They get stuck. They reach for different reasons. They flail. They eventually say something like “it’s just wrong,” usually with a lot of indignation. The feeling stays even after the explanation collapses, which is the point: the feeling did not come from the explanation. The explanation came from the feeling.

That’s the piece I think we underestimate when we talk about pile-ons as if they’re purely rational reactions to wrongdoing. A lot of the time, the collective feeling arrives first: disgust, contempt, the little thrill of taking someone down, the adrenaline of being in a group that has agreed upon who the villain of the day is. And then the moral reasoning gets constructed around that feeling to make it feel like a rational conclusion. This is also why the reasons can get so slippery. If you’ve already decided someone is contemptible, you can find a reason that fits. If one reason stops working, you can find another. If the original offence is small, you can expand the story until it feels appropriately criminal. If you need the person to be worse than what you can prove, you can start using suggestion and insinuation. And because everyone else is doing it, it feels not as much ‘you’re being cruel’ and more like you’re participating in community hygiene.

This is where the apology discourse becomes a bit silly. People talk about wanting responsibility as if the repair is the point, like if the person apologized “properly,” the mob would be satisfied, and everyone would go home. But that’s not how it works once a pile-on becomes a spectacle. An apology can’t become repair if repair isn’t what people actually want. If the real reward is the feeling of righteous contempt, then an apology is just new material to add to the list of crimes committed. It becomes proof that you were guilty. Or proof you’re manipulative. Or proof you’re weak. Or proof you’re only sorry you got caught. It doesn’t matter which one; the interpretation will be selected to preserve the emotional verdict, because preserving the verdict is the point. You can almost feel the story protecting itself. You can almost feel the crowd needing you to stay “bad,” because if you became “human,” the whole structure would collapse into something much more awkward: a group of people who enjoyed being mean.

There’s also a scaling problem that makes this worse. A single person being outraged at you can be reasonable, proportional and even helpful. But outrage is an emotion that mutates as it multiplies. When thousands of people do it at once, it stops looking like answerability and starts looking like a swarm. There’s research that describes this as the “paradox of viral outrage”: condemnation that seems morally appropriate in isolation starts to read as bullying when it becomes viral, and the scale can actually generate sympathy for the person at the center of it.

This is the part where the story often has to escalate, because once the response looks disproportionate, the mind needs the target to deserve it. The punishment begins to outgrow the crime, and the only way to make that feel consistent is to inflate the crime.

So the allegations multiply. “This tweet” becomes “this pattern.” “This pattern” becomes “this is who she is.” And once the crowd is in that register, rumours are a sharper tool in the arsenal. They don’t have to be true to be useful. They just have to feel plausible inside the framework of the story that’s already been agreed upon. They fill in the gaps. They make the punishment feel earned. They turn the discomfort of “are we overreacting?” into the relief of “no, actually, she’s worse than we thought.”

I’m not saying this to absolve anyone of anything, least of all myself. This time, I think I did deserve it.

I’m saying it because I think the sequence matters. If hatred comes first and reasons come later, then the confidence with which someone can list their reasons isn’t necessarily proof of their rightness. Sometimes it’s proof they’ve had time to stew and build a case. Sometimes it’s proof they’re enjoying the act of building it. Sometimes it’s just proof that the press secretary is good at her job.

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After the verdict: when context stops working

The strangest part of a pile-up isn’t even the anger. It’s the confidence! It’s genuinely incredible how quickly people move from “I didn’t like that” to “I know exactly who you are.” And once that certainty takes hold, language stops functioning normally. Context stops functioning normally. You learn very fast that you cannot “clarify” your way out of a story people are enjoying telling. You cannot “explain” your way out of captured imaginations. You cannot “be reasonable” in a room that is trying not to be reasonable. Which sounds obvious when I type it, but it is genuinely hard to accept when you’re inside it, because it goes against the childish, stubborn part of you that still thinks: if I can just say the right thing, this miscommunication will clear up.

What actually happens is… the story sets into a concrete shape that’s nothing you asked for. And after that, nothing you do gets read on its own terms. People aren’t asking “what did she mean?” anymore. They’ve already decided what you mean, and now they’re just collecting things that match. That’s when the digging starts. Old tweets, screenshots, jokes, captions, anything that can be pulled out and held up like “see?” And it’s not “see what she said,” it’s “see who she is.” Once you’re in that zone, everything becomes fair play. A joke becomes a tell. A clumsy sentence becomes “this is how she always is.” The details don’t even have to agree. They just have to keep you pinned.

This is where “tone” becomes a weapon. The tone you wrote in becomes your personality. Your personality becomes your intent. Your intent becomes your crime. People will tell you what you meant with this serene confidence that makes you want to laugh and cry at the same time, because you’re sitting there thinking, I literally wrote it. I know what I meant. But then you realize: what you meant is irrelevant once you’ve been assigned a role. You’ve been cast. Now people are reacting to the character. And the character is much easier to hate than the reality of a person who said something poorly and maybe meant something different and maybe has blind spots and maybe also isn’t a cartoon villain.

And then there’s the word that does the most heavy lifting in these moments: “pattern.” “Pattern” is magical because it makes everything sound principled. It takes a bunch of scattered moments, some real, some stretched, some fully imagined, and it weaves them into something that feels like a hard-earned insight instead of vague irritation. It’s saying “I’m not being petty, I’m being perceptive.” And sometimes that’s true! Sometimes pattern recognition is literally how you protect yourself from people who keep doing the same harmful thing. But online, “pattern” is also what people say when they’ve found enough screenshots to support the feeling. The screenshots don’t have to prove anything. They just have to look like they might, in the way that lets other people nod along and go, “yeah, that tracks,” which is basically the internet’s version of due process.

The rumour part is what I can’t stop thinking about. When someone is already decided to be bad, rumours aren’t rumours. It’s more like “Of course.” “Yeah I heard that too.” “This explains everything.” And once a rumour has that kind of emotional usefulness, it doesn’t matter if it’s true. It matters if it’s compatible. That’s why the stories get more baroque over time. They’re being refined for narrative satisfaction. Each new claim isn’t meant to inform; it’s meant to justify. It’s meant to make the existing level of rage feel earned and valid. It’s meant to make the punishment feel proportionate. If the punishment is already huge, then the crime has to be huge too, even if you have to build it out of rumours and inference and “my friend said.”

I keep coming back to how normal this feels to the people participating. That’s the scariest part. It doesn’t look like cruelty to them. It looks like community. It looks like doing the right thing. It looks like being on the correct side. It looks like “we’re holding someone accountable.” And because it looks like that, nobody has to sit with the truth underneath it, which is: some part of this is fun. Some part of this is relieving. Some part of this is about power. If the target is rotten, then your contempt becomes moral. If the target is dangerous, then your aggression becomes protective. If the target deserves it, then you don’t have to examine the part of you that enjoys watching someone get humiliated.

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Why “I just don’t like her” isn’t enough anymore

One of the weirder shifts of the last few years is that “I don’t like her” is no longer considered a complete thought. It reads as suspicious now, like you’re confessing to something childish. You’re supposed to have a better reason. You’re supposed to be able to justify it in a way that sounds grown-up and principled and socially useful. Dislike has to be upgraded into something that looks like public service.

And I get why. “I don’t like her” is silly. It forces you to admit that you’re having a human reaction to a human being, and human reactions are often petty, jealous, defensive, and inexplicable. Not the kind of thing you want to claim, especially to an audience that is always scanning for hypocrisy. So we do what we always do: we clean it up. We launder it. We turn it into morality.

There’s actually research that basically backs up this intuitive difference between plain old dislike and the kind of hate that shows up in online pile-ons: hate isn’t “stronger dislike.” It’s dislike that’s been moralized. People don’t feel negatively; they feel righteous about the negativity. The moral framing is the whole point, the thing that makes hatred feel like a virtue rather than a vice. And once you notice that, you start seeing it everywhere: the way criticism escalates from “I didn’t like that tweet” to “this person is harmful,” “this person is dangerous,” “this person should not have a platform,” as if disliking someone isn’t valid unless it can be justified as harm reduction.

This is where the internet gets to do its favourite magic trick: taking a feeling and turning it into a test. Because if disliking someone is framed as moral discernment, then liking them becomes morally suspect. Supporting them becomes complicity. Not joining in becomes endorsement. The emotional reaction spreads outward and recruits other people, not into agreement, but into performance. You’re not allowed to think someone is a dick; you’re expected to demonstrate that you, too, can recognize the dickishness, and that you, too, are on the correct side of it. “I don’t like her” becomes “I’m a good person.”

There’s a term psychologists use, moralization, for the process where something that used to be a preference becomes a value. Where “I don’t like this” turns into “people shouldn’t do this.” Where a personal reaction becomes an obligation and then, eventually, a kind of purity ritual. Rozin and colleagues wrote about this years ago, and what’s striking is how closely it matches what we see online: once something becomes moralized, people feel licensed to censure it, and they also start recruiting reasons to support their position. Not because the reasons caused the moralization, but because the moralization makes the reasons feel necessary. It’s like your brain and your community both agree that “just a feeling” isn’t enough, so now you need a case file. You need a story. You need a reason that will stand up in public.

Which means the internet becomes a place where a huge amount of emotional life gets disguised as ethics. Envy gets disguised as structural critique. Personal irritation gets disguised as activism. A desire to punish gets disguised as reckoning.

The most common example is how quickly “this annoyed me” becomes “this is unsafe.” “Unsafe” is one of those words that started as a serious descriptor and now gets used like a particularly cheap garnish. Sometimes it’s accurate. Sometimes it’s saying “I felt something and I don’t want to assess it.” Sometimes it’s “I don’t like the power dynamic here” without having to admit the underlying feeling is envy or intimidation or social comparison. It’s turning discomfort into authority. It lets you treat reaction as evidence.

And honestly, who wouldn’t want that? It’s exhausting to admit you’re being petty. It’s much easier to say, “This person is bad.” Once they’re bad, your feelings don’t need interrogation. They need expression. Once they’re bad, your cruelty can be reframed as boundary-setting. Once they’re bad, you don’t have to deal with the more complicated possibility: that you dislike them for reasons that have nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with you.

This is also why pile-ons can feel so… gleeful, even when everyone is insisting they’re doing something serious. Morality gives people permission. It’s the permission slip that says: you are allowed to be harsh, you are allowed to be contemptuous, you are allowed to strip someone of complexity, because this isn’t you being mean, this is you being right. And once a crowd gets that permission slip, it’s very hard to take it away, because taking it away doesn’t challenge a behaviour, it challenges an identity. It asks people to consider that they might have been enjoying something ugly.

So the moralization has to stay intact. The target has to stay bad enough to justify the scale of the response. Dislike has to stay dressed up as duty. And that’s why the story escalates. That’s why rumours “track.” That’s why people keep saying “pattern.” It’s not only because the internet is cruel. It’s because the internet is full of people trying to experience their emotions without taking responsibility for them.

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Why it feels so good to be part of the crowd

Pile-ons are fun for the people participating! A very solid “guilty pleasure,” the way it’s fun to gossip, the way it’s fun to be in on something, the way it’s fun to feel like you have power over a situation that has nothing to do with you. And you can watch people working very hard to deny this to themselves in real time, because admitting it would collapse the story. If it’s fun, it can’t be purely righteous. If it’s fun, then maybe we are not ‘protectors’, maybe we’re also enjoying the spectacle. If it’s fun, then the line between “good people calling out bad behaviour” and “crowd enjoying cruelty” gets blurry, and blurriness isn’t very convenient!

And then there’s the social reward, which is honestly the bigger drug than the cruelty itself. A pile-on gives you instant belonging. You don’t have to build intimacy with people, you don’t have to earn trust, you don’t have to be interesting. You just have to pick a side. You post the right reaction, in the right tone, and you get the little hits: likes, retweets, replies, “exactly,” “this,” “drag her.” It’s a tawdry version of community, but it still feels like community. It tells you you’re safe inside the group. It tells you you’re safe today, because you’re pointing at the correct person.

I think this is why pile-ons always have a performative edge. Even when the original criticism is valid, the swarm quickly turns into a stage. People aren’t expressing disapproval; they’re auditioning. They’re trying to write the dunk that gets screenshotted. They’re trying to be the voice that sets the framing. They’re trying to be seen by the in-group as a person who gets it, who has the right politics, the right instincts, the right moral disgust. And once you’re on that stage, the incentives get ugly fast, because subtlety doesn’t win. Nuance doesn’t travel. The thing that travels is the most confident, most contemptuous, most final version of the judgment.

This is also where envy and resentment sneak in. A public target is usually someone with something: attention, perceived influence, perceived money, perceived access, perceived ease. Which means a pile-on becomes an opportunity to rebalance status, to pull someone down to a level that feels less threatening. There’s a whole thing in social psychology often called tall poppy syndrome- the impulse to cut down someone who’s visibly thriving because their thriving makes you uncomfortable. The justification is usually framed as fairness, or humility, or answerability, but the emotional core is simpler: “why does she get to have that?”

This is also where privilege accusations become a favourite weapon, not as analysis, but as delegitimization. If she’s succeeding and I dislike her, then her success must be illegitimate. It’s the rhetorical crowbar you use to pry someone’s status away.

The last payoff is that participating in a pile-on can make you feel morally superior. You get to be part of a moment. You get to locate evil, stupidity and badness outside yourself, and then bond with other people around the shared act of rejecting it. It’s purity culture with better distribution and branding. And the reason it feels so good is because it solves, temporarily, the exhausting modern problem of not knowing whether you’re a good person. If you can hate the right person, you don’t have to sit with your own ambiguity.

The impossible response

Being the target of a pile-up isn’t “getting criticized.” It’s getting shoved, very abruptly, into a game where every move you could make has already been pre-interpreted, and not in a generous way. You don’t get to respond like a normal person responding to a normal misunderstanding, because the room you’re responding into isn’t behaving like a room full of individuals; it’s behaving like a single organism with a script, and the script has three lines for you: if you explain, you’re defensive; if you apologize, you’re manipulative; if you stay quiet, you’re arrogant. Pick one. Choose your fighter. Either way, you’re still the villain of the day.

Your first instinct is to clarify, not even because you’re trying to “win” but because you still have this stubborn belief that language is supposed to do something. You think: I’ll just say what I meant, I’ll name what I got wrong, I’ll add the missing context, and surely the temperature will drop by a few degrees, because that’s what happens in real life. Except online, clarification isn’t clarification.It’s a refusal to take responsibility. It’s you trying to talk your way out of consequences. Half the people reading aren’t even reading for meaning; they’re reading for posture, for tone, for whether you sound sufficiently bowed. So you end up with this insane situation where the more precise you try to be, the more people act like you’re doing a lawyerly dance, and you start sounding guilty purely because you’re trying not to be misunderstood.

Then you think, okay, apology. Because apology is the approved ritual. It’s what everyone demands with this intense confidence, as if the only reason mobs exist is because people aren’t accountable enough, and once you offer the correct amount of reckoning, everyone will stand down. But apologies online are content. They get screenshot. They get quote-tweeted for “tone.” They get audited for missing clauses. And if you’re careless, you end up apologizing to the loudest interpreter of your words rather than to the people you actually affected, which is such a weird position to put yourself in, because now you’re responding to a version of your intent that doesn’t belong to you. It’s not “I’m sorry I did X,” you’re saying “I’m sorry you think I did X,” except you have to phrase it in a way that doesn’t sound like “I’m sorry you think,” because that gets called a non-apology, and suddenly you’re playing this stupid semantic game in public while the actual situation gets farther away from you.

So you go, fine. Silence. Let it blow over. Don’t feed it. And then silence gets its very own story attached to it, because of course it does. Silence becomes proof you don’t care, or proof you think you’re above criticism, or proof you’re “hiding.” And the funniest part is how quickly the internet can turn into a mind-reading machine. If you block people, you’re thin-skinned and censorious. If you don’t block people, you’re letting harm happen in your mentions. If you log off, you’re running away. If you stay on, you’re centering yourself. If you make a joke, you’re flippant. If you don’t make a joke, you’re grim and self-serious. Every option becomes evidence of the worst possible intention, because once someone is committed to a story about you, your behaviour is no longer behaviour; it’s “signals.” You can’t be a person fumbling through an unfortunate moment. You have to be a character committing to a plot.

And then something small and humiliating starts happening in your head. You start rereading your own words to pinpoint your faults. You keep thinking you’ll find it, like there will be one obvious line where you can go, ah, yes, that’s what they’re reacting to, and if I correct that line, the whole thing will become normal again. You scroll your own tweets like they’re evidence in a case you didn’t know you were on trial for. You start pre-empting interpretations before they arrive. You start writing imaginary replies in the shower, the one paragraph that will finally make everyone go “oh, fair,” even though you already know the paragraph doesn’t exist. The most embarrassing part is how earnest this urge is. How badly you want there to be a fix that involves you being articulate enough, humble enough, clear enough, human enough, so that the world feels less crazy.

But the pile-on isn’t really a misunderstanding that can be corrected. It’s momentum. It’s a bonding event. It’s a hundred people trying to write the definitive caption under your face, and the best caption wins. So you find yourself watching strangers narrate your motives back to you with this confidence that makes you feel insane, because it’s not an argument with what you said anymore; they’re arguing with what they think you “are,” which means you’re no longer allowed to be inconsistent, or clumsy, or half-formed, or learning in public, or any of the things we supposedly tolerate in humans. You’re either redeemable or irredeemable, and the crowd usually decides that early, and then spends the rest of the time acting like it was a conclusion reached through careful analysis.

This is why people disappear after they get dogpiled, and I don’t mean “disappear” in the dramatic influencer way where they take a week off and come back with a better content strategy. They stop posting, they stop sharing, they stop taking risks, they stop being visible, because at some point, your name stops feeling like yours. It becomes a thing other people pass around, reshape, improve for drama, repeat like trivia. It doesn’t even have to be accurate to become sticky. It has to be repeatable. And once it’s repeatable, it’s real enough to ruin your week, your reputation, your relationships, your ability to sit in a room without wondering who saw what and believed what and decided what about you without ever speaking to you.

The most irritating part is that the whole experience also tempts you into your own version of moral laundering. It makes you want to frame yourself as purely misunderstood, purely victim, purely innocent, because that’s the only role the internet really understands on the other side of this: either you’re the villain who deserves it, or you’re the saint who was wronged. And I don’t want to write this essay from either costume. I can be wrong, and people can be right to criticize me, and the pile-on can still be its own beast with its own incentives and its own ugliness. Holding all three is inconvenient. It’s not tweetable. But it is what it is.

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What to do instead

This is not an answer, and if I pretended it was, it would be just another way of claiming clarity, which is kind of the whole problem. But I do have a few rules I try to follow when I’m the one being piled on, and also when I’m the one tempted to join a pile-on, because that temptation is real and pretending you’re immune to it is how you accidentally turn into the exact type of person you hate.

The first rule is boring and annoying: I don’t read everything. Not because I’m above it, not because I’m “protecting my peace,” not because I’m spiritually evolved, but because my brain is extremely suggestible when it’s stressed. If I read two hundred strangers confidently describing my motives, my brain will start offering up those motives as plausible, even when they’re nonsense. If I read ten different versions of what “everyone is saying,” I will start believing that “everyone” is a coherent entity with a stable opinion, when actually it’s just a loud subset of people performing for each other. You don’t realize how much your mind craves social consensus until you’re watching a fake consensus being manufactured around you in real time. So I limit exposure. There is a point past which data stops being information and becomes contamination.

The second rule is that I try not to negotiate with the internet in public. This is the hardest one for me, because I love words, and the idea that words won’t save you makes me sad. But once the verdict has set, you’re dealing with a spectacle. Clarifying starts to look like pleading. Defending starts to look like doubling down. Apologizing starts to look like an insincere performance. So when I do respond, I try to respond once, plainly, to the people who are actually affected or actually engaging, and then I stop.

The third rule is the one I wish the internet understood: I keep the critique at the size of the offence. This is true whether I’m the one being criticized or the one criticizing. If someone says something clumsy, I try to treat it as clumsy. If someone is being careless, I try to treat it as careless. I try not to do that thing where I reverse-engineer someone’s soul from a screenshot. There are people in this world who are genuinely malicious, and there are people who are genuinely harmful, and there are people who should not be protected by “benefit of the doubt” because they have proven, repeatedly, what they are. But most people online aren’t those people.

The fourth rule is: I don’t confuse moral language with moral action. This one is for me as much as anyone else. Calling someone “harmful” is not harm reduction if it’s just a way to get social approval for being mean. Declaring someone “unsafe” is not community protection if there’s no protection happening, you’re just escalating a mob. Even when criticism is valid, the performance layer creeps in so quickly. If I’m not willing to be accountable for what I’m doing, if I’m not willing to say “I’m angry” or “I’m hurt” or “this feels unfair” or “this reminds me of something personal,” if I’m only willing to speak in the language of righteousness, then I’m probably laundering something. And if I’m laundering something, I’m not as pure as I’m pretending to be.

The fifth rule is that I take the conversation offline when it matters. If I actually harmed someone, I’d rather speak to the person than to the crowd. If someone is criticizing me in good faith, I’d rather talk like actual people rather than trade statements like rival PR teams. The internet encourages you to keep everything public because publicness is the currency, but publicness is also what makes repair impossible. Repair requires privacy and time and the option to be awkward without it becoming another piece of content. This doesn’t mean everything should be hidden. It means that “public consequence” and “private repair” aren’t synonyms, and treating them like the same thing is why everyone ends up stuck in these endless loops of performative repentance and performative punishment.

And finally, the rule that keeps me from turning into a cynic: I don’t let the crowd become my compass. When you’re visible, you can start making decisions based on the general temperature of your mentions, and you don’t realize it’s happening until you look up and you’ve become a person who is always pre-flinching. You start writing around the mob. You start rounding off your edges. You start only saying what you know will be approved. And then you wake up one day with a platform you built by being yourself, and you don’t recognise yourself.

So the best “what to do instead” I have is: refuse to shrink, but also refuse to harden. Don’t become the kind of person who thinks every contradiction is persecution, and don’t become the kind of person who needs other people to be morally reprehensible in order to justify your contempt. Try to keep your criticism specific. Try to keep yourself honest. Try to keep your humanity intact.

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In Closing

Emerson’s line is still the one I want to hold onto, partly because it’s true and partly because it’s humiliating. It is genuinely vulgar to treat every contradiction as persecution. Being disagreed with is not a tragedy. Being criticized is not a human rights violation. Sometimes you say something stupid and the appropriate consequence is that people tell you it was stupid, and you take the L, and you write better next time.

But the reason I started with that quote is that it makes room for a second truth without letting me slip into martyrdom. You can accept contradiction as part of the deal and still acknowledge what a pile-on is. You can be accountable for your clumsiness and still refuse to pretend that every dogpile is justice. You can admit that the internet has built a very effective machine for converting ordinary dislike into moral certainty, and then using that certainty to license cruelty at scale.

I signed the social contract of visibility. I like being read. I like writing in public. I like having opinions that people can argue with. I’ve benefited from attention in ways that are real and material and I’m not going to play innocent about that. But I didn’t sign up to be turned into a communal object every time I misstep, to have my intent rewritten by strangers, to have rumours become “pattern,” to have contempt dressed up as civic duty and then handed back to me as if it’s good for my soul.

Maybe this is just the price. Maybe this is the tax you pay to be a person with a platform, and if you don’t want it, you should log off, go private, write in your diary, live a quieter life. I’m not even saying that’s wrong. I’m saying: if this is the price, then we should at least be honest about what we’re paying for. Because “accountability” is too easy a word for what’s often happening. It flatters the crowd. It hides the pleasure. It absolves the cruelty. It turns the mess of envy, insecurity, boredom, genuine principle, genuine harm, and genuine group psychology into a story where everyone is a hero, and the target is a lesson.

And I don’t want to be the kind of person who thinks she’s persecuted whenever she’s contradicted. But I also don’t want to live in a world where contradiction automatically metastasizes into moral prosecution. If nothing else, I want to keep one truth: sometimes you don’t like someone, and that is not the same thing as them being a horrible person.

It’s ok to just dislike someone. It’s perfectly ok.

2:17 AM, somewhere in Loop Health’s distributed medical operations. Dr. Priyadarshani’s night shift team is three hours into their watch when the message comes through. A Zepto employee in Gurgaon, awake after his shift, worried about his father’s chest pain. His father is in Patna, 1,100 kilometers away, and doesn’t speak English.

The medical advisor responds in 27 seconds. They can, because they have context: they can see the father’s blood pressure medication from last month’s consultation, the ECG from his company-facilitated health checkup six months ago. They know this family. The MA switches to Hindi, walks through the symptoms. The chest pain started after dinner. Radiating? No. Sharp or dull? Dull. Any sweating? Yes, but it’s humid in Patna.

The doctor, reviewing in real-time, makes the call: likely gastric, but given the sweating and history, safer to check. They coordinate with a hospital in Patna, share the father’s medical history, arrange for an ECG on arrival. The son gets the location, the admission process, what to tell the auto driver. The father goes. It’s gastric. He’s home by 4 AM with antacids and peace of mind.

This interaction, with a parent in hometown, child in metro city, doctor in the cloud, care delivered seamlessly, happens hundreds of times every night through Loop. It’s healthcare that didn’t exist in India five years ago. And it’s the answer to a question most companies don’t even know they’re asking: What if employee benefits actually worked?

Loop Health’s audacious mission reads like something a consultant would dismiss as unrealistic: Add 20 healthy years to India’s workforce. When they announced it, the benefits industry smirked. Insurance is about covering catastrophe, not extending life. But after a week inside Loop Health, watching their infrastructure hum at 2 AM, reading their data on India’s hidden health crisis, understanding what they’ve built over eight years, that mission starts looking less like aspiration and more like inevitability.

Part 1: The Great Budget Leak

“When we started, we thought we were fixing insurance,” Ryan Singh, co-founder and COO at Loop Health, tells me. “Eight years later, we realized we were fixing something much deeper, the fundamental mismatch between what companies spend on health and what employees actually receive.”

To understand Loop’s bet on the future, you need to understand how Indian employee benefits became a ₹30,000-per-head exercise in wishful thinking. Ryan maps it across four generations, each solving yesterday’s problem while creating tomorrow’s crisis.

Generation 1 (1990s-2000s) was never about health at all. It was tax optimization through a ‘benefits program.’ HRA, LTA, and conveyance allowances had one goal: minimizing tax burden, not keeping people healthy. Healthcare meant basic hospitalization insurance, something you hoped never to touch. Companies structured salaries to save money; employees got coverage they’d only use in a catastrophe.

Generation 2 (2000s-2015) introduced the illusion of choice. TPAs entered, offering flexibility: pick your sum insured, choose co-pay levels, add parents. But flexibility only meant choosing how much hospitalization coverage you wanted, not what care you could access. An employee could select between a ₹3 lakh and ₹5 lakh hospital cover, but their therapy needs, their diabetes medication, their parents’ cataract surgery, all remained out-of-pocket.

Generation 3 (2015-2024) was the digitization wave. Beautiful enrollment portals, instant e-cards, mobile apps that made picking insurance as smooth as ordering food. Companies bolted on wellness vendors ; like Cult.fit memberships, mental health app subscriptions, diagnostic discounts. “By 2020, our clients had an average of six different benefits & wellness vendors,” Ryan recalls. “Employees had six apps, six passwords, six places to remember what they’d signed up for. Utilization sat at 10% because the only time benefits actually worked was if you were hospitalized.”

The numbers tell the story Ryan’s too kind to spell out. This is corporate India’s greatest magic trick. Companies spend ₹20-30K per employee annually on benefits. Only 10% of employees will be hospitalized and get a meaningful benefit, potentially ₹2-5L depending on their sum insured. The other 90% of employees don’t realize any value. They end up spending ₹10-15K out of pocket on the care they actually need: therapy sessions at ₹2,000 each, quit halfway because they can’t afford more; maternity scans and supplements adding up to ₹50K that insurance won’t touch; diabetes monitoring that costs ₹1,000 monthly but isn’t “treatment” enough to claim.

This isn’t a vendor problem or a technology problem. It’s a design problem. The entire system was built for catastrophic coverage, not care.

Loop’s Workforce Health Index, the first report to merge behavioural data with lab test reports across cities, genders, roles and industries, revealed the depth of this crisis. They plan to release this annually, tracking India’s workforce health evolution year by year. The findings were damning: 78.6% of professionals under 30 are Vitamin D deficient, affecting everything from immunity to mental health. 40.6% of women aged 31-40 are clinically anemic during their peak career years. 37.2% show abnormal glucose metabolism. One in five women has PCOS, a condition that affects fertility, metabolism, and mental health, yet most insurance policies don’t acknowledge it exists.

“We kept calling these ‘wellness issues,’” says Ryan. “But that’s like calling a broken leg a ‘mobility challenge.’ These are medical conditions destroying productivity, happiness, and yes, eventually creating the expensive hospitalizations insurance does cover.”

The bitter irony? Companies desperately want healthier employees. CFOs watch insurance premiums rise 20% yearly. CHROs field complaints about benefits nobody uses. But they keep buying the same broken product because the alternative, rebuilding benefits from scratch, seemed impossible.

Until Loop Health spent eight years making it possible.

Part 2: The Infrastructure Years

The revelation came from a simple observation. “Fifty percent of our employees don’t work in the city they grew up in,” Ryan explains. “They have no family doctor. They navigate healthcare through Google, WhatsApp forwards, and whoever their colleague saw last week.”

This was a baseline infrastructure problem. And solving it would take something the Indian benefits industry had never attempted: building actual healthcare delivery, not just paying for it.

The six-year build started with a controversial decision. While competitors were aggregating wellness vendors and building prettier insurance portals, Loop Health hired doctors. Not to review claims or deny coverage, but to actually treat patients. “We pay our doctors’ salaries and bonuses for keeping our members healthier,” Ryan emphasizes, “Their only job is keeping members healthy. Every hospitalization prevented is a win, not lost revenue. We’re on the side of the patient and payer, not the fee-for-service providers who want to maximize revenue per bed.”

Building their own medical team meant building an entire medical operation. Electronic Medical Records that connected every family member’s health history. Training protocols ensuring consistent care whether the doctor was in Bangalore or Bihar. Clinical workflows that could handle everything from a midnight fever consultation to long-term cancer navigation.

Dr. Mihir Shah, one of Loop’s doctors, explains what this infrastructure enables: “A 64-year-old woman consulted me for worsening diabetes. She’d seen me eight months earlier. In a busy OPD, she’d be a new case. But I could see her EMR instantly and her allergies to certain skincare products stood out. Her palm swelling wasn’t from diabetes; it was an allergic reaction to a new moisturizer. That’s continuity you can’t always get in a hospital.”

The infrastructure means catching strokes at 2 AM. Dr. Mihir recalls a recent night consultation: “The son said his 70-year-old father had a headache. But on video, I saw slurred speech, facial drooping. Those are stroke signs. No medication could help, they needed emergency care immediately. Virtual care has boundaries, and recognizing them saves lives.”

“There was a moment,” Piyush Gupta, Head of Product, recalls, “when a CHRO asked us, ‘Wait, you built an entire EMR system? You trained your own doctors?’” That was when clients started understanding the moat Loop Health had constructed.

The infrastructure includes partnerships that took years to build: diagnostic labs providing instant results and lower waiting periods for Loop members, Tata Memorial Centre partnership for cancer second opinions and navigation, direct deals with mental health providers that lower the ₹3,000-per-session market rate. Each partnership integrated into Loop’s platform, creating what the industry calls “health assurance”, not just covering illness but actively preventing it.

“Our Electronic Medical Records system brings together IPD and OPD claims data, records from chats, consultations, and labs,” Ryan explains. “It creates a complete picture of the member and their family for our clinicians to give personalized care over time. Our doctors not only remember you better, but can help you stay in touch. We’re able to give automated nudges when your prescription runs out or your follow-up consultation is due.”

Consider what this means practically. When an employee messages about their parent’s recurring headaches, the Loop doctor can see the family’s cardiac history, note the father’s hypertension medication, and recognize a pattern that suggests investigation. They order tests through the app, cashless at a partner lab. Results come back showing early markers. The doctor explains them the same day, refers to a neurologist, and follows up weekly. All of this happens before anything becomes an insurance claim.

“We’ve built tools for HR teams to manage everything from enrollment to endorsements,” Piyush explains. “But the real infrastructure is invisible. It’s the clinical protocols ensuring quality, the data systems tracking outcomes, the operational excellence making 24/7 care possible.”

Part 3: The Psychological Unlock

So how do you increase utilization for a product that hasn’t innovated in three generations, that employees dismiss as a “hidden cost” or “kuch toh hai insurance wagerah, pata nahi“?

The breakthrough Loop leaned on was psychological. “Insurance is usually a hidden cost,” Ryan explains. “An employee has no idea how much their employer is spending on their healthcare. The moment you introduce a wallet, that changes.”

The thought process is simple: take the company’s existing ₹30K benefits budget and split it. ₹20K goes toward smarter insurance design. The remaining ₹10K becomes a visible healthcare wallet that employees control. Same budget. Smarter allocation.

This core innovation is what they call HealthFlex.

“When employees see that wallet, they realize their company is contributing for their family every year, and can now spend it on things their family can really benefit from,” Ryan says. “Psychology-wise, that feels very different. In feedback, employees tell us things that basically mean: you’re more transparent, I can see the value, I can literally put a number to an emotion of ‘my company cares about me.’”

“We didn’t get that on day one,” Ryan admits. “We came to that consensus after a few iterations and a lot of research.”

The wallet revealed unexpected behavioral patterns that took time to understand. “On the bundles and utilization side, we learnt a bunch of things the hard way,” Ryan explains. “One big insight: in corporate insurance, caring about your parents is a primary driver. I might not need insurance today, but my parents definitely need it. Same with very clear life events. My parents needing proper cover, my fiancée going in for delivery, a planned surgery. These are short, high-stakes events where people want proper help.”

“When we created some of these benefits as purely digital programs, they didn’t pick up. People don’t fully trust only-online programs for critical stuff. They care much more about in-person care in those moments.”

The purchase insights around maternity bundles made that super clear. “Almost all the maternity bundles were being purchased by men, not women,” Ryan discovered. “For male partners, these digital offerings looked high-value. But when a woman sees the same, because it’s very virtual and not very tangible, she might not value it the same way.”

This insight led Loop Health to completely rethink their approach. “We understood that with bundles and cohorts, it’s all about last-mile conversion and real-world value. The next step for us in maternity, for example, is to actually find the right partner and make the benefit more tangible and usable, so utilization goes up.”

The data showed distinct employee cohorts, each with different healthcare needs:

Unmarried professionals under 30 worried about mental health, their parents’ preventive health needs, and fixing the vitamin deficiencies wreaking havoc on their energy. The sandwich generation (35-45, young kids, parents with real disease burden) faced a different crisis entirely. “They’re burned out with dual care responsibilities,” Dr. Priyadarshani observes. “They forget to take care of themselves. Especially women, juggling postpartum recovery, household responsibilities, work pressure, and often friction with extended family about medical decisions.”

“We also saw that only specific cohorts really invest and purchase benefits from the wallet,” Ryan notes. “A large chunk of purchases comes from unmarried males between 25-30 and married folks above 35. Some cohorts hardly purchase anything, for example, women under 25 or under 30. The way we read that is: there just aren’t enough benefits that feel genuinely valuable for those cohorts.”

Dr. Mihir sees how the wallet changes medical conversations: “When patients know they have budget for preventive care, they ask different questions. It’s not ‘Can I afford this test?’ but ‘Should I do this test now?’ That psychological shift from scarcity to choice changes healthcare decisions fundamentally.”

“So behaviorally,” Ryan concludes, “the wallet journey for us now is: make the employer spend visible so it feels like ‘my’ money, structure bundles around real high-stakes use cases, and then go deeper into individual cohorts, understand what they value, and partner accordingly. That’s how we’ve been trying to move the wallet from just a financial construct to something that actually changes utilization and perception.”

Part 4: When Care Gets Real

The stories that matter don’t appear in pitch decks. They surface in Dr. Priyadarshani’s logs, in the medical team’s Slack channels, in the moments when Loop’s infrastructure meets human crisis.

Take Arjun (name changed). Thirty-five, high performer, recently married. Then his performance cratered. Stopped responding to managers, to teammates, to HR. When they finally reached him, someone else was on the phone, informing them Arjun was on a building ledge, planning to jump.

“The HR team called our salesperson, who immediately connected them to our medical team,” Dr. Priyadarshani recounts. “We got a counselor on the phone within minutes. They talked him down, arranged an immediate in-person session in Gurgaon that evening. We saved a life. We even approached and counseled his family.”

But here’s what weighs on Ryan: “Arjun still needs ongoing therapy. Weekly sessions, medication monitoring, regular check-ins. That’s not a one-time intervention. That’s continuous care. This person needs 24x7 care available to him. His company was spending ₹30,000 per employee per year on benefits. We came and helped, but we want to do more. And to do more, we need your help as HR leaders.”

Then there’s the everyday miracle of early detection. Loop’s case study from Druva Software, tells one such story: routine health checkup data flagged concerning markers that led to early cancer detection in an employee who felt fine. The Loop doctor called, explained the urgency without causing panic, and arranged immediate specialist consultation. The cancer they caught and treated early would have progressed significantly within months.

Dr. Mihir shares another pattern he’s noticed: “I’m treating entire families now. A young woman came to me with prediabetes after a routine health camp at her company. But I already knew her parents, both diabetic. I’d mapped the family’s metabolic patterns across generations. That context meant we could focus on prevention immediately, not wait for disease to develop. A hospital doctor could reach the same conclusion, but they’d need to start from scratch. I had the story already written.”

“That’s where Loop Health becomes ‘the doctor in the family,’” Dr. Mihir continues. “Over time, you stop seeing individuals in isolation and start caring for patterns, habits, and risks that run through households and across generations.”

The most profound moments come in crisis navigation. Dr. Mihir recalls counseling an eight-month pregnant woman whose baby was breech, cord wrapped, low amniotic fluid. “Her OB recommended C-section. She was devastated because her family expected a natural delivery. We spent 40 minutes talking. Not pushing her toward or away from surgery, but explaining the medical reality clearly. She needed to make peace with the right decision, not the expected one. In situations like these, ethical care means respecting beliefs, but not at the cost of withholding clarity.”

The chronic cases reveal the system’s silent power. A Dengue patient, platelets dropping daily, messaging Dr. Priyadarshani’s team with each report. “Traditional insurance would cover hospitalization if it got bad enough,” she explains. “We monitored daily, adjusted treatment, kept them stable at home. They never needed admission.”

Dr. Priyadarshani’s team handles the sandwich generation’s unique burden daily. “Our MAs and doctors have access to the entire medical history of patients in an EMR. This becomes easier to navigate existing issues and help out the entire family at large. For example, if there’s a family of 5, employee (female), spouse, father, mother, one child, their consultation, medical, blood test history gets stored in updated real time. So if 4 months later the father, whom we assume is diabetic, comes in for a consult, the doctors already know which medicines he is consuming, when was the last test, etc. This ensures uniformity, consolidation, and most importantly, every family has a doctor in their family.”

Part 5: The Cracks and Edges

Loop Health’s infrastructure is impressive, but honesty demands acknowledging where it strains. The cracks appear not in the technology but at the intersection of India’s digital divide and healthcare’s inherent complexity.

“The first month with a new client is when the truth reveals itself,” Piyush explains. “On paper, everything always looks smooth. The client proudly walks in with a modern HRMS, the right people allocated, and an eager promise that ‘integration will be simple.’ But the moment we begin, the real story surfaces. Their product team is buried in other priorities. Approvals move slower than anyone expected. A clean API turns into an S3 bucket workaround. Technology is never the barrier; readiness is. So we step in, adjust the plan, sit with their teams, rewrite expectations together, and build momentum inch by inch.”

“Blue-collar workers often don’t have official email IDs,” Dr. Priyadarshani admits. “Even logging into the app becomes a challenge. The app is in English, but they’re comfortable in regional languages. They message us in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and we translate and respond in their language, but it adds friction.”

The language barrier goes deeper during consultations. “When a factory worker needs a gastroenterologist who speaks Kannada, we might not have that specific specialty in that specific language available immediately,” she explains. “So our Medical Advisor joins the call, translating between doctor and patient. While we make sure nobody is left unheard, it does create a bit of a bottleneck because it adds one more step to the process.”

Piyush shares a moment of painful clarity: “A CHRO once told us, ‘You solved complexity but created paralysis.’ Their employees had beautiful options, but sometimes froze at decision time. Insurance is still a foreign language, and even smart employees can’t translate co-pays into real-life impact. This insight led us to build a recommendation engine that would act like a friend who knows your history, your family, and your risks.”

The virtual care model, for all its convenience, has natural boundaries. Dr. Mihir knows these boundaries intimately: “A middle-aged man called with chest pain, hoping for medication to get through the night. On video, he looked clammy, uncomfortable. Chest pain is where virtual care stops. You need an ECG, physical exam. I sent him to emergency. At the hospital, they found a cardiac event in progress. Sometimes the hardest decision is saying, ‘This needs to be seen in person.’”

Dr. Mihir also handles the modern challenge of information overload: “The question I get asked most is about these newer diabetes medicines everyone’s talking about as weight-loss drugs. Patients have Googled everything, seen celebrities’ results. What they ask isn’t ‘what is this drug?’ but ‘Doctor, can I take this?’ or ‘Will it work the same way for me?’ Google can’t answer that. These are judgment calls, not search results. People aren’t looking for Google to give answers, they’re looking for a doctor to say, ‘This makes sense in your case, and this doesn’t.’”

“Building a secondary and tertiary care network is a massive undertaking,” Ryan acknowledges. “Our investors are aligned and this is in our plans. We do suggest where to go, but providing data-informed suggestions that are rock-solid reliable, along with discounting, priority access, and quality control, these are the practical challenges. It’s just a question of when to pull the trigger.”

Part 6: Generation 4 And What Comes Next

“If I could kill one industry practice tomorrow,” Piyush says, “it would be the idea that everyone should get the same plan. This model was born when workforces were small, homogeneous, when benefits were compliance, not care. Today, it actively holds companies back. A young team ends up paying for maternity coverage they won’t use for years. A team with aging parents struggles with insufficient support. No one feels seen.”

Enter Generation 4: healthcare that shapeshifts around individual need. Not paternalistic (company decides everything), not purely transactional (employee alone in the market), but something new- employer-funded, employee-directed, Loop-delivered. This is what Loop calls “health assurance,” a category they’re creating because “insurance” no longer captures what they’re building.

The early results suggest something is working. Benefits enrollment jumped from 60% to 85% with HealthFlex implementation at Zepto. Employee complaints about benefits dropped significantly. Ola, BluPine, Livspace, Sharechat, Leadsquared, companies across sectors are seeing employees actually use their benefits before they’re sick enough to need hospitals.

“One client came in fully convinced their workforce couldn’t care less about benefits,” Piyush recalls. “Then enrollment opened. Within hours, employees were choosing plans reflecting their lives in intimate detail. A young couple expecting a baby chose maternity support. A mid-career employee added dental coverage she’d postponed for years. The same employees labeled ‘disengaged’ were making thoughtful decisions because someone finally spoke their language.”

The moment clients truly understand arrives without much fanfare. “A client sees their claims dashboard and notices how many cases closed without friction,” Piyush explains. “They see 97% satisfaction and pause. But the real turning point comes when they experience how the entire claims journey feels different. Each user has a dedicated claims advisor who knows their story. Our AI quietly checks every uploaded document for completeness, alerting both advisor and user instantly if something’s missing. The advisor calls, explains what needs fixing, and resubmits before the claim gets stuck. That’s when clients say, ‘This isn’t insurance support anymore. This is healthcare infrastructure.’”

“In 2030,” Ryan envisions, “employees will be excited for benefits enrollment because they’ll get what their family actually needs. I get the right insurance plan for myself and my family, basis our life stage and annual needs. The idea that we used to have one-size-fits-all benefits through our employer will seem really outdated. When I have a symptom or condition, I have a family medical concierge that will help me triage symptoms and get the right intervention. When I switch employers, I’ll be able to port my benefits. I’m in control of my medical records and can seamlessly move from one healthcare and insurance partner to another.”

But Ryan also acknowledges the operational challenge: “You have to be operationally excellent to execute this business. We work across and integrate with multiple insurers, TPAs, labs, radiology centers, wellness vendors. We have lots of customer endpoints: a mobile app, enrollment portal, clinical video calls, prescriptions, in-hospital claims assistance. It takes a healthy dose of customer obsession and deep respect for operational rigor and persistence to do what our teams do every day, and I’m really proud of them for that.”

Closing: The Morning After

6 AM. Shift change in Dr. Priyadarshani’s team. The night team hands over: hundreds of chats, dozens of consultations, 3 crisis interventions, 1 early cancer marker flagged, prescriptions renewed, 1 life saved from suicide. The day team takes over seamlessly because they can see every conversation, every prescription, every concern from the night.

“We’re proud because we’re the first point of contact,” Dr. Priyadarshani says. “Patients trust us. They believe we’ll help. And we have, thousands of times.”

The logs tell stories the benefits industry doesn’t track. An elderly woman in Mysore, alone at midnight, needing emergency care. The MA coordinating with the hospital, sharing locations, arranging consultations, ensuring doctors were ready when she arrived. Following up the next morning to check she’s okay.

“We work 24/7, 365 days, irrespective of weekends and festivals,” Dr. Priyadarshani reflects. “Yes, burnout happens. Maintaining response times, sitting for long hours, lonely night shifts. But as a medico, as a Medical Advisor, we have our own ways to cope up. We convert this lack of human interaction to conversations on huddles. It’s like another family where you discuss patients of professional life to patients of personal life. And I am proud to say that, for us everything comes second. First, the patients.”

Dr. Mihir captures what’s different: “If I went back to traditional practice tomorrow, I’d miss the time and freedom to really hear my patients. Every Loop consult is at least 20 minutes. Patients can fully explain concerns, ask questions, understand treatment without feeling rushed or worrying about costs. I’d also miss how easy it is to involve the right experts together. For a diabetic patient, I can bring in a nutritionist instantly; for a musculoskeletal case, a physiotherapist. But mostly, I’d miss the proactive approach. We’re not just treating problems after they happen; we’re helping prevent them. That human connection, the time, guidance, continuity, is what makes the difference.”

What genuinely surprised Dr. Mihir after joining Loop was the scale of the silent crisis: “People in their late twenties and thirties with central obesity, early insulin resistance, borderline cholesterol, poor sleep, high stress, almost no physical activity. Add vitamin B12 and D3 deficiencies, brushed aside as ‘minor’ but contributing to fatigue, poor concentration, long-term problems. In hospitals, we meet patients after damage occurs. Here, I see how routine screening and early intervention change trajectories before disease sets in. A small shift toward proactive healthcare can significantly change someone’s health and even their longevity.”

This is healthcare that operates on a different logic. Not “is it covered?” but “what do you need?” Not “submit and wait” but “let’s solve this now.” Not “your employer provides insurance” but “you have a doctor in your family.”

In a country where healthcare meant hospitals, where benefits meant hoping you never used them, where 50% of workers had no family doctor, Loop built something that shouldn’t exist: care that’s always there, never overwhelming, constantly learning what you need.

Their mission, adding 20 healthy years to India’s workforce, once seemed impossibly ambitious. But when you watch their infrastructure hum at 2 AM, see employees choosing mental health support over unused insurance, witness families navigating health crises with actual navigation support, you realize they’re not trying to revolutionize insurance.

They’re building the doctor India never had. The one who knows your family. Who answers at 2 AM. Who catches things early. Who treats budget waste as a moral failure, not a business model.

“Just offering wellness perks creates the illusion of proactive care while leaving chronic disease, diagnostics, and mental health unmanaged,” Ryan says definitively. “They serve more as a checkbox that the company is doing preventative health.”

The future of care in India might not be about better hospitals or cheaper insurance. It might be about never needing them in the first place. One wallet, one platform, one medical team at a time.

I’ve been fortunate to get access to some of the most impactful startups in the country through my writing, and I’m so excited to extend that privilege to you! Once a month, you will receive a deep dive into an incredible Indian startup via my A Week Inside…series.

Not lying, to be clear. Everything I’ve shared has been true. The books, the ideas, the strange connections I draw between things that don’t obviously belong together. All real. But also selected. Arranged. The version of me most likely to make you lean in.

You might subscribe to my weekly reading list. Every Saturday, I bundle together the most interesting things I encountered that week, write little annotations, draw threads between them. People tell me it makes them feel smarter. They screenshot my takes and send them to friends. I love that. I’m not going to pretend I don’t. There’s a specific pleasure in being someone’s source- the friend who always knows about the thing before it becomes a thing, the one who reads the weird stuff so you don’t have to. I built that on purpose. It wasn’t an accident.

Recently I was reading something genuinely strange and wonderful, and I don’t even remember what, which is part of the point, and my first thought wasn’t wow. It was how do I describe this in a way that makes me sound like the kind of person who finds things like this?

I wasn’t reading anymore. I was scouting. The book had become raw material for a future performance of having read it.

This happens more than I’d like to admit. I watch a film, and somewhere around the forty-minute mark, I start composing the tweet. I have a genuine emotion and immediately begin translating it into something shareable, something that will resonate, something that earns its place in the feed.

Susan Sontag saw this coming decades ago, writing about photography. The camera doesn’t just record experience, she argued. It changes the nature of experience itself. You start seeing photographically. The tourist isn’t really looking at the cathedral; she’s looking at the picture of herself looking at the cathedral. The frame precedes the seeing.

I don’t carry a camera everywhere. I carry something worse, an internalised audience. The frame is always up. The seeing is never just seeing.

The experience had become secondary to the narration of the experience. I was auditioning for my own life. And I was so very good at it.

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The Economics of Interesting

I didn’t become this way by accident. Being interesting takes a lot of work, and it also works.

It opens doors that stay closed for people who are merely competent. It gets you into rooms where decisions are made, onto lists you didn’t apply for, into DMs from people you admire. The interesting person gets the speaking invitation, the podcast interview, the “you should meet my friend” introduction that changes everything. I’ve watched it happen. I’ve been the beneficiary.

The internet has made this an explicit requirement. Before, you could be privately fascinating- the dinner party guest everyone wanted seated next to them, the colleague who made meetings bearable. Now, fascination is scalable. You can be, sometimes have to be, interesting to thousands of people who’ve never met you. And that interestingness compounds. Followers attract followers. The screenshot gets shared. The algorithm notices you’ve been noticed and notices you more.

There is a well-worn term for this- personal brand. I remember when it first entered the lexicon, around 2008 or so, and how embarrassing it sounded. Your brand? Like you’re a soft drink? A sneaker? The language felt borrowed from a world that had nothing to do with actual personhood.

By 2015, personal brand was startup advice. By 2020, it was career necessity. The cringe faded, or we just got used to it, and the language of marketing colonised the self so gradually that we stopped noticing we’d been occupied. Now, everyone has a brand whether they cultivate one or not. The only choice is whether you manage it deliberately or let it be managed by accident.

I understood this early. Not consciously, but in the manner you understand any economy you’re trying to survive in. I understood that my ideas were currency, that my references were signals, that the way I synthesised disparate things into unexpected wholes was a kind of value I could trade on. So I got better at it. I learned which observations resonated, and which ones didn’t. I developed a sense for the interesting-shaped hole in any conversation and became adept at filling it.

Guy Debord called it the society of the spectacle. He was writing in 1967, long before any of this existed, and yet he saw it clearly: “Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” He was talking about mass media, about advertising, about the way images mediate our relationship to reality. But he was also describing something more intimate, the way we become spectacles to ourselves. The merger of being and appearing. The inability to experience something without simultaneously representing it.

This isn’t a confession of some shameful inauthenticity. I genuinely am curious. I genuinely do read widely and think in connections and care about ideas. The performance wasn’t a lie, but it was an optimisation. I was taking the most interesting parts of myself and turning up the volume, letting the rest fade into background noise. The girl who watches reality TV and cries at dog videos and sometimes goes weeks without a single original thought, she was still there, but she wasn’t the product.

And the product was good. I won’t pretend otherwise. The interesting version of me built a career, an audience, a reputation. She got me out of rooms I wanted to leave, and into rooms I wanted to enter. I’m not ungrateful. I’m just tired.

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The Cost You And I Pay

The tiredness is hard to explain because it doesn’t look like anything from the outside. It’s not burnout in the way people usually mean. I’m not exhausted from overwork or crushed by deadlines. I sleep fine. I meet my commitments. From the outside, I look like someone who has it figured out.

Byung-Chul Han calls it the burnout society. The exhaustion isn’t coming from external demands, from a boss or a system pressing down on you. It’s coming from inside. We have become, he says, “entrepreneurs of ourselves,” and the entrepreneur never rests because the business is never done. The project of self-optimisation has no endpoint. You can always be more productive, more visible, more interesting. The tiredness I feel isn’t laziness or weakness. It’s the logical destination of turning yourself into a project that can never be completed.

When you’ve optimised for interesting long enough, every experience starts to arrive pre-formatted. I’ll be walking through a market or sitting in a waiting room or overhearing a conversation and I can feel the processing begin. How would I describe this? What does this connect to? Where does this fit in the larger tapestry of things I’ve been thinking about? The moment hasn’t finished happening and I’m already packaging it for later.

I went to NAAR for the new year. Beautiful, delicious, disorienting, everything I wanted. And I remember standingin the washroom, struggling to take in the (insane) view from the washroom, genuinely moved by something I couldn’t name, and within seconds I was composing the caption. Not even for Instagram specifically, just for the generalised audience that now lives in my head. The one that’s always watching. The one I perform for even when I’m alone.

That audience that used to feel like company. That now feels like surveillance.

The research on this is still emerging, but what exists is grim. Studies on self-presentation and social media find a consistent pattern: the more we curate, the more exhausted we become, but the exhaustion doesn’t stop the curating. It’s not a behaviour we can simply decide to quit. The performance becomes structural. We don’t know how to experience things without the frame anymore. One study found that people who took photos of experiences remembered the visual details better but the experience itself worse. The camera ate the moment. The documentation displaced the living.

There’s a loneliness to being known for your taste. People approach you with a certain expectation. They want the version of you that’s always finding things, always synthesising, always a little ahead of the curve. And you deliver, because that’s the transaction, that’s what you’ve promised. But the delivery requires constant vigilance. You can never quite relax into not knowing, not having a take, not being the one with the interesting observation. The role doesn’t have an off switch.

I’ve started to notice what I edit out. The ordinary pleasures that don’t fit the brand. The books I read that are simply fine. The days where nothing interesting happens, where I’m just a person moving through hours without insight. Those parts of life have started to feel like failures. The gaps in the content calendar, missed opportunities to be fascinating. I’ll catch myself feeling guilty about a weekend where I didn’t encounter anything worth sharing. As if living without producing evidence of living is somehow a waste.

The other cost is subtler and I’m only starting to understand it. When you perform curiosity long enough, you stop being able to tell the difference between genuine interest and the performance of interest. I’ll pick up a book and I genuinely can’t tell if I want to read it or if I want to be the kind of person who’s read it. Both feel identical from the inside. The wanting has collapsed into the wanting to be seen wanting.

This is what Debord meant when he said the spectacle isn’t just something we watch, it’s something we become. The image doesn’t just represent life; it starts to substitute for it. And once the substitution is complete, you can’t find your way back to the original. You don’t even remember there was an original.

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The Difference

Interesting is something that happens in other people. You can’t feel your own interestingness, you can only infer it from reactions, from the lean-in, from the screenshot, from the “you should write about that.” It’s a quality that exists entirely in the space between you and an audience. Remove the audience and the interesting disappears. The category simply stops applying.

Interested is different. Interested is something you actually experience. It’s the absorption, the forgetting of time, the thing that happens when you look up from a book and two hours have passed and you haven’t once thought about how you’ll describe it later. Interested doesn’t need a witness. It completes itself.

Simone Weil wrote about attention as the rarest and purest form of generosity. But she meant something very specific. Not the kind of attention that takes notes, that processes, that asks “what can I do with this?” She meant attention that empties the self. Receptivity so complete that you disappear into the looking. The object of attention fills the entire frame because there’s no part of you leftover to be observing yourself observing.

I read that years ago and thought I understood it. I didn’t. I thought attention meant the thing I was already doing: reading carefully, noticing patterns, making connections. But that’s not what Weil was describing. She was describing a kind of attention that doesn’t produce anything. That doesn’t have an output. That isn’t, in any sense, generative. You don’t come away with material. You come away changed, or you come away with nothing, and both are fine.

I’ve been confusing these for years. I thought my job was to be interested in things and then share that interest with others. A clean pipeline of input, processing, output. But somewhere along the way, the output started to shape the input. I began selecting what to be interested in based on what would be interesting to share. The curiosity became a sense of usefulness. It was still real, but it was also optimised, which meant it was no longer entirely mine.

This sounds like a humble brag, I know. Poor me, I’m too interesting, people pay too much attention to my carefully curated thoughts. But that’s not quite what I’m trying to say. What I’m trying to say is that I built a machine for generating interestingness and then the machine started running me. The part of me that used to wander, genuinely wander, without destination or purpose, got recruited into the project of being someone worth paying attention to. And wandering with a purpose isn’t really wandering at all.

I think about the difference between a window and a mirror. Interesting is a mirror. You’re always seeing yourself reflected in the other person’s reaction, adjusting, calibrating. Interested is a window. You’re looking out at something that has nothing to do with you. The self recedes. You’re just there, in the presence of the thing, not thinking about how you look in relation to it.

The novelist and essayist Siri Hustvedt put it this way: “To be truly interested in something, you have to be willing to be bored by it.” She meant that real attention includes the dull parts, the longueurs, the stretches where nothing is happening. It means staying with something past the point where it’s yielding content. Most of what I read, I abandon the moment it stops being useful. The moment I’ve extracted what I need. That’s not interest. That’s mining.

I miss being a window. I’m not sure I remember how.

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The Unpostable Life

There are things I love that I’ve never told you about.

I love watching amateur cooking videos on YouTube, the badly shot ones where someone’s auntie is making dal in a pressure cooker older than me while yelling instructions at a camera she clearly doesn’t trust. I’ve seen hundreds of these. They have never once made it into a reading list.

I reread the same three comfort novels every year. They’re not particularly good. They’re not even particularly interesting. They’re just mine in a way that doesn’t need to be explained or defended or positioned as a quirky contrast to my otherwise highbrow taste. I’ve never mentioned them because they don’t fit the curation. They’re just ordinary pleasure, and ordinary pleasure doesn’t have a hook.

I like sitting in my car after I’ve parked, sometimes for twenty minutes, listening to the end of a song or a podcast or sometimes nothing at all. Just sitting. No thoughts worth capturing. No insights emerging. Just a person in a stationary vehicle, delaying the transition back into someone who has things to do.

I cry at those videos where soldiers come home and surprise their dogs. Every single time. I find them on purpose sometimes, when I need to feel something that isn’t complicated. This is arguably embarrassing. It doesn’t signal anything interesting about my interior life. It’s just a naked sentimentality that I’ve never figured out how to frame.

These are the parts that don’t make the cut. Not because they’re shameful but because they’re ordinary, and ordinary has no currency in the economy I’ve been trading in. The interesting person has interesting tastes, interesting hobbies, interesting ways of relaxing. She doesn’t just sit in her car. She doesn’t watch aunties make dal. She doesn’t cry at dog videos like everyone else on the internet. Or if she does, she makes it a thing. She writes about it, ironises it, finds the angle that makes it interesting again.

I’m tired of finding the angle.

Researchers have documented how authenticity itself became a genre- the messy bun, the “no makeup” makeup, the casually tossed-off caption that took forty-five minutes to write. We got so good at performing genuineness that the performance became invisible even to us. The “authentic self” we present is still a presentation. It’s just a presentation that’s learned to hide its seams.

I think about Elena Ferrante sometimes. The novelist who refuses to appear. No author photos, no interviews, no readings, no public self at all. Just the books. She called publicity “a garbage disposal” and refused to let her personhood become part of the product. Critics have called it a gimmick, a marketing strategy, but I don’t think that’s right. I think she understood something the rest of us are only starting to grasp: that the author becoming interesting is a threat to the work staying interesting. That the public self cannibalises the private one. That some things can only survive by staying hidden.

I’m not Ferrante. I don’t have that discipline, and I definitely don’t have that faith that the work can stand alone, that I don’t need to be there selling it with my presence, my takes, my carefully curated interestingness. But I understand the impulse now in a way I didn’t before. The appeal of being nobody. The freedom of the unpostable life.

There’s a version of me that exists only in private. The one who doesn’t know things, who hasn’t read the important book, who has no take on the current discourse because she didn’t even notice there was a discourse. The one who sometimes goes entire weeks without a single thought worth sharing. She’s not performing anything. She’s not even really paying attention. She’s just there, existing, unburdened by the need to be witnessed.

I like her. I don’t let her out much.

Zadie Smith wrote about quitting social media, and what struck me wasn’t the quitting itself but how she framed it. Not as a moral stance, not as a rejection of the platform’s politics or ethics, but simply as self-knowledge. “I’m the wrong personality type,” she said. Some people can hold the tension between public and private, can stay present while being watched. Others can’t. Knowing which one you are isn’t failure.

I’m still figuring out which one I am. Maybe I’m neither. Maybe I’m someone who can stay public but needs to protect certain rooms. Needs to keep some doors closed. Needs to let some pleasures stay ordinary, unframed, unshared.

The dal videos. The same three novels. The dog coming home to the soldier. The car after it’s parked. Mine.

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The Harder Question

So what am I actually saying here? I’m not quitting the internet. I’m not abandoning the reading list or deleting my accounts or retreating into some performative silence that would itself be a kind of performance. I’m still going to have takes. I’m still going to share them. The machine I built isn’t one I’m ready to dismantle, and I’m not sure I’d want to even if I could.

But then what is this? What changes?

Part of me wonders if it’s even possible to stay public and stay present at the same time. The audience changes things. It has to. The moment you know someone is watching, you become someone who is being watched, and that someone is never quite the same as the one who exists unobserved. Maybe the corruption is built in. Maybe the best I can hope for is to be aware of it, to hold it lightly, to not mistake the performance for the whole.

But that feels like a cop-out.

I’ve noticed something about the burnout confessional as a genre. It has become, itself, content. The “I’m stepping back” post. The “I’ve been doing some thinking” essay. The performed exhaustion, the carefully crafted admission of struggling, all of it feeding the same machine it claims to critique. Even vulnerability has been optimised. Even this essay risks becoming that- another piece of interesting content about the exhaustion of producing interesting content. The snake eating its tail, but plating it for Instagram before it does.

I keep thinking about writers I admire, the ones who seem to produce from some deep interior place, who write like no one is watching even though thousands of people are. I used to think they were simply more talented, more authentic, more immune to the pressures that shape the rest of us. Now I think maybe they just got better at protecting something. Some chamber of the self that doesn’t get shown. Some room where the work happens before it becomes work that’s seen. They found a way to keep the window open even while the mirror was running.

The poet Mary Oliver lived this way. Famously private, allergic to self-promotion, she spent most of her life in relative obscurity before becoming one of the most beloved poets in America. She didn’t build a platform. She built a practice. Every morning, walking in the woods with a notebook, paying attention to things that would never trend, writing poems about geese and grasshoppers and the ordinary astonishment of being alive. When asked about her process, she said something I think about constantly: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” Not attention as content generation. Attention as a spiritual practice. Attention as a way of being in the world that has nothing to do with being seen.

Or maybe they’re performing too, and they’re just better at it than I am. Maybe the authentic voice is always a construction, and the only difference is how visible the seams are. I don’t know. I genuinely don’t know.

What I do know is that I’ve started to want something different. Not instead of what I have. I’m not trading one identity for another. But alongside it. A life that isn’t entirely legible. Thoughts I don’t complete. Experiences I let dissolve without capturing them. The freedom to be uninteresting sometimes, to be ordinary, to have nothing to report.

It sounds simple. It’s not. The muscle memory runs deep. Even now, writing this, I can feel myself shaping it. Is this vulnerable enough? Is this too vulnerable? Does this land? Will this resonate? The audience is in the room. The audience is always in the room. I don’t know how to make them leave.

Maybe I start by admitting they’re there.

Have you heard of the “observing ego?” It’s the part of the self that watches the self, that maintains a slight distance even during intense experience. It’s supposed to be healthy, a sign of integration, the thing that keeps you from being completely swept away by emotion. But I wonder if the internet has hypertrophied this function. The observing ego has become the performing ego. It doesn’t just watch and reflect. It curates and broadcasts. The distance that was supposed to protect us has become the distance that alienates us from our own lives.

How do you collapse that distance? How do you get back inside your own experience?

I don’t have an answer. But I have some hunches.

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The Shift

I don’t have a transformation to offer you. No five-step programme for recovering from interestingness, no morning routine that rewired my brain, no revelation that changed everything. That would, anyway, be another performance. The performance of having figured it out, which is maybe the most seductive performance of all.

What I have instead is something smaller. A reorientation. A slight turning of the head.

I’ve started letting things go. A book I loved that I didn’t tell anyone about. A thought that came to me in the shower and dissolved before I could capture it. A whole Tuesday where nothing happened that was worth narrating. I used to feel a low hum of guilt about these, a sense that I was wasting material. Now I’m trying to see them as something else. Proof that I still exist when no one is watching. Proof that there’s still a me that isn’t made of content.

There’s a difference between privacy and secrecy that I’m only now learning to articulate. Secrecy is about hiding something shameful. Privacy is about choosing what to share. For years I conflated these. If I wasn’t sharing something, it felt like I was hiding it, which meant there must be something wrong with it. But that’s not right. Some things aren’t hidden. They’re just held. They belong to you in a way that doesn’t need to be proven by making them visible to others.

The dal videos aren’t a secret. The comfort novels aren’t shameful. The crying at dog videos isn’t something I need to ironise or explain. They’re just private. They’re the rooms in my house where guests don’t go. Not because the rooms are dirty, but because some spaces are just for living in, not for showing.

I’ve also started paying attention to what interests me when no one’s looking. Not what I want to be interested in, not what would be interesting to be interested in, but the actual texture of my attention when it’s left alone. It’s different than I expected. Softer. Less impressive. More prone to the ordinary and the sentimental and the genuinely uncool.

It’s harder than it sounds. The instinct to capture is so deep now that resisting it feels almost physical. I’ll have an experience and feel my hand reach for my phone and have to consciously stop, consciously stay in the moment, consciously let it be unrecorded. Sometimes I manage it. Sometimes I don’t. The muscle memory is patient and I am only starting to build the counter-muscle.

I’ve started experimenting with what I think of as attention hygiene. Small practices, nothing dramatic. Not sharing something for forty-eight hours after I encounter it, to see if it still matters when the dopamine of novelty has faded. Keeping a google doc that isn’t for anything. No essays will come from it, no tweets, no reading list annotations. Just observations that dead-end. Thoughts that go nowhere. The stuff that would get cut from the highlight reel.

Reading things I know I’ll never reference. Watching films I’ll never review. Having conversations I won’t reconstruct later for someone else’s benefit. It sounds simple but it’s a kind of training. Teaching myself that experiences can be complete without being captured. That the tree can fall in the forest.

There’s a version of curiosity that isn’t about accumulation. I’m trying to find my way back to it. The kind where you look at something and don’t immediately think about what it means or how it connects or what you’ll do with it. You just look. The thing is itself and you are yourself and for a moment the transaction is complete without anyone else needing to witness it.

I used to think being interested was the input and being interesting was the output. The natural flow of a mind engaging with the world and then sharing what it found. I don’t think that’s wrong exactly, but I’ve started to wonder if the arrow can point the other way. If sometimes you have to protect the input from the output. If the sharing, done too automatically, starts to shape and eventually starve the thing it’s sharing.

I want to be interested in a way that doesn’t need to become interesting. I want to read without scouting. I want to think without drafting. I want to let some things stay half-formed, unresolved, not ready for an audience, maybe never ready for an audience. I want to have experiences that don’t become stories.

I want to sit in the car a little longer.

This essay is a contradiction, I know. I’m telling you about wanting to stop telling you things. I’m making my desire for privacy public, performing my exhaustion with performance. The irony isn’t lost on me. Maybe that’s the last thing I need to accept, that I can’t write my way out of this. The writing is part of the trap. The window becomes a mirror the moment you describe the view.

But I’m going to try anyway. Not to stop being interesting, I don’t think I know how to do that, and I’m not sure I want to. But to hold it more loosely. To let there be a gap between the experience and the narration. To remember that I exist even when I’m not producing evidence of existing.

Weil wrote that attention is a form of prayer. I’m not particularly religious, but I think I understand now what she meant. There’s a way of being present that doesn’t take. That doesn’t extract. That doesn’t turn the moment into material. It just witnesses, and the witnessing is enough.

I’m not there yet. I may never be. The audience is still in the room. But I’m learning to let them wait. Learning that not everything needs to be served. Learning that some attention is just for me. Formless, purposeless, unremarkable.

To be, sometimes, just a person in a stationary vehicle.

Listening to nothing.

Going nowhere yet.

He paused for a second, like he was deciding whether to be polite or accurate. Then he said, almost casually: Man. You’re someone I’d date. But you seem really high maintenance.

A few years ago I would have flailed. I would have performed chill. I would have rushed to reassure him that I’m easy, low-effort, not like that, not a problem, not too much. Anything but the thing he’d just named. I would have shaved down the truth right in front of him, like it was embarrassing to take up space. And I would have left the conversation with that familiar, sour aftertaste: why did I make myself smaller again?

But this time, I just sat with it. Smiles at him. Let the words hang in the air. And in that silence, I realised something funny: he wasn’t wrong. Not in the way he meant it, but in the way that matters.

Yes. I am high maintenance. Not because I need constant proving, but because I have grown up in a life that has been, quite literally, maintained. I have been loved in ways that built who I am today.

The Lexicon of Diminishment

Before we go any further, let us talk about what high maintenance actually means when it is lobbed at a woman. It is a warning label, a disqualifier, a way of saying: you ask for too much. Not too much of anything specific, mind you. Just too much in general. Too much attention. Too much care. Too much consideration. Too much presence in the relationship, you are supposedly sharing equally.

The terminology belongs to a broader vocabulary designed to pathologise women who have standards: gold digger, drama queen, high maintenance, demanding, needy, clingy, too much. These words share a common function - they reframe reasonable expectations as character flaws. They turn wanting things into a kind of greed. They suggest that the correct amount of needs for a woman to have is, conveniently, zero.

Consider how rarely men are described using this vocabulary. A man who expects his partner to cook, clean, manage the household, remember his mother’s birthday, and be sexually available on demand is simply a man with standards. A woman who expects emotional reciprocity and consistent effort is high maintenance. A man who wants his shirts ironed is particular. A woman who wants her feelings acknowledged is needy. The asymmetry is built into the language itself.

The manosphere has industrialised this vocabulary. Online communities united by opposition to feminism have created elaborate taxonomies of female worth: high value versus low value women, the hierarchy of Stacys and Beckys, the endless calculation of sexual market value. According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, these communities share core beliefs that women are driven primarily by greed and sexual manipulation, that feminism has created a society biased against men, and that traditional gender hierarchies need restoration. The Red Pill ideology, borrowed from The Matrix, positions itself as an awakening to truth: the supposed reality that women are fundamentally deceptive, ‘hypergamous’, and unworthy of trust.

The UN Women explainer on the manosphere notes that this content is gaining significant traction: according to the Movember Foundation, two-thirds of young men regularly engage with masculinity influencers online. The effect is not theoretical. Academic research on manosphere communities found that their shared ideology reduces women to three primary motives: to deceive and manipulate men, to satisfy their own sexual needs promiscuously, and to trade sex for power. Women who have standards , who ask for effort, commitment, or care, are automatically suspect. The acronym AWALT (All Women Are Like That) is used to dismiss any evidence that individual women might differ from the stereotype.

The vocabulary extends beyond the manosphere into mainstream dating discourse. The ‘high-value woman’ discourse, which appears on TikTok and Instagram with billions of views, often reproduces the same reductive framework it claims to subvert. Both the Red Pill men and the high value women content creators agree on one thing: dating is a marketplace, and your worth can be calculated. They just disagree on who is overvaluing and who is underselling.

The manosphere’s language of female classification is not actually that different from mainstream dating culture. It is just saying the silent part out loud. When a woman is called high maintenance in casual conversation, she is being assessed against the same invisible rubric. The ideal woman is supposed to be hot but not vain, sexually available but not promiscuous, successful but not intimidating, present but not needy. She is supposed to have needs that are somehow met without anyone having to meet them.

The Mythology of Chill

Gillian Flynn gave us the definitive diagnosis of this phenomenon in Gone Girl. The Cool Girl monologue has echoed through a decade of cultural conversation, and for good reason. It named something women had been performing without language for it:

Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer... Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want.

The Cool Girl does not exist, of course. She is a projection, a fantasy of a woman with no interior life that might inconvenience anyone. Flynn’s sharpest observation was not about the men who want this woman. It was about the women willing to perform her: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be.

And Flynn did not let women off the hook. The Cool Girls, she wrote, are even more pathetic than the men fooled by them because at least the men think they are dating a real person. The Cool Girl knows she is performing a fiction, knows she is erasing herself, and does it anyway. The question Flynn leaves us with is: why? What makes the performance worth the self-annihilation? And more importantly: what would happen if women just stopped?

Studies on emotional labour in relationships consistently find that women do the majority of what sociologists call emotion work, the task of managing feelings, maintaining connection, smoothing conflict, and ensuring relationship harmony. One study found that even in couples who described their relationships in the language of equality, none achieved actual equality; the women gave more and received less emotional nurturing than their partners.

The concept of emotional labour was first defined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild in 1983 to describe the work service industry employees do to manage their emotions for customers. But the term has since expanded to capture the invisible work women do in relationships: anticipating needs, managing schedules, remembering birthdays, initiating difficult conversations, smoothing over conflicts, tracking everyone’s emotional states. This work is largely invisible precisely because it is done well. You only notice its absence when relationships start to fray.

The chill girl is just the romantic version of this unpaid labourer. Research shows that women are socialized to prioritize relationship harmony over personal needs, to accommodate rather than assert, to be liked rather than respected. The cool girl is just that socialization dressed up in a crop top, saying I’m so chill while internally screaming into her pillow.

The pressure to be chill starts early and compounds over time. Relationship therapists note that women are told to be confident but not bossy, assertive but not needy, supportive but never high maintenance. Being chill becomes a survival strategy; a way to avoid rejection, criticism, or being labelled difficult. But it comes at a cost: suppressed opinions to avoid being too intense, minimised needs to appear easygoing, relationships that feel fundamentally unequal.

The situationship epidemic has made this worse. When relationships exist in deliberate ambiguity, asking for clarity becomes a violation of the unspoken rules. Women are automatically viewed as obsessed if they simply ask what someone wants; emotional detachment and being chill with whatever become survival strategies rather than authentic preferences. In situationships, the chill girl performance becomes mandatory. To ask where this is going is to be too much. To want commitment is to be needy. To have feelings about how you are treated is to be crazy.

The result is a generation of women performing low maintenance so convincingly they almost believe it themselves. Almost.

The Philosophers of Full Selfhood

The feminist philosophers saw this coming. Simone de Beauvoir’s central insight in The Second Sex was that women are made, not born. Femininity is not natural or innate, it is a condition of socialisation. One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman, she wrote. The becoming includes learning to accommodate, to efface, to shrink one’s desires into whatever shape will cause the least friction.

De Beauvoir was particularly sharp on how this plays out in love. She observed that women are taught to define themselves through their relationships to men rather than through their own projects and pursuits. Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.

The trap de Beauvoir identified is that women are encouraged to seek transcendence (meaning, purpose, self-realisation) through love and through men, rather than through their own projects. This makes love not a meeting of equals but a form of self-abandonment. The woman in love, de Beauvoir wrote, loses herself in the beloved, makes herself an object rather than a subject. She waits. She adapts. She becomes what he wants rather than what she is.

She dreamed of something different: On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself - on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.

Joan Didion approached the same territory from a different angle. Her 1961 essay On Self-Respect remains one of the most precise diagnoses of what is lost when we perform versions of ourselves to gain approval. Self-respect, she argued, has nothing to do with the approval of others and everything to do with the ability to face yourself honestly. Character - the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life - is the source from which self-respect springs.

Didion’s essay begins with a failure, her failure to be elected to Phi Beta Kappa as a college student, and uses it as a jumping-off point for examining the difference between genuine self-regard and the desperate need for external validation. The lesson she learned from that disappointment was that there was no such thing as automatic approval, that the world would not organize itself around her expectations simply because she existed. This was, in its way, liberating. Once you stop expecting validation, you can start building something real.

Didion’s crucial observation was that without self-respect, we become trapped in an exhausting performance: To do without self-respect is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one’s failings. The singular power of self-respect, she wrote, is that it frees us from the expectations of others and gives us back to ourselves.

But what happens when we try to find ourselves and find no one home? Didion’s warning echoes across the decades: Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home. The chill girl who has spent years performing a version of herself that does not exist may eventually realize she has no idea who she actually is.

bell hooks brought love itself under examination. In All About Love, she argued that we have been taught a distorted version of love, one that centres power and control rather than mutual care. hooks defined love not as a feeling but as an action: the will to nurture the spiritual growth of oneself and another. By this definition, relationships characterised by domination, manipulation, or neglect, no matter how intense the feelings involved, are not love at all.

hooks was particularly incisive about how women confuse love with self-sacrifice. All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.

hooks identified what so many women learn too late: The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin. This is not narcissism. It is foundation-building. It is understanding that you cannot receive from others what you withhold from yourself.

The Data Does Not Lie

Here is where the research gets interesting. Women who have standards - who are, by the reductive vocabulary of dating culture, high maintenance - actually fare better.

According to research from the American Sociological Association, women initiate approximately 70% of divorces. This trend appears even more pronounced among college-educated couples. The most common reasons women cite for divorce include emotional and verbal neglect, unequal distribution of household and emotional labour, and simply that their needs were not being met. Notably, many husbands reported being completely surprised by their wife’s dissatisfaction. More than 25% said they were blindsided by the divorce request.

This blindsiding speaks to a profound communication gap, or perhaps more accurately, a listening gap. Many men in these studies described themselves as good providers who worked hard to ensure financial security, focused on what they assumed to be their primary role. But their wives were not asking for bigger houses. They were asking to be seen, heard, and partnered with. The disconnect between what men thought they were providing and what women actually needed is a case study in how gendered expectations distort relationships.

Women who initiate divorce report higher levels of well-being after the separation, despite often facing greater financial challenges. Research from Kingston Business School found that women who divorced were much happier than their male counterparts, even accounting for the negative financial impact. The explanation offered: Women who enter into an unhappy marriage feel much more liberated after divorce than their male counterparts.

But why?

Women are more likely to seek professional help during and after divorce. They are more likely to build supportive networks. They are less likely to rely on substances to cope and more likely to turn to experiences that enrich them. Men, by contrast, often show a persistent reliance on marriage for care and companionship, hence the higher rates of remarriage among divorced men. Studies consistently find that marriage extends more health and longevity benefits to men than to women, suggesting that men have more to lose when marriages end.

Perhaps most telling: research shows that in unmarried couples, men and women end relationships at equal rates. It is specifically in marriage that women dominate the exit. As Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld noted, this supports the feminist assertion that some women experience heterosexual marriage as oppressive or uncomfortable. Marriage as an institution, it seems, has been slow to catch up with expectations for gender equality.

The emotional labour research tells a similar story. Women in heterosexual relationships consistently report doing more emotion work than their partners. Remembering the appointments, managing the social calendar, noticing when something is wrong, initiating difficult conversations, managing everyone’s feelings during conflict. A 2016 survey found that 75% of women would rather be alone, successful, and happy than in a relationship where they are not happy, compared to 58% of men.

The conclusion writes itself: women with standards who are willing to enforce them end up happier, even when the short-term cost is walking away. The high maintenance label is a scare tactic. The data suggests it should be a goal.

The Architecture of a Full Life

I grew up rarely being told no where it mattered. Not spoilt in the bratty sense - though also that! - but spoilt in the sense that my wanting was taken seriously. Study what you love. Change your mind. Take the risk. Start again. Become someone else. My life was not built around shrinking my desires into something manageable. It was built around making space for them to exist.

That kind of upbringing rewires you. It teaches you that your life is yours.

And I grew up watching love done in full sentences. Parents who loved each other with the kind of devotion that does not require an audience, does not need proof, does not keep score. The kind of love that shows up in choices, in plans, in loyalty, in the shape of a shared life, even when things were impossibly hard. When you have seen that up close, you stop confusing intensity with intimacy.

So I grew into a woman who does not experience care as a rare event. I have a village. A big one. It is not theoretical. It is practical. It calls. It checks in. It remembers. It pulls up. It celebrates without turning it into a competition. It holds my joy like joy is allowed to be loud, and my grief like it is allowed to be real.

My life, in other words, is already full. It has momentum. It has weight. Work I care about. Friendships that steady me. Family that makes me feel held even when I am being difficult. Routines that keep my mind from eating itself. Small pleasures I have built on purpose. And a kind of pleasure in my own company that I had to fight for, earn, defend.

So yes, when someone arrives, they are not entering empty space. They are entering a home. A home with furniture I chose carefully, with windows I learned how to open, with corners I softened myself. You have to be an exceptional person to make me want to rearrange it. You have to add, expand, widen, make me want to shift the bones of what already holds me up.

That is the part people do not like, because it removes the romance of winning a woman who is lonely. If I am loved well already, you cannot impress me with crumbs. If I am supported, you cannot confuse me with inconsistency. If my life is rich, your effort has to be real, not loud, not grand, not performative. Real like consistency. Real like repair. Real like showing up twice, the same way, without being asked.

The Economics of Desire

There is a reason the language of maintenance comes from machines, not from people. High-maintenance cars require expensive parts, regular servicing, and specialised mechanics. The implication when applied to women is clear: you are a costly investment with uncertain returns. The calculus is explicitly transactional - what do I get for what I put in?

This framing reveals something crucial about how we have been taught to think about relationships. The high-maintenance accusation assumes that love is a zero-sum exchange, that every need met by a partner is a debit from some invisible account, that the ideal relationship is one where you get maximum output for minimum input. It is the language of efficiency applied to intimacy, and it is fundamentally dehumanising.

But consider what the term actually describes when stripped of its judgment: a person who knows what they need and communicates it clearly. A person with standards they are willing to articulate. A person who will not pretend to be satisfied with less than they require. In any other context, we would call this self-awareness. We would call it emotional intelligence. We would call it healthy.

The low-maintenance woman, by contrast, is celebrated precisely for her lack of demands. She is easy. She is simple. She is no trouble at all. But what does that actually mean in practice? It means she swallows her disappointments. It means she does not ask for things to be different. It means she has learned that her needs are inconvenient and has preemptively minimised them. The low-maintenance woman is often not actually low-maintenance at all. She has simply internalised the work of managing her own unmet needs so thoroughly that it has become invisible.

We are raised in a culture that explicitly trains women for self-abnegation, where the highest compliment for a woman is often that she adjusted well, where maternal sacrifice is elevated to religious status, where asking for oneself is considered selfish and unfeminine. The cool girl here is just the Western packaging for something our grandmothers would recognise immediately: the good woman who wants nothing, needs nothing, causes no trouble.

The economics of desire only make sense if you believe that meeting someone’s needs is fundamentally costly rather than fundamentally rewarding. But anyone who has been in a genuinely good relationship knows that caring for someone you love is not a drain, it’s one of life’s greatest pleasures. The effort you put in comes back transformed. The problem is not that some women require too much care. The problem is that some men experience any care requirement as excessive.

The Threshold, Not the Type

High-maintenance is not a personality type. It is a threshold. A line. It is what happens when you stop negotiating against yourself. It is what happens when you stop treating your needs like they are embarrassing and start treating them like information.

Most women are not low maintenance. They are under-loved and over-adapted. They have been taught that being chosen is about being easy, and that being easy is about having no appetite. No needs, no boundaries, no preferences that might inconvenience someone else. So they become fluent in self-erasure. They call it maturity. They call it being cool, even while it hollows them out.

Becoming high maintenance starts in a very unsexy place: you stop auditioning. You stop sanding down your edges so someone can hold you without getting hurt. You stop laughing when something feels wrong. You stop saying it is fine when your body is already tallying the cost. You let the discomfort exist long enough to actually learn what it is telling you.

Then you build a life that does not feel like waiting. Not a busy life. A full one. Friendships you do not abandon the second a man texts. Work you respect. Money habits that make you feel safe. Rituals that belong to you: morning walks, a gym routine, Sunday calls with your people, a savings rule you do not break, a home you are proud of. A life that says: I am not here to be picked. I am here to be lived.

When your life is full, you become harder to manipulate, not because you are cold, but because you are not starved. Attention stops being intoxicating when you are already seen. Mixed signals stop being exciting when you know what steadiness feels like. You stop chasing potential like it is a personality trait. You stop dating almost. You start noticing what someone consistently makes you feel: small or steady.

You also stop romanticising confusion. You stop calling anxiety butterflies. You stop thinking maybe is a mysterious love language. You stop confusing obsession for devotion. You start preferring the kind of love that is repetitive in the best way: ordinary, sturdy, slightly boring, deeply safe. The kind of love that does not spike your cortisol before it kisses you.

And you start guarding your peace like you have paid for it. Because you have. You paid for it with lonely nights and hard conversations and the humiliating work of learning yourself. With therapy or gym or prayer or whatever stitched you back together. With choosing yourself when it would have been easier not to.

The Question That Changes

At some point, the question changes. You stop asking, Will he choose me? and start asking, Does he fit into the life I have built?

A relationship is not a prize. It is a choice. And you are allowed to want a beautiful one, one that matches your standards, your pace, your dignity. One that does not require you to betray yourself to keep it.

bell hooks wrote that Love cannot exist in any relationship that is based on domination and coercion. She was talking about systems, but she was also talking about the micro-negotiations of everyday partnership. The relationship where one person’s comfort always trumps the other’s needs. The dynamic where stating a preference becomes making demands. The love that requires you to shrink to fit inside it.

We are living in a moment where those conditions are finally, unevenly, emerging. Women have unprecedented access to education, work, and financial independence. We can build lives that do not require marriage for survival. And increasingly, we are using that freedom not to avoid relationships but to demand better ones.

The manosphere sees this as a crisis. They interpret women’s rising standards as evidence of corruption, manipulation, hypergamy run amok. They have built an entire mythology around the idea that women with expectations are fundamentally broken. The irony is that their ideology often makes its adherents less, not more, attractive as partners. Research on former Red Pillers shows that many left because the ideology made them worse at relationships, not better.

But maybe what they are actually witnessing is women refusing to perform gratitude for the bare minimum. Maybe what looks like too high standards is just what happens when women have options. The real crisis, perhaps, is not that women want too much. It is that some men want relationships without the work of deserving them.

The Invitation

If that word, high maintenance, is supposed to scare me into being easier, it is about ten years late. I have outgrown the urge to be digestible.

This is not about becoming cold or closed off or impossible to please. It is about understanding that your standards are not obstacles to love. They are directions to it. They are information about what you need to feel safe, seen, and held. And anyone who treats that information as a burden has already told you something important about what they are offering.

The chill girl performance was always a losing game. You carve yourself down to be easier, and then you are chosen for a version of yourself that does not exist. You maintain the performance until you cannot, and then you are accused of changing, of being different from who you seemed. The mask always slips eventually. Better to never put it on.

Didion wrote about the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. That is what self-respect gives you: the capacity to care deeply about what matters and release what does not. To know that not everyone will choose you and to understand that this is not a failure, it is a filter. It is the mechanism that ensures the people who stay are the ones who actually want what you are actually offering.

So here is my invitation to anyone who has spent years performing chill to be loved:

Stop. Just stop.

Build a life that is full without a relationship at its centre. Cultivate friendships that feel like home. Find work that engages you. Create rituals of pleasure and rest. Learn what you need to feel safe, and practice asking for it out loud. Become the kind of person who does not abandon herself the second someone shows interest.

And then, from that fullness, decide who you are willing to rearrange the furniture for. Notice that the question has changed. It is not Does he like me? It is Does he enhance this life I have built? It is not Am I too much? It is Is he enough?

If you are in your high-maintenance era, where love has to match the life you have already built, welcome. Stay as long as you like.

And send this to the friend who keeps shrinking herself for men who have not expanded at all.

We are not doing that in 2026.

Self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth.

- Joan Didion