Intro by AMV: Most people know B. R. Ambedkar as a mind that reshaped a country, through law, through language, through an unrelenting clarity about injustice.

There is no shortage of research on the remarkable life and thought of Ambedkar. What is harder to find is the quieter life, the small, almost forgettable details that do not look like history, but reveal the emotional world of the man who changed the shape of this country.

This guest post stays with those details. The mundane, the intimate, the parts that rarely get recorded. Over to S. P. V. A. Sairam.

To love animals and to be loved by them undoubtedly constitutes a profound spiritual experience. The enormous and boundless joy one feels while playing with pets may never be accurately captured in words. The sense of fulfilment is truly staggering, often imparting an ethereal feeling of belonging to a wider cosmos, something beyond the realm of merely human. This is probably why the great French poet Anatole France remarked: “Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.”

In this context, it is exciting to inquire into and learn about the impact of animals on the life of the greatest maker of modern India, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar. Although many biographies are being written on Dr. Ambedkar, most confine themselves to documenting his enduring contributions to law, economics, constitutional jurisprudence and so on, while paying little or no attention to his private life. As a result, an impression is created that he hardly had the opportunity to experience those small, mundane moments that constitute the essence of a fulfilled life.

How accurate is this impression? In my close examination of the writings, speeches and correspondence of Dr. Ambedkar, guided by Mies van der Rohe’s conviction that God dwells in the details, I discovered an extraordinary wealth of information about his private life that is yet to be documented. Having realised the utmost significance of this material, I set out to chronicle it.

In my previous article, I documented the movies that Dr. Ambedkar watched and the interactions he had with film stars and musicians of his era. In this essay, I turn to a different aspect of his private life, collecting information about his pets, their names, their stories, and the forgotten anecdotes surrounding them to reveal the profound solace Babasaheb found in the company of these lovely animals.

I. The Goat in the Chawl

Young Bhim was nearly 12 years old when his family moved from Satara to a chawl in Bombay city in 1903. His father, Ramji Maloji Sakpal, had twin objectives in mind in making this decision, namely, to escape from the brutalities of the caste system in rural Maharashtra and to secure better educational prospects for his children. Around 1911 or 1912, Young Bhim’s family moved to a new place in the city called Bombay Improvement Trust (BIT) chawl No. 1, situated in Parel.

In the BIT chawl, they lived on the second floor where they had two small rooms [Room No 50 and 51] situated opposite each other. Room No. 50 was used as a study-cum-sitting room, while the room opposite, Room No. 51, was used for household purposes.

Besides providing space for Young Bhim, his father, and nearly ten other family members, these two tiny rooms offered shelter to a loving she-goat! This she goat was one of the first few pets documented in the literature connected to Babasaheb. Unfortunately, apart from this basic detail, we do not know anything about her. The very fact that it was specifically mentioned by Babasaheb in some of his speeches might indicate the nature of affection that he had for this lovely goat^.

This BIT chawl was created in response to the deadly bubonic plague that killed thousands of people in the Bombay province between 1896 and 1897 [Savitrimai Phule passed away during the same period while carrying an Untouchable Mahar boy to a hospital]. According to the British colonial government, the overcrowded spaces in Bombay acted as the incubators of contagious diseases like Plague, and they had set out to mitigate the trouble by building new homes for the poor by dismantling the slums.

In this process, they entrusted the task to Bombay Improvement Trust [which was modelled on City of Glasgow Improvement Trust], which allocated homes to the poor in different chawls based on caste! That is why, Young Bhim’s family lived in tenements among mostly other untouchable families.

II. The Dogs He Loved

“When the Man waked up he said, ‘What is Wild Dog doing here?’ And the Woman said, ‘His name is not Wild Dog anymore, but the First Friend, because he will be our friend for always and always and always.”

– Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories [page 204]

Dr. Ambedkar kept many dogs throughout his life. We gain a clear sense of the enormous love Dr. Ambedkar had for dogs through the books written by his associates. Among these, it is Nanak Chand Rattu who gives a fascinating account of this love:

“During my close association with Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar till his last breath I have had the honour and privilege to watch him from a very close distance, his love for pet animals, especially the dogs to which he had an irresistible fascination and liking, probably they are so faithful. He would bring one from the farthest corner of the country if his eyes fell on a charming, good breed and would be prepared to pay any price…

Whenever he went out for long, he always instructed the servant to pay special attention to the dogs. He would even inquire about the health of the dogs in his absence. He never stopped worrying about the dog till he saw him on his coming back. He would even inquire about the health of the dog on phone, give instructions …. he would like that the dog was brought at the Aerodrome, coming out he would immediately look at the dog approaching him and pat.”

While we may not know the names and stories of all those wonderful dogs who gave immense joy to Babasaheb, we can still make an attempt to get acquainted with a few of them.

Tobby, and the Grief That Followed

Let us meet Tobby first. There are two accounts related to him or her. On the one hand, it is generally suggested that this fox terrier dog named Tobby stayed with Dr. Ambedkar at Rajgruha during the late 1920s and early 1930s. We can even find the picture of this dog in the family photo of Dr. Ambedkar in 1934, which I share below:

On the other hand, Nanak Chand Rattu, who became a personal assistant to Babasaheb in 1940s, mentions about a dog with the same name, Tobby. Recalling the intense love and attachment that Dr. Ambedkar had for Tobby, Rattu recorded:

“Tobby, his pet dog at Bombay accidentally caught its paw in a door and cried the loudest. As he saw the dog with a bandage around its paw, he was worried and managed to send the dog to the veterinary hospital. When Tobby fell ill, he too often inquired after his health, visiting the dog in hospital twice a day.”

When Tobby passed away, it became nearly impossible for the associates of Babasaheb to console him, as Rattu writes:

“When news came to him that the poor dog had died this shocked him so terribly that he rolled in his chair like a bereaved mother, that for the rest of the day and for several days afterwards he was cast in a deepest gloom and constantly muttered ‘Poor Tobby’ and would go to have a glance where the dog used to lie” ⁴

When Rattu discusses Tobby, it is not clear whether he is referring to the dog that lived at Rajgruha between 1920s to 1930s [as seen in the photograph above], or to another dog that lived with Babasaheb in the late 1940s [when he joined as PA to Babasaheb]. If the description above refers to the dog that lived in the late 1940s, then the dog featured in the family photograph of Dr. Ambedkar is not Tobby. If that is the case, what was his or her name? Perhaps, we might find an answer to it if we examine the old Marathi books written on the early days of Babasaheb.

The story of Jeel and Peter

Next comes the beautiful dog, Jeel. She was owned by Barrister M. B. Samarth, who was a close friend of Dr. Ambedkar. Besides sharing a love for reading books and a commitment to social transformation, what strengthened the bond between Dr. Ambedkar and Barrister M. B. Samarth was their love for animals, particularly dogs. As I have discussed in my previous articles, M. B. Samarth was the paternal uncle of the famous Hindi actress Nutan.

In those times, the Samarth family used to have a dog called Jeel of the Vilayati or foreign breed. Dr. Ambedkar loved her so much that whenever he visited the home of Samarth, he would spend time playing with her. After Jeel passed away, Babasaheb was deeply saddened. Later, he took one of her puppies to Rajgruha as a token of love for Jeel. Babasaheb named this jewel from Jeel as ‘Peter’. Our Peter had the good fortune to spend time with Babasaheb in both Bombay and Delhi.

Mohini, and the Rhythm of His Days

Of all of Dr. Ambedkar’s dogs, Mohini is perhaps the one who was photographed the most! With brown, silky hair and long, flowing ears, she was undoubtedly one of the most energetic dogs that Babasaheb ever had. For a brief account of her, we must turn again to Rattu. Speaking about the daily morning ritual of Mohini, he wrote:

“Early in the morning, Mohini would quietly enter room wagging her tail, to get the morning pat, raising her paw as if to shake hands and then the great scholar would know that this was morning. He would then divert his attention for a while, taking the dog in his lap, fondle with her with a patting and exclaim: “So, you are here to tell me, this is morning. You are so good. Alright, now go and have your milk”. So saying he would again start on the job, reading and writing.”

On the fascinating bond of love between Babasaheb and Mohini, he wrote:

“She was the most loveable. Dr. Ambedkar would too often take her in his lap, pat and fondle and she was also very responsive to his calling.…In the evenings, sitting in the lawns of the bungalow, Mohini would run around his chair, dance and play, all of a sudden, she would then raise her paw as if to shake hand which the great man immediately responded, much to the joy of the onlookers.

The dog would then immediately leap on to lick his hands and face and he would fondle with her for long, taking her into his lap and talk to her in a very passionate and friendly way. He would ask her whether she had taken milk and food. He called her Bhikni. He would then persuade her to lie near his feet and curl up in sleep. Mohini would stay with Babasaheb while he was drafting the articles of constitution all throughout the night.

…Whenever Dr. Ambedkar went out Mohini would sit at the entrance of the bungalow and wait for the arrival of her master. At the very sight of the car entering the premises she would escort running ahead of it with wagging tail, with a wide dance. As the great man came out, she would immediately cling raising her paw to get a patting.

…While Dr. Ambedkar was away to Kathmandu to attend the World Buddhist Conference, Mohini had been admitted to dog hospital. On his return, coming out of the plane, the first thing he asked me was about the health of the dog. Such was his love for the pet dogs.” ⁷

As the Chairman of the Drafting committee of the Constitution of India, it was a daily routine for Dr. Ambedkar to immerse himself in his work after returning from Parliament, with little or no rest. Dr. Ambedkar’s health was already deteriorating then, and the task of preparing the Constitution of independent India took a heavy toll on his already fragile health. In one of his letters addressed to Kamalakant Chitre on 31^st August [1947], Dr. Ambedkar wrote:

“My health is on the down-grade. For the last fifteen days I have not had a wink of sleep, the nights have [become] a nightmare to me. The neurotic pain always comes at midnight and continues throughout. I am taking insulin as well as homeopathic medicine. Neither seems to give me relief. I must now learn to endure what appears beyond cure”

Dr. Savita Ambedkar, who took immense care of Babasaheb after their marriage in 1948, and who had worked relentlessly to extend the lifespan of Dr. Ambedkar made the following observations:

“The Constitution of independent India was altogether the creation of Dr Ambedkar. He worked on it for sixteen to eighteen hours every day at a stretch. He would say, ‘I am repaying my debt to the people of this soil.’… Dr Ambedkar had already been suffering from diabetes, rheumatism, neurological pains and a host of other ailments. The pain in his legs would flare up every now and again, as a result of which he would not be able to sleep for fifteen days at a stretch, writhing in bed all through the night. Pressing his limbs, giving his legs an oil massage, fomenting his legs with a warmed-up brick wrapped in a towel whenever his neural and leg pains flared up, I would always be anxious to find ways to bring relief to him in some way or the other.⁸

During this unimaginably hectic and challenging period between 1947 and 1950, Mohini would accompany the learned doctor all throughout the night as he worked tirelessly to draft the provisions related to the Constitution, the Hindu Code Bill, and other laws. She would roll and wriggle at his feet, and he would gently pat her with affection. In the midst of tyrannical and fanatical humans, he found solace and contentment in the company of these innocent animals.

III. Dr. Ambedkar on How Animals Shaped the Early Human World

In his path-breaking sociological treatise titled “The Untouchables [1948]”, Dr. Ambedkar begins his discussion of the origin of Untouchability by delineating the distinction between nomadic and settled communities of the primitive human world.

In this context, he speaks about the significant role played by cattle in the life of nomadic communities:

“How did Primitive Society become a settled community?... Primitive Society was no doubt nomadic. But it was nomadic not because of any migratory instinct. Nor was it due to any mental trait peculiar to it. It was the result of the fact that the earliest form of the wealth held by Primitive Society was cattle… Primitive Society was migratory because its wealth, namely the cattle, was migratory. Cattle went after new pastures. Primitive Society by reason of its love for cattle, therefore, went wherever its cattle carried it. Primitive Society became fixed in its abode, in other words became a settled community, when a new species of wealth was discovered. This new species of wealth was land. This happened when Primitive Society learned the art of farming and of cultivating land. Wealth became fixed at one place when it changed its form from cattle to land. With this change Primitive Society also became settled at the same place.”

After discussing the evolution of human societies, Dr. Ambedkar gives a fascinating exposition of the concept of Broken Men by citing examples from Ireland [such as Brehon Laws], Wales and so on before turning to the question of Untouchability in India. For a more detailed account, readers should consult the original text.

Some of you might have already noticed from the above details that Dr. Ambedkar published this book in 1948, a period when he was intensely engaged in the making of India’s Constitution. I am sure it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that only Dr. Ambedkar could write and publish an in-depth sociological book that addresses questions such as the origin of untouchability – a remarkable feat that no sociologist or anthropologist before or after Babasaheb could achieve - while simultaneously preparing a constitution for a massive country like India. Truly, Ekach Saheb Babasaheb!

IV. The Books That Shaped His Curiosity About Animals

A mere glance at his massive library reveals that Dr. Ambedkar possessed numerous books [more than 60,000] on a wide range of subjects, ranging from politics, law, and economics to astrophysics [including relativity], anatomy of muscles, psychoanalysis, plant physiology, and ethology [the science of animal behaviour].

Knowing this, I have often wondered which books Dr. Ambedkar read on contemporary developments in the domains of Evolution and Ethology. As luck would have it, while browsing Facebook, I came across a terrific post shared by former civil servant and scholar Mangesh Dahiwale, in which he shared images from Dr. Ambedkar’s copy of “Man in the Modern World” authored by the preeminent evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley. ⁹

What strikes me most in these images is that the book is heavily underlined, which speaks volumes about Babasaheb’s interest in evolutionary biology and ethology. Since the book discusses animals, including references to dogs, I take the liberty of sharing a few excerpts from the underlined passages.

Huxley discusses the fate of the three highest animal groups in evolutionary history - the molluscs, the arthropods, and the vertebrates - and why the Molluscs couldn’t succeed better than the other two groups. The explanation given by Huxley piqued Dr. Ambedkar’s interest, as evidenced by the underlined portion from the book:

“What was it that cut the insects off from progress? The answer appears to lie in their breathing mechanism.” [For detailed explanation, see from page 14 of the book]

Having shown why the insects reached the end of their blind alley, Huxley proceeds to discuss the divergent lines that reptiles, birds and mammals took in the evolutionary past. Here too, Dr. Ambedkar found the whole discussion quite interesting, as the underlined words testify:

“Temperature regulation is a necessary basis for final progress…Two reptilian lines achieved this next step, in the guise of the birds and the mammals. The birds soon, however, came to a dead end, chiefly because their forelimbs were entirely taken up in the specialization for flight…. Most mammalian lines, however „cut themselves off from indefinite progress by one-sided evolution, turning their limbs and jaws into specialized and therefore limited instruments.”

After a few pages, the analysis proceeds to discuss the flexors and extensors [muscle groups] of limbs, in which a reference is made to dogs. The dog lover in Babasaheb was quick to catch the point, as can be seen below:

V. The Birds He Cared For

Associates of Babasaheb, like Devi Dayal, noted that Dr. Ambedkar would regularly fill the bird water feeders to quench the thirst of birds like sparrows, parrots and other migratory avians. ¹⁰ It has been recorded by Rattu that whenever Dr. Ambedkar cut his fingernails and toenails, he would collect all the nail clippings in a cloth and dispose of them safely. When asked by Rattu about this habit, Babasaheb told him that he did it to prevent the injury [or even death] to small birds from ingesting the nail clippings!

The above instances throw a flood of light on the deeply emotional bond that Dr. Ambedkar shared with animals, particularly dogs and birds. In this context, it is not surprising that he found Buddhism close to his heart. For Buddha too, just like Babasaheb, had immeasurable love for animals.

Interesting as it is, Dr. Ambedkar describes a moving tale of the young Siddhartha in his magnum opus “Buddha and his Dhamma” that speaks volumes about the blessed lord’s compassionate heart:

“His childhood was marked by the presence of supreme sense of compassion. Once he went to his father’s farm. During recess he was resting under a tree enjoying the peace and beauty of nature. While so seated a bird fell from the sky just in front of him. The bird had been shot at by an arrow which had pierced its body and was fluttering about in great agony. Siddharth rushed to the help of the bird. He removed the arrow, dressed its wound and gave it water to drink. He picked up the bird, came to the place where he was seated and wrapped up the bird in his upper garment and held it next to his chest to give it warmth: Siddharth was wondering who could have shot this innocent bird.

Before long there came his cousin Devadatta armed with all the implements of shooting. He told Siddharth that he had shot a bird flying in the sky, the bird was wounded but it flew some distance and fell somewhere there, and asked him if he had seen it. Siddharth replied in the affirmative and showed him the bird which had by that time completely recovered…Devadatta demanded that the bird be handed over to him. This Siddharth refused to do. A sharp argument ensued between the two. Devadatta argued that he was the owner of the bird because by the rules of the game, he who kills a game becomes the owner of the game. Siddharth denied the validity of the rule. He argued that it is only he who protects that has the right to claim ownership. How can he who wants to kill be the owner?

Neither party would yield. The matter was referred to arbitration. The arbitrator upheld the point of view of Siddharth Gautama. Devadatta became his permanent enemy. But Gautama’s spirit of compassion was so great that he preferred to save the life of an innocent bird to securing the goodwill of his cousin. Such were the traits of character found in the early life of Siddharth Gautama”

There are many stories in the Buddhist literature in which Buddha takes the form of animals to deliver moral sermons. A striking example is the Kukkura Jātaka.

This Jātaka recounts the tale of a Bodhisatta who was born as a wise dog [an extraordinary example of anthropomorphism], leading a pack in a massive cemetery. One day, when the King of Benares, Brahmadatta, learns that the leather of his chariot had been gnawed, he hastily ordered a massacre of dogs. To save his kin, the Bodhisatta entered the king’s palace with unflinching bravery and confronted the king in the following way:

“Is it you who are having the dogs destroyed?” “Yes, it is I.” “What is their offence, king of men?” “They have been gnawing the straps and the leather covering my carriage.” “Do you know the dogs who actually did the mischief?” “No, I do not.” “But, your majesty, if you do not know for certain the real culprits, it is not right to order the destruction of every dog that is seen.” “It was because dogs had gnawed the leather of my carriage that I ordered them all to be killed.” “Do your people kill all dogs without exception; or are there some dogs who are spared?” “Some are spared,—the thorough-bred dogs of my own palace.”

… “Sire, just now you were saying that you had ordered the universal slaughter of all dogs wherever found, because dogs had gnawed the leather of your carriage; whereas, now, you say that the thorough-bred dogs of your own palace escape death. Therefore you are following the four Evil Courses of partiality, dislike, ignorance and fear. Such courses are wrong, and not kinglike. For kings in trying cases should be as unbiassed as the beam of a balance. But in this instance, since the royal dogs go scot-free, whilst poor dogs are killed, this is not the impartial doom of all dogs alike, but only the slaughter of poor dogs,”

Impressed by these words of wisdom, the king asked the Bodhisatta to throw light on the real culprits. In order to expose the real culprits, the Bodhisatta mixed the buttermilk with kusa grass and fed the palace dogs. As they drank it, the palace dogs began to vomit pieces of leather one after the other. Having witnessed the entire scene, the king understood who the culprits were, and “commanded that the lives of all creatures should be safe from harm. He ordered that all dogs from the Bodhisatta downwards, should have a constant supply of food such as he himself ate; and, abiding by the teachings of the Bodhisatta, he spent his life long in charity and other good deeds”

The vast Buddhist literature [particularly in Pali] contains not only the essential teachings and timeless wisdom of the Tathāgata Buddha but also serves as a massive repository of innumerable historical accounts, myths and floating legends of a multitude of independent tribes and sects from ancient Indian history.

Having fully appreciated the significance of Pali sources in unearthing the past, Dr. Ambedkar compiled an entire dictionary of the Pali language, comprising more than 12,000 entries, and translated it into four languages [Marathi, Gujarati, Hindi and English] so that students and scholars who wish to understand, analyse and document the true history of Ancient India may use his dictionary as a guide in their quest to exhume the past. Speaking on the same, Dr. Ambedkar remarked:

“Ancient Indian history must be exhumed. Without its exhumation Ancient India will go without history. Fortunately, with the help of the Buddhist literature, Ancient Indian History can be dug out of the debris which the Brahmin writers have heaped upon in a fit of madness.

The Buddhist literature helps a great deal to remove the debris and see the underlying substance quite clearly and distinctly. The Buddhist literature shows that the Devas were a community of human beings. There are so many Devas who come to the Buddha to have their doubts and difficulties removed. How could this be unless the Devas were human beings.

…Again, the Buddhist canonical literature throws a flood of light on the puzzling question of the Nagas. It makes a distinction between womb- born Nagas and egg-born Nagas and thereby making it clear that the word Naga has two-fold meaning. In its original sense it stood for the name of a human community…. With this exhumation of debris, we can see Ancient Indian History in a new light.”

VI. The Meaning of Maitri

It must be remembered that not everyone who loves animals would extends the same degree of concern to humans, and vice versa. We know how brutal humans are towards animals. It is equally true that there is no dearth of hypocrites who feed sugar to ants but kill humans for exercising their basic human rights, without any sense of remorse.

For them, so-called concern for animals takes precedence over the basic rights of humanity. Crores of people may perish in utter poverty, millions of children may remain stunted and wasted, and many more may spend their lives in an extremely disadvantaged state of exploitation and abuse, yet their conscience remains hardly pricked. These same “apolitical” and arrogant people will suddenly wake from their deliberate deep slumber the moment something happens to animals.

One wonders why these active and responsible citizens do not display similar fire in questioning the injustice and ignominies to which fellow humans are subjected on a daily basis. Why limit the boundary of your love only to animals? Why not extend it to encompass the suffering humanity? It is highly possible that even this overt display of concern for animals might be just another deceptive performance exhibited by privileged castes to project themselves as true champions of love.

To conclude, it takes an extraordinary degree of moral fibre to possess unbounded and untainted love and concern for both humans as well as animals alike. As Buddha profoundly observed:

“Love is not enough; what is required is Maitri. It is wider than love. It means fellowship not merely with human beings but with all living beings. It is not confined to human beings. Is not such Maitri necessary? What else can give to all living beings the same happiness which one seeks for one’s own self, to keep the mind impartial, open to all, with affection for every one and hatred for none?

And Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar was truly a Mahamaitrisagara [to coin a phrase] – the mighty ocean of Maitri, who has not only emancipated the sunken humanity but also bestowed unfathomable love upon all the living throughout his blessed life. Let us get inspired from the great life of Dr. Ambedkar and work to disseminate the spirit of Maitri – the foundation of a real democracy.

I end my essay by dedicating it in loving memory of my dogs, Shambhu, Simba, Sheero, Michael, Shambu, Simbha, Tobby and the two unnamed kittens of Alex.

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About the author

Dr. S. P. V. A. Sairam is a dentist an independent researcher. He has been writing articles exploring the fascinating lives of Dr. Ambedkar, Phule couple, and medieval telugu posts since six years.

Some of his articles include “Recreating the lost library of Mahatma Jotiba Phule”, “Movies watched by Dr. Ambedkar”, “Beyond sacrifice: A comprehensive portrait of Ramabai Ambedkar” and so on.

You can find all his articles and talks by clicking this link

https://linktr.ee/DocSpva

References:

1] Ambedkar Awakening India’s Social Conscience by Narendra Jadhav

2] Outcaste Bombay City Making and the Politics of the Poor by Juned Shaikh.

Although the book is informative, I found a few remarks that are objectionable. For example, by citing Khairmode, the author writes: “Sakpal’s family considered Dabak chawl respectable or proper (vyavasthita), while they deemed the places many other Dalits lived, often from the same Mahar jati, filthy. They had borrowed the existing discourse of sanitary and unsanitary housing in early twentieth-century Bombay and used it to highlight class or status distinctions within a caste group.”. There is no evidence to back this claim and a reference from Khairmode is as unreliable as a gossip from Goebbels, unless it is substantiated with other sources. To understand more about the distortions and disinformation shared by Khairmode, see Dr Bhagawan Dhande’s Babasahebaanchya Badnaamicha Mahaprakalp (The Mega Project to Defame Babasaheb).

3] Little known facets of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar by Nanak Chand Rattu

4] ibid

5] To know more about the association of Dr. Ambedkar with films and film stars, check my article https://www.theculturecafe.in/p/an-unexplored-side-of-dr-ambedkar?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

6] डॉ बाबासाहेब आंबेडकर यांचे दलितेतर सहकारी. ले. योगीराज बागुल [Thanks to my friend Milind Patil for translating the relevant part for this article]

7] Little known facets of Dr. B. R. Ambedkar by Nanak Chand Rattu

8] Babasaheb My life with Dr. Ambedkar by Dr. Savita Ambedkar, pages 16, 90.

9] I thank Mangesh Dahiwale sir for sharing this invaluable reference https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1AczKrGRtR/

10] Daily routine of Dr. Ambedkar by Devi Dayal

The article itself was ordinary piece of writing. In the beginning it argued that in India a book selling three thousand copies is fairly typical. Ten thousand copies is considered a bestseller. This is true that in a country of over a billion people, those numbers appear small. By the end, the author even acknowledged that literature festivals raise awareness, and that if a handful of people hear something they remember for life, it is worth it. It was hardly a demolition of Indian literary culture.

The headline is clearly clickbait, but I still could not understand the anger. Why are we offended if someone says we are not reading for pleasure? Perhaps the larger issue is that we are limited in what we mean when we use the term- reading culture.

For a large part of India, reading has never been detached from purpose. It is tied to utility. It is tied to survival. In a country obsessed with competitive exams, reading must promise a return on investment. The book must lead somewhere. It must produce a rank, a job, a transfer from a small town to a government office where you sit on the chair which for no reason has a white towel.

The schooling system prepares you for this early. You memorise textbooks. You buy guidebooks and what we called in our towns kunjis. You underline paragraphs that may appear in exams. Reading becomes less about wandering and more about targeting. Then come the coaching years. Kota, or towns that resemble it, with coaching academies rising beside tangled electric wires. Now there are many Kotas inside every city. Engineering entrance, medical entrance, banking exams, SSC, police recruitment, state services and yes mother of all- UPSC. Even philosophy or psychology is consumed strategically. If it helps in mains, it is valuable. If not, it is empty indulgence.

This also explains the popularity of self help manuals, Chanakya Neeti editions, books on the power of the subconscious mind, autobiographies of wealthy entrepreneurs. There were even news reports in 2009 about Mein Kampf being promoted in some business schools as a management guide. In such a climate, you begin to extract purpose from every minute spent turning a page. The purpose becomes bigger than the context.

For millions, books are bridges between their present life and a more stable one. The pleasure of reading is replaced by the necessity of reading. A novel may expand the mind, but an exam guide expands opportunity. That mentality shapes a certain kind of reading culture.

And yes this produces a particular reading habit. Anxious, goal driven, instrumental. Far removed from the image of leisure reading by the sea. The Indian reader is more likely to be reading at a plastic table under a tube light, with a ticking clock and a family expectation hovering nearby. Context changes the meaning of reading.

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And yet, pleasure does exist. Even in non metro towns, people read romantic fiction. They read crime thrillers. They consume mythology retellings on their phones. They follow web novels. Newspaper reading culture remains strong in most regions. Magazine culture once shaped entire generations and still survives in pockets. These too are part of reading culture.

In fact the most under discussed part of reading culture of India is Ambedkarite reading culture. Every year, lakhs of people gather at Deekshabhoomi on Dhamma Chakra Pravartan Din, and along with prayer and remembrance, books become central to the experience. The grounds around the stupa turn into a vast open book market where stalls sell the writings of B. R. Ambedkar, Buddhist texts, pamphlets on caste, biographies, speeches, and contemporary Ambedkarite literature. For many visitors, buying books is not decorative consumption but part of the pilgrimage itself. Families arrive prepared to purchase stacks, often carrying them back in cloth bags to their towns and villages. Small publishers rely heavily on these few days, because the scale of sales can surpass what they manage in the rest of the year.

It is one of the rare spaces in India where reading is collective and alive. Here reading may carry pleasure, but more importantly it carries dignity and emancipation. This reading culture rarely appears in the conversations of the self declared bibliophilic world or in elite networks that claim to define literary taste. And most definitely you will not find them on Instagram, where a selfie outside Faqir Chand Bookstore has become the symbolic image of India’s prime urban reading culture.

The idea of reading culture is complex, and the real conversation around it should not be defensive. Perhaps it should be practical. How do we make reading less intimidating? How do we remove the snobbery that surrounds certain classes of readers and self appointed taste makers who call themselves cultural writers, yet rarely look beyond their own class comfort? How do we build strong distribution networks beyond English speaking cities? How do we price books so that buying one does not feel like a luxury?

What India reads, and what we call reading culture, cannot be brushed under a single umbrella. None of this means that India does not read. It means India reads differently. Any serious analysis must pass through the lens of caste and class. Indians do read for pleasure, but they also read anxiously, strategically, and sometimes secretly. They read in languages that rarely enter metropolitan surveys. They read on cheap paper and cracked phone screens, often because income does not allow even the small pleasure of changing a new tempered glass.

And yes if you like to read for ultimate pleasure, you can read my book here.

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While reading the emails, one thing among many obvious others kept occurring to me, why these people cannot write even a single proper sentence. Most of the emails are themselves a demonstration of this struggle to construct or finish a thought. One reason is that rich elites are so dependent on outsourcing labour that even the act of thinking begins to feel like an assault on their “me time.”

This is very much possible as I too have felt this in the company of few elites. Many rich people have a clear aversion to thinking and they are lazy af. They are also bored. Very bored. This boredom often takes a dangerous turn, and now we are seeing what we are seeing.

The recent Epstein files break a long held myth, that rich people are highly ethical and possess a special mastery over personality and money. These qualities were routinely attached to billionaires, and from this belief emerged an entire self help book economy. People, especially in small towns, were told that wealth was a learnable skill. Pick up the right book from a railway station stall, memorise its lessons inside a four by four room, and success would follow. This produced a class that believed anyone could become rich, and that all it required was discipline, willpower and hard work.

This illusion that the rich are mainly hardworking has produced real damage. I saw this most clearly where I studied. One of the founders of my college in Rajasthan was a devoted follower of Bill Gates. He believed that success meant following the Gates way, extreme discipline, ethical living, and a constant problem solving attitude. Cribbers, we were told, could never succeed.

This belief shaped everything. Strict attendance was mandatory. Internal marking was strict. Dress codes were strictly enforced four days a week. We were made to wear a uniform, blue shirts and black pants. It was disgusting. Bill Gates had stolen the vibe of our youth and left us aura less. The main keyword was strictness over leisure.

I was watching an interview a few days ago with Dolly Chaiwala, a tea seller in India who became a social media sensation after Bill Gates drank tea at his stall. The interviewer asked him about the experience of meeting Bill Gates. Dolly snapped back, visibly irritated. “Bill Gates nahi. Bill Gates sir hota hai”- He replied. (It is not Bill Gates, it is Bill Gates sir.)

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The same kind of delusion gave birth to the Great American Dream, where you are promised that you can be rich if you work hard, and the Indian one, where people live with the guilt of not trying hard enough to be rich. While hard work does pay off, it is not the most important criterion for success. Especially when it is now amply clear that rich people are not hardworking, they are hardly working. They are well rested beneficiaries of systems designed to keep money circulating around them. They call this arrangement merit, mostly to sleep well at night.

This is how morality gets manufactured in the average person. While driving home in Jaipur, I saw a large Rajasthan Patrika billboard that read: Jeff Bezos padhte hai din ki ek kitaab. Aap ko kon rok rha hai. (Jeff Bezos reads one book everyday, who is stopping you).It is strange that a local newspaper ends up doing free public relations for a billionaire. The billboard builds a small mythology around Bezos, presenting him as a serious reader whose wealth is a natural outcome of intelligence and discipline. His riches appear as a moral reward, not as the result of systems designed to concentrate money. This helps maintain the status quo. Working class readers are left with the comforting explanation that the system works perfectly, and that they are poor only because they are not reading one book a day.

This illusion of rich people being smart is not limited to an average person in Jaipur. I recently saw a tweet by a very successful ad filmmaker who began by saying that some of the smartest men on the planet thought they would get away with the Epstein mess. The assumption that these men remain smart even after being exposed for what they are shows how deep this conditioning runs in society.

It is also worth noting that despite elite society being so shady, Indian cinema has produced very few films that actually depict this shadiness with any depth. The one name that comes to mind is Zoya Akhtar, a very competent filmmaker. But her gaze towards the rich is gentle and somewhat affectionate despite the mild crique. She occasionally hints that wealth brings its own problems, but the suggestion is never allowed to threaten the aspirational glow around that world. Their troubles are the usual ones, a little loneliness, a little confusion, the occasional detour outside marriage. The camera never strays far enough to show what their comfort rests on or to hint that they might be grotesque beneficiaries of an unfair world. Even in their brokenness they remain aspirational figures, lightly bruised yet never contaminated.

Madhur Bhandarkar has attempted it in his usual one dimensional and Punjab Kesari style of filmmaking . Still, there is one interesting scene in Page 3. Several rich people learn that an influential woman named Anjali has died. The news comes over a phone call.

A woman receives the call while standing inside an expensive clothing store, browsing colourful clothes. The voice on the phone tells her that Anjali is dead. She puts the phone down, exhales, and asks the salesman “alright, show me something in white.”

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The reason became clear soon enough. I had two honest responses.

First, I barely remembered most of what had happened this year. Second, whatever I did remember did not feel worth revisiting. I vaguely recall the Kamra incident and the breaking of a studio, but there is nothing left to say about it now. I remember the days around Operation Sindoor, when I lived with an anxiety that missiles could enter my Noida apartment at any moment. Even that period does not evoke any real interest, either for me or for a reader. There were many such moments. None of them ask to be revisited. Even thinking about them induces a yawn. They already feel stale, like infographic news from an Instagram page that was deactivated years ago.I stared at In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, sitting on my bookshelf like a moral accusation. It reminded me that he was a romantic man who treated memory as something sacred, stretching it into volumes of such length and density that I have never managed to finish them.

That struggle of writing also pushed me to think about memory itself. Espcially the memory in the times of social media included brain-fog and oversimulation.

There is something strange about how we remember. Memory is not linear, but we keep forcing linearity onto it. I am often asked a question that exhaust me- “tell us about your journey.” The person asking imagines a neat movement from point A to point B. Life does not work like that. You may start at A, reach Y, then fall to T, return to A, and stay stuck there for years. It is more a game of snakes and ladder than a Vande Bharat ride (or perhaps it is an Indigo flight)

This is why if anyone question you about your personal highlights of 2025 then it may create a small internal panic. You begin auditioning moments in your head, searching for events that felt like achievements. The thought that this may have been another wasted year is scary. So the awkward silences, the idle gazes at sunsets, the long spells of nothingness, and the low grade confusion are erased, even though they probably explain the year far better than any achievement. A yearender demands coherence. Life rarely supplies it.

To compensate for this failing memory, we now outsource remembering to apps. Yearly wraps arrive to tell you who you were. Spotify assigns you a listening age. YouTube claims to know you through your viewing history. Even ChatGPT now offers a wrap. Every platform works on the same belief: you are what you consume. Personality is reduced to data and choice that you made on those apps. The wandering of your thumb defines you.

At the same time, consumption itself begins to manufacture memory.

Every year I wait for meme rewind videos. These edits pull together viral templates and accidental moments into something surreal, almost like an alternate reality we all inhabited. Memes travel through circulation and repetition, picking up meaning along the way, until they settle into shared references among friends. They turn into a language. The rewind captures something official yearenders never manage. It brings back its mood, the absurd rhythms, and the nonsense through which most of the time was actually spent.

This also reveals how completely the border between online and offline life has dissolved. When I meet people who live intensely on Twitter (often called as Twelebs), conversation rarely escapes that platform. Everything is recalled through tweets, pile ons, cancellations, and fleeting victories of viral quote tweets. For them the world outside the timeline feels irrelevant, almost unreal. Their memories are digital memories which are formed according to what trended and what vanished. It is tempting to treat this as a personality flaw, and some of it is grating, but it is no longer unusual. It is simply how memory now learns to organise itself in the online world.

Even for those who are not creators, only consumers. That line too is fading. Posting an Instagram story is creation. Commenting is creation. Entire pages now exist that turn comments into content. On social media, to exist at all is to create, and in the same breath, to be converted into content yourself.

In this over-simulated world, memories become less physical and more digital. We have entered a phase where memory itself is outsourced. I often rely on Facebook Memories to understand who I was one or two years ago. Sometimes I cringe. Sometimes I am amazed by a great line I wrote. It becomes a strange kaleidoscope of humiliation and ego in equal measure. Google Photos does something similar. It reminds you where you ate, who you were with, the hotel bed, the food plate, the face that has aged, the one who have lived with you and one who now left forever. The world has moved on and traces remain.

When memory is stored outside the body, experience begins to feel second hand. Nothing stays long enough to bruise or to comfort. One moment replaces another before it has time to settle. Nostalgia too feel stripped of ache or warmth, producing neither special sadness nor special delight. In this endless overwrite, the sacredness of memory collapses. We are freed from remembering and slowly become hostages of the present. Topicality turns into the only reality, and there is a kind of lightness in that. But every freedom comes from a loss. In gaining ease, we may have lost the burden that once gave memories that made us feel more human. Perhaps if Proust were born in this age, he might be ordering Biscoff on Blinkit, less interested in remembering than in producing a new digital trace, posting a story with caption- In Search of Lost Clout.

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Dear Readers,

My Substack has been bit silent for the past month or so. The last few weeks have been, to put it mildly, hectic. A book release, literature festivals, family events, and a constant state of being in transit. I did not get the time to sit at my desk, do my work, and sink back into the comfort of routine.

I was telling a friend last night, a filmmaker and a firm believer in being a prisoner of boring routines, that there is something tragic about stealing someone’s routine. The rush of travel and events is exciting, but beneath it sits a steady longing to return to the calm, reliable boredom of everyday. The kind of days where nothing important happens and that itself feels important.

After almost a month, I finally found my way back to a little peace. Enough to sit down and write. This Substack is partly to mark that return, and partly to share a few updates about my work and upcoming events. I also want to address some questions that keep appearing in my inbox .

When are the next book signing and meet up events?

There have been quite a few book signing events around Delhi over the past few weeks. At many of these bookstores, they also recorded short videos of me, asking me to tell readers why they should buy the book. At one store, while recording, the bookstore owner gently told me that I did not look excited enough. Smile more, raise the tone, look happier while talking about the book.

I told her this was my natural response to things. I am not very overtly excited in general. She smiled and said yes, but you have to act a little. You have to understand the marketing game.

I thought about it for a moment and then realised that if I appeared any more excited than this, I would probably start laughing at myself. Or biting my lips. I suspect this has something to do with Vipassana, a meditation practice I have followed for years. It slowly takes away your capacity for extreme joy and extreme sadness. You end up somewhere in the middle. It feels like a barter system of life. You give up something to gain something else. A kind of spiritual negotiation.

While walking to some of these signings, especially the ones inside malls, I had strange flashes from an older life. The past of the city came back in fragments. Voices of people who are no longer here. I remembered walking on these same streets almost fifteen years ago, completely anonymous, a migrant who did not know a single person in the city. For years I wandered through the same malls and roads like a detective, observing people without being noticed. Now, I was the one being observed.

It felt a little like the dream sequences from Satyajit Ray’s Nayak. Not exactly, but there was a similar daydream quality to it.

At one signing, I also realised I had not held a pen properly in years. I could not even remember whether I preferred a gel pen or a ball pen. Back in school, this distinction mattered deeply. Each had its own loyal crowd. I had completely forgotten that such loyalties once existed.

What surprised me most was how many readers turned up on weekdays. Some even brought gifts. One person gave me a beautiful pair of socks, which I recently realised is a deeply underrated accessory. I had never paid attention to socks before, until I noticed my friend Suraj Yengde’s fondness for them. Others brought chocolates and small things.

It made me realise how intimate the internet can make relationships feel. As they say- para-social relationship. People develop a closeness with those they consume online, even if they have never met them.

More book events will happen soon at bookstores in different cities. I will keep updating you as and when they are confirmed.

For now, these are the upcoming festivals where I will be speaking.

I will be at the Jaipur Literature Festival on the 19th.

I will be at the Kerala Literature Festival from the 22nd to the 25th of January.

If you are around during these dates, do drop by.

When will the Kindle edition be available

Good news! The Kindle edition of the book is now out on Amazon, worldwide. I have been getting a lot of messages, especially from people outside of India who felt a mild FOMO during the book release posts and stories. You can now finally read it without waiting for a physical copy.

You do not need a Kindle device to read the book. You can read it on the Kindle app on your phone, laptop, or desktop. If you like the book then please leave a review. It helps the writer in more ways than you can imagine.

What are the other options besides Amazon?

If you prefer a physical copy, the book is available at all major bookstores. If you want to order it online in India, Midland is a good option. They will also have lot many signed copies. Please call them before you order to make sure that you get he signed copies.
https://www.midlandbookshop.com/en/product/the-great-indian-brain-rot

My work lately ?

A few months ago, an editor at The New York Times asked if I would write about Delhi pollution, but not as a report full of numbers and warnings. He wanted it from inside the house, what it does to a person’s days, habits, mood, and sense of the future. By then we had been in touch for many months, so he also knew what was changing in my personal life, my writing style, and my relationship with the city.

The result was the piece I finally published with them. It is about the helplessness that comes with Delhi air, and how people have little choice but to accept this dystopia. Every winter arrives like a familiar problem with a familiar outcome. The sadness has a season.

Read here:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/opinion/india-air-pollution.html

The book excerpt: Here is a small book excerpt on the fascinating cult of Neeraj Tanwar Pepsu from Delhi NCR: https://scroll.in/article/1088658/how-the-digital-cult-of-neeraj-tanwar-pepsu-is-creating-a-mythology-about-the-gujjar-community

My piece on Nikhil Kamath and Elon Musk interview: https://www.newslaundry.com/2025/12/06/a-conversation-that-never-took-off-when-nikhil-kamaths-nervous-schoolboy-energy-met-elon-musk

My Indian Express piece on the end of the Twitch ban and the future of the internet: https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/australias-social-media-crackdown-internets-free-range-era-is-over-10384912/

A fun and breezy podcast I did about my book with Manjula, the editor of the Book Page at Hindustan Times:

I will return with essays and more updates once things settle down a bit. Till then, happy holidays, and I hope you have a great new year.

I have been writing since I was twenty. I cannot say any of it was good, but it was the only thing I did that did not belong to the syllabus. Where I grew up (in many towns of Rajasthan) anything outside the curriculum was treated like a grand act of self-sabotage. The bright ones were told to chase competition exams. The rest were advised to slip into some private job and migrate to a city where the real badge of honor was a plastic card hanging from the neck, swinging like a tamed snake that opened office gates. Poems, stories, and essays were considered proof that you had already surrendered in the economy of success. That is the education the towns gave me. From there came my interest in the idea of losersim, the condition of which roughly meant people who are following activities deemed useless by society. Or as the title of one Hindi poem goes “Duniya ki raftaar se bahar khade hue log. “ ( People standing outside the wheel of progress)

The interesting thing about not being busy is that you can study the people who are. All art begins with observation, and you can only observe when you are not sprinting to some destination. That is why a little boredom becomes useful. I slowly became aware of this boredom because I was always stuck in the wrong places, waiting for each phase to fade.

In class twelve I chose the hardest stream in our town, the famous PCM combination of physics, chemistry and maths. I had no interest in any of them. I did not know what I liked apart from reading magazines, newspapers, and watching films. But I was locked into that phase and there was no exit. All you can really do is let the storm run its course and hope a phase that means nothing to you slips away on its own.

One of the quote that stuck with me was from Murakami (whose writing bored me later in life)

And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about

I somehow cleared my 12th and then stepped into another bad phase. Or as the character in Big Lebowski says, You are entering into the world of pain, my dear friend. I had no interest in any subject in that ridiculously traumatic and humiliating stretch called engineering. The trauma was so steady that I still get nightmares about it. I accepted it as fate, something I could not control. I mugged books, memorised subjects, and tried to survive a world I deeply disliked. It felt like being wrapped in a plaster of disgust and forced to continue like that for four or five years.

I had no idea what lived outside that world. Until then I had never stepped out of Rajasthan. Actually, I had been to Bengaluru once, which at that time was sold to us as the final dream city where all the cool things happened. The best engineering colleges, fashion, pub culture, Hard Rock Cafe, and most importantly, a place where people spoke in English. It carried a strange glamour back then, almost like an international utopia and no wonder it was even named as silicon valley.

I went there after telling my parents that I needed to improve my English and that there was no better place than Bengaluru. I said I would join a spoken English course and practice with locals, back in those pre compulsory Kannada days. So I roamed around the city, doing nothing, just absorbing everything, and of course I never joined any class.

During the final days of engineering college I started writing. I wrote short stories, poems, and movie reviews in a hostel diary. Then I would walk to each room and hand it over so they could read it. This was the Orkut phase of the internet and very much the pre Substack world where you could not simply upload something and feel heard.

One of my teachers eventually read a few of these pieces. He was a misfit on that campus too. The college had placed him in the placement cell with the title ‘personality development faculty.’ His task was to give students a small breather from engineering misery and help them improve their English and communication skills so they could get placed in companies like TCS or the humble ones like Infosys.

After going through my pages he told me, Anurag you are creative but you need to work on your English. But yes, you are creative. Those lines kept echoing in my head like a caller tune of your lover. I tried to understand what a creative person does and what that even means. If I was creative then what was I supposed to do next?

My family had capital but no cultural capital. No one around me had ever stepped into the world of arts, not even remotely close to it.

He then asked me if I had heard of FTII. I said no. He told me that in the next internet period I should search for ftii on google.com. We had only one internet class on weekends where we were allowed to surf the world wide world of internet.

After engineering I worked in a call center for a short while. The main idea behind doing that useless job was to improve my English and buy myself some time to think about what I wanted to do in life. It did improve my English to some degree, although one teacher kept scolding me because I said Jaipur as Jaipur and not JAYAPOR (by rolling my tounge in an international accent). I am from Jaipur and I always believed Jaipur is Jaipur. But that experience taught me something important about urban spaces, about how people will later appropriate your own story and gaslight you.

After the call center, I moved to Mumbai to become a writer. By then I had written a few scripts that I carried to producers and emailed to small production houses that had mushroomed across the city. I used to go to a cyber cafe to send the scripts, then return the next day to check the emails that said, sorry, it does not fit what we are looking for. I paid around thirty rupees an hour for the daily ritual of rejection.

But I wanted to write and publish something of my own. So I began writing what I called street poetry. These pieces came from observation, from walking through the city, from love, breakups, odd moments, and the absurdities of urban life. The poems were loose, but the passion was real. One poem was about a lonely man in a new city who runs around trying to catch a pokemon, which was the game everyone was obsessed with at that time. In the poem he accidentally meets his ex at one of the spots. The pokemon becomes a symbol of their loneliness and the ache they carry, the things they are trying to find in life. I decided to publish the collection under the name Love in the Time of Pokemon.

I put the manuscript together and went to Hariom Printers in Andheri, a small Gujarati led print shop. They told me they only printed in bulk and that the minimum was one hundred copies. I had a money problem, as usual, so I borrowed from a friend and got it printed. I figured out the process of putting it on Amazon and setting up the delivery system, and finally the book was ready.

But when the copies arrived, I realised the entire manuscript was full of spelling mistakes. That was the moment I understood that you need an editor before you publish anything. I gave it to a friend who was good with English and asked him to clean up the spelling. The first batch went straight to waste. Then I went back to Hariom Printers and got the whole thing printed again. The sisyphean saga continues.

The thing with self publishing is that you have almost no way to market the book. So it died its own slow death with four or five sales, and the rest of the copies piled up in my rented room in Versova. My house help would often say that if I did not need them, I should give them to her so she could sell them to the local kabadi shop and buy her child Kinder Joy Chocolates. I gave her money to buy Kinder Joy and told her to wait for a bit before we throw these copies away.

I also sent the manuscript and copies to several publishers, but everyone rejected it or never replied. I read many publishing blogs and realised that poetry is the least favoured genre. So I shifted to fiction. I spent almost a year (2017) writing a collection of short stories on dating encounters, partly inspired by my own experiences, and titled it I love you only on weekends. This time I wanted the cover to look better and I hired an editor in advance so that my copies would not get wasted. For the cover I hired someone on fiverr dot com, where many freelancers work for very cheap. I found a broke Italian designer who made the cover at a very cheap price for me because one of the poem reminded him of the girl that broke up with her in Florence.

Finally the book got published on Amazon. But like most self published work, it got no traction. I went to bookstores and asked if they could keep a few copies. They told me it does not work like that and only publishers can do it. They said they cannot place random books like mine on their shelves. I even went to JLF to see if I could somehow put my book there, but I learned that there too all stalls are paid stalls and there is no way to casually slip a book into that world.

Next I realised I should connect with editors and publishers and build a directory of their emails. So I made a PDF of fifty or sixty pages with all the contacts I could find and emailed each one of them. All the replies were rejections. One reply stung more than the rest. Sorry, these are not poems but random musing of a bored person. We can’t publish such stuff.

This went on for three or four years. I realised I had no idea how any of this publishing system worked and there was no point trying to break in like this.

In 2019 I even called my friend Amit Dutta and told him that I feel sad that had posted about my book launch (self published) on Facebook and received one like. I had two thousand friends and still one like. He told me to keep going and not think about results. There is one rule of success in this field : stay consistent and enjoy what you are process of improving your craft.

But at that time I felt hopeless about writing and I began to believe that someone like me could never build a career in this field.

But in 2019 something shifted. I started making videos on the internet. I changed my Instagram page name from new age poetry to Anurag minus verma. The videos began to go viral, the podcast picked up, and people slowly started recognising me. A small traction began to build. For the first time in my life I felt a bit of reach, a bit of power, and a little confidence in whatever I was trying to do.

After one of my articles went viral, the one about whether a Dalit can wear H & M or Zara, I started getting a few writing offers. It was a piece about how the idea of how a Dalit should look is deeply embedded in the Indian upper caste psyche and especially in the imagination of upper caste filmmakers. That article opened a few doors in the media. I began writing for several alternative platforms, especially in print, for places like Newslaundry, The Wire,Times of India and others.

And around that time the one of the biggest literary agent of country (Kanishka) reached out and asked me to pitch an idea for a book. I finally pitched one on internet culture because that is the world I understand most. By then nearly every publishing house was interested in the publishing the book. The tide had shifted. For the first time I felt I had some control of choice, which felt strange considering where I had come from.

That is how the book began. I also realised that getting a book deal is only a small part of the struggle. Writing the book after getting the deal is a different world. My agent even told me that many authors never finish their manuscripts after signing.

Even for me, getting a book published and seeing numbers rise is not the real form of success. The real measure is how far you have come in your craft, how well you can finally articulate the things you once struggled to express, and how much you can grow through practice and learning. I now realise that the thing about being consistent is that you can only be consistent with what you love to do. So first one must find out what they really love.

I still consider myself at a very early stage. Only now have I started feeling a small confidence that what I write has a fair chance of being published. So this is not the end of any struggle. It is the beginning of a journey where I hope to write better and put words and hopefully can struggle for better things in life.

As Rilke once said” “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.”

Thank you for being here and for staying with my ideas, my messy thoughts, and everything in between. If it feels interesting to you, please consider buying a copy of my book.

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My essays are free to read here. No paywall. Just a request—support the work by buying The Great Indian Brain Rot. It would mean a lot to me.

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A few days back, I saw an artist collaborating on Instagram with a fan who had attended his concert. The post was about how the fan felt after watching the show. The entire text was AI slop. It was clear she had outsourced her joy to ChatGPT, assigning it the task of faking love. The artist didn’t get it, of course. But spotting an AI-generated text these days isn’t easy. And no, this isn’t about the much-maligned em dash.

It’s no longer news that we live in the age of machine text. It seeps through Instagram captions, commissioned think pieces, and even those long WhatsApp replies. I’m not one of those people warning that AI will end humanity.I’m unfortunately a software engineer by study, which means I understand just enough to know that the apocalypse won’t arrive through these technology. We are in deep trouble even without technology. What fascinates me is subtler: how this polite technology is quietly editing our emotions. The future may not be about machines replacing humans, but about humans outsourcing their emotions to machines. It is training us to develop a mind devoid of any rough edges. A persona that is formatted, and stripped of their glorious chaos.

I receive many emails these days, and it’s alarmingly easy to spot the ones written by ChatGPT. They have the aroma of metals burning inside welding shop. There’s nothing wrong with using it for dull, professional correspondence; I do it too when I don’t want to think. Most email writing is boring labour anyway. But the problem begins when these templated sentences sneak into personal letters. These are the messages from people who want to collaborate or share their life stories, hoping to explain what art or creative thought means to them. Those letters are meant to carry some tremor of honesty, a small crack in composure. Now there’s such a passionless display of passion that you wonder if the person feels anything at all for what they claim to pursue.

A few weeks back, my father shared the announcement of my book release in his WhatsApp group of government employees. He called me that evening, thrilled. “So many people responded,” he said. “They really liked your book and even wrote reviews.” Praise always feels good, but there was one small problem; my book releases on November 18. How did they write reviews for a book that doesn’t yet exist? He forwarded me the messages. One of them read like this:

“The Great Indian Brain Rot” is both a book and a concept reflecting the state of digital life in India, especially concerning the overwhelming and often frivolous use of social media and digital platforms.

Also, the term has been artistically captured in Viraj Khanna’s art exhibition “Brain Rot: The Life You Live?”, which uses sculptures and textile work to depict the mental overload and identity dilution caused by digital addiction and the pressure to maintain idealized online personas.

In summary, “The Great Indian Brain Rot” highlights the cultural and psychological impact of India’s digital explosion, the addiction to internet fame, the spread of superficial content, and the resulting cognitive fatigue and social malaise.”

It didn’t take much to see that ChatGPT was the ghostwriter behind Girdhari Lal uncle’s review. I scrolled further and realised every single congratulatory message in the group was AI-generated. Words upon words, yet no trace of human joy. It was a mass WhatsApp orgy of fake enthusiasm.

I remember that the best letters I’ve ever read were rarely grammatical or neatly structured, but you could feel the person breathing through the words. ChatGPT has made that kind of emotional labour look foolish. It’s moto is simple: upgrade the plan downgrade emotional labour. Why suffer the highs and lows of human feeling when a machine can flatten them for you? Now we have been freed from the tyranny of feeling.

I should also be very clear that I am not here to chatgpt-shame anyone. I understand very well where this desire to outsource the work to chatgpt comes from. In this country, English carries a quiet humiliation. There’s always the fear of making a mistake, of revealing that you don’t belong. We live in a culture that corrects rather than listens. I remember back in 2011, fresh out of my engineering college in Rajasthan, trying to decode the mannerisms of big-city life. A filmmaker had posted on Twitter that they were looking for writers and asked for resumes. My English was clumsy then, my only qualification being an engineering degree from a sad little town outside Jaipur and a stint at an international call centre where I sold computer plans to Americans and Brits. I wrote to them anyway. The filmmaker promptly tweeted: The audacity of some idiots who can’t write a proper sentence but still apply for writing jobs. They should first join English classes.

I was, of course, hurt. I was young, desperate for work, and still trying to find some shred of self-respect. But even then, I knew writing was like any sport. It takes time to learn the rhythm, to build muscle. One day, I told myself, I’d be good at it.

Still, the culture of shaming stayed even in this era. It hasn’t gone anywhere. You misspell one word on Instagram, a place meant for half-dazed, unserious posting, and you’ll find grammar vigilantes correcting you in the comments. In this country, language is not a medium of expression; it’s a weapon of power. And it’s not just English. Even in regional languages, there’s a hierarchy of purity. I remember when I was in Maharashtra, someone told me how a particular dialect of Marathi was considered lower than another.

At this point it will be also interesting to notice the relationship of language with the people who are not from this subcontinent. One of my favourite things these days is reading restaurant reviews whenever I’m in a new town. A few weeks ago, I was scrolling through reviews of a ramen place in Rawai, a small town in Phuket. One review, written by a European(I assume) tourist, read like this:

“Amazing…would come here again. Probably will come back every week. Why not?The chicken was amazing, gyoza nice and that thing was good…let me remember the name…. ummm….tonkotsu ramen..ah yess that’s the name… was good too. There were too many people inside the resturant. One baby crying in her mother’s lap as she strugged to hold the chopstick between her fingers. I went outside where the air was breezy (moonsoon over?) and I got to look at the people passing by. Not bad! One con is they forgot to remove the mushroom from mine but that’s really nitpicking to find something bad about this place. Sometimes I do think I over the years became kind of nitpicker. But that may be the old age…alas… I am myself labelling me as old now…how time flies. youth is goneeee! “

It was full of mistakes, but that didn’t matter. There was mood, honesty, a faint smell of thought. You could sense a person trying to make sense of their own moment. It was chaotic, tender, and strangely beautiful. That’s what makes it worth reading. It’s a form of confession in the review format. It reminded me that freedom of thought is deeply tied to one’s relationship with language. Some languages intimidate you; others feel like sitting with an old friend.

When you’re at ease with a language, mistakes start to look like personality. They carry the warmth of an accent, the confidence of not caring. That’s the texture missing from AI writing. The delightful awkwardness of being human, the stray comma that tells you a real person was here, thinking faster than they could type.

The heartfelt should matter more than the correct, but the opposite has happened in the age of ChatGPT. We are drifting toward a future of immaculate sentences without pulse, where no one bleeds into their words. In the age of Artificial Intelligence, the real search is for authentic intelligence. A kind that’s flawed, impulsive, occasionally stupid, yet somehow beautiful in its imperfection.

Everything here is free to read. No paywall, only goodwill. If you want to keep it that way, buy The Great Indian Brain Rot. It’ll mean a lot.

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Cinema is not just about stories; it is about surrender. Every time the lights go off, we agree to be hypnotized, to believe in something that we know isn’t real. And perhaps that is why cinema, more than any other art form, understands our loneliness better than we do.

One of my favourite observations about cinema comes from the French thinker Jacques Ellul, who wrote:

“The movie spectator also is alone; though elbow to elbow with his neighbors, he still is, because of the darkness and the hypnotic attraction of the screen, perfectly alone. This is the situation of the ‘lonely crowd,’ or of isolation in the mass, which is a natural product of present-day society and which is both used and deepened by the mass media. The most favorable moment to seize a man and influence him is when he is alone in the mass: it is at this point that propaganda can be most effective.”

Propaganda did not begin as a dirty word. It meant the organised transmission of ideas. Time made the word a repulsive word and that is understandable. But one thing is certain that if you want perfect hypnotism, there is no medium as efficient as cinema. The darkness of the theatre, the play of sound and images, the graceful deceit of the camera. All of it conspires to make you surrender. You sit there, believing you are watching freely, when in truth you have been quietly taken hostage by images.

Filmmaker Luis Bunuel said, in his blunt way, that film watching is a kind of hypnosis. He traced it to the same mechanics: darkness, movement, montage that quickens the mind and dulls its critical guard. Cinema can be used to free the imagination or sometimes even to choke the imagination. That is the strange beauty and the quiet danger of the medium.

This hypnosis is why, in that brief trance of two or three hours, people begin to do things that would look absurd anywhere else. I remember watching Lagaan in a theatre where people stood up, shouted, and wept as if they were watching a real match. The screen had successfully erased the lines between fiction and national duty.

Such collective madness is one side of cinema’s spell and sometimes can also be used by state to control a certain narrative. I am more interesting in another aspect of cinema which is more private. On films which makes you emotional without asking you for a call to action. It begins when your throat tightens, your eyes blur, and you realize you are about to cry in public. You hide it instinctively, afraid the stranger beside you might notice. You wonder what it says about you, that you are so weak who can weep for something projected on a wall. There is a strange relief in crying inside a theatre, but also the quiet shame of being seen when the lights return. In a city where everyone is watched, measured, and endlessly performing, the darkness of the cinema becomes the last refuge for the lonely, where one can finally cry without having to explain why.

Neeraj’s new film Homebound arrived to the kind of reception usually reserved for sublime experiences. Critics called it “devastating,” the internet called it “a lump in the throat.” Many people in the theatre, as reported, were crying. I wanted to see if the same emotion could survive in Noida (the land of tough people, where I live for now), a city where the only time people truly express their feelings is during road rage.

When the title rolled on the screen, the girl next to me began to cry. Her mother, I think, understood. She didn’t try to stop her or reach out with those gentle, well-meaning words that often ruin a moment of release. She simply sat still, carrying the quiet wisdom of someone who knows that in such moments, presence is best performed as absence. To be there, yet invisible, so the other can feel alone without being abandoned. After a while, she placed her hand on her daughter’s head, a gesture both protective and distant, as if saying, go on, take your time.

I also noticed a few people behind me who had clearly been moved. But the moment the lights came on, they straightened up, adjusted their bags, and fixed their expressions. Within seconds, they were back to scrolling, booking their Ubers and Rapidos, as if the safest way to hide emotion was to pretend that one is still consumed with the banal routine of life.

This made me wonder why people cry in the theatre when most of them haven’t lived anything close to what the characters on screen have experienced. Is relatability with the characters really a necessary condition to be moved by a piece of art? Perhaps not, because the logic behind tears is impossible to map.

While writing this piece I remember a funny post. It was about the news we often read that when Lata Mangeshkar sang the song Ae Mere Watan Ke Logon, Nehru started crying. To which a comedian on Facebook joked that: right wingers love Lata Mangeshkar because she made Nehru cry.

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In one of my podcasts with Neeraj, he talked about the film Udaan and how he used to cry for hours while watching it or listening to its songs during his early days of struggle in the film industry.

When I was in Boston four years ago, a man who came to meet me told me he often cried while listening to my podcast, especially the episodes featuring stories of people from marginalized communities trying to navigate unfair lives. He said he had grown up in a privileged household, far away from that world, yet something in those stories made him weep uncontrollably. I tried to understand what exactly triggered that emotion in him, but there was no clear answer.

A few days ago, I was listening to a piece of melodic electronic music with no lyrics. Its nostalgic pulse, stitched with soft electronic beats, carried me to a place I couldn’t name. It wasn’t joy or sorrow, just a sudden rush, a quiet collapse of realizing how far you’ve traveled in life and how much you’ve left behind without noticing. There’s no logic to that moment. It remains one of the small, inexplicable miracles of art.

When I was living in a small town of Sikar in Rajasthan, there was a family of ten in the same complex. Among them lived a man who had recently rented a single room. He kept to himself, always polite, but his loneliness showed in the way he walked, and especially in the way he smiled, like someone quietly carrying a story of which he was the only audience. One evening, my mama went to watch Jaanwar, that Akshay Kumar film which, by most measure, can be called emotional. When they came back, the man went straight into his room and shut the door. Later, my mama told me he had cried through most of the film, uncontrollably. I asked why anyone would cry in Jaanwar. He said there was a song about a mother and son, and the man’s own mother had died a few years ago.

It’s strange how grief lies dormant, waiting for the most ordinary thing, and how experiences that aren’t meant to evoke anything end up stirring everything.

This also reminds me of a scene from David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive. Betty (Naomi Watts) and Rita (Laura Harring) sit in a dark theatre as a performer tells them that everything they will hear is an illusion, that there is no band. Then a woman steps onto the stage and begins to sing Roy Orbison’s Crying in Spanish. Her voice trembles with sorrow. Midway through, she collapses, yet the song continues, revealing it was only a recording. Betty and Rita sit frozen, tears streaming down their faces.

That scene captures the peculiar genius of cinema, an art that never hides its deceit yet still manages to move us. Everything about it is false, the lights, the voice, the collapsing woman. We know it isn’t real, and still the throat tightens. That is the quiet fraud of the medium. It manufactures emotion out of illusion, and the audience, fully aware of the trick, agrees to be fooled.

In most cases, to be fooled by this medium is in itself a beautiful kind of deception. It reminds me of that line from There Is a Light That Never Goes Out by The Smiths, “to die by your side is such a heavenly way to die.”

Dear readers, I’m curious to know, what was your moment of catharsis? A film, a song, a painting, or something else that made you feel more than you could explain? Share it with me in the comments.

My debut book is now out for pre-orders. It will means a lot to me if you can pre-order it here. I write on Substack for the joy of writing. This platform doesn’t pay me, and my work depends entirely on the support of readers. If you liked this piece, you can contribute any amount on Razorpay, or if you are outside India, you can use the Buy Me a Coffee link. Thank you :)

After two years of writing, deleting, and arguing with myself, my first book is finally out.

It’s called The Great Indian Brain Rot: Love, Lies and Algorithms in Digital India (Bloomsbury).

In each generation, cultural critics emerge to decipher the strange dance between technology and culture. Marshall McLuhan once gave us Understanding Media. Jean Baudrillard gave us Simulacra and Simulation to explain the complexities of reality, symbols, and society.

The idea of decoding our current age becomes very complicated because as we step into the hyperreal stage of the cyber world, the notion of reality itself becomes slippery. In India, where culture, caste, and aspiration constantly collide, everything changed in 2016 when Mukesh Ambani launched Jio and made data cheap. Overnight, India became the global hotspot of the internet. Ambani himself, India’s richest man, gave a 90-minute speech promising to “reshape the future of the internet in India.”

This book is my attempt to make sense of that very post-jio world. It doesn’t stick to political binaries or the cliche debates on whether social media is good or bad. Instead, it explores the wild subcultures of the post Jio world, digital mythologies, cringe content, internet conspiracies, caste wars in forms of memes and livestreams, fake gurus, YouTube philosophers, and influencers born out of the cheap data revolution.

If you’ve enjoyed my writing here, you’ll find the same mix of absurdity and critique in the book.

Since this is my debut with a big publisher, pre-orders matter a lot. They decide rankings, visibility, and how far the book travels. Right now there’s a good discount too. So if you’d like to support the work, please pre-order your copy today. 👇

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For readers outside India, you’ll have to wait a little longer. The Kindle edition will be released on 18th November. We’re also working on securing rights for overseas distribution, but that will take some time.

In the coming months, I’ll also be doing book signing events. So if you’d like your copy signed, you can purchase the book and bring it along to these events.

Your early support means a lot. More updates, events, and Substack posts about the writing process will follow soon. Thank you for always being so generous with your support:)

– AMV

The Great Indian Brain Rot

Smoking was the costume of youth. It was freedom, defiance, and cosmic rhythm rolled into paper. And that song, har fikr ko dhuein mein udata chala gaya, declared that all it really took was a drag of nicotine to be airlifted from the land of misery.

In the Indian sense, there was also something modern about smoking. Especially the image of a woman smoking, which was and still is judged, and for that reason once appeared jarring. Back then even smokers judged women who went to a paan shop to buy cigarettes, branding them as having loose character, all while they themselves were lost in a nicotine high. I remember the famous photograph of Chashme Buddoor’s director Sai Paranjpye smoking during the shoot. Many on internet, based on this photo, commented that Sai was the coolest filmmaker. Having met Sai, I can say she is indeed cool, though not because of the cigarette. (Will write about my experience of meeting her in detail but you can watch podcast here)

When I went to the US, I was told about the history of smoking there. Tobacco companies once sent people into African American neighborhoods to distribute free cigarettes. In the 1950s, Liggett & Myers ran campaigns for their Chesterfield brand, giving away free packs at film screenings in African-American colleges. By the 1960s, Philip Morris was handing out free cigarettes at events honoring Black newspaper founders. Over the years, companies relied on menthol brands, ads, and giveaways to turn Black neighborhoods into steady markets. A similar story exists in India about how chai became popular. I watched a video by Krish Ashok few days back where he explained how in colonial era, marketing men went to villages and towns handing out free samples of tea. Once people got addicted, a new market opened up for the business of chai.

But today, cigarettes and alcohol, while still romanticised by some, are steadily losing their grip on popular culture. The evidence is everywhere, pointing to a slow retreat of the old glamour. In that sense, the cover of Roy’s book felt a little dated to me. But then a friend reminded me on Instagram that Arundhati Roy had been trolled by a few celebrated Hindi authors on Facebook. These men, embodiments of the old guard and their Brahmanical notions of purity, were outraged by the image and declared it outside the limits of maryada. That is when I realised I had misjudged the idea of progress. In India, we live with so many taboos that you can never be certain when you have broken one. Even the most ordinary act of pleasure might inadvertently break a taboo. Perhaps it should be notified to us like traffic challans that suddenly appear on an app. You never know when you committed the violation, but the authorities always know.

But my point is not to dwell on the comments of old patriarchs (which Hindi literature is a bastion of) or the morality attached to smoking. My interest lies in understanding culture and how it is shifting at a global level. It is now widely debated that this generation drinks and smokes less compared to the ones before. The current mood suggests that alcohol and cigarettes are no longer seen as their primary sources of pleasure.

I came across a video about how many clubs in Berlin are shutting down, and people are puzzled. This is unusual because Berlin is a city built on clubs, where the party culture is central to its identity. The video explained that Gen Z is simply not drinking the way earlier generations did. Instead, they are inventing odd new rituals on TikTok. One of them is called the “fridge cigarette,” which has nothing to do with smoking. It is the act of reaching into the refrigerator, pulling out a cold Diet Coke, and treating it as a calming ritual after a long day. Clips with lines like “Time for my afternoon fridge cigarette” or “Just a little something to take the edge off” have become viral on social media

In popular culture sobriety is becoming cool and people are shifting toward health trends. American podcasts have done lot of the heavy lifting. Andrew Huberman has whole episodes devoted to what alcohol and nicotine do to the brain. Some other voices like Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan also regularly surface the ill effects of drinking and smoking. The idea now is that smoking is as uncool as “chaini khani” used to be. The old test of manhood, how many shots you could take or how many cigarettes you could chain-smoke, feels more and more stupid.

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Drinking was also a kind of barter system: one great night in exchange for a terrible morning. If you are a believer then you might believe that perhaps hangovers are God’s sermon preaching long term happiness does not lie at the glass of beer.

There is actual data to back this up. The “sober curious” movement, where people want to rethink their relationship with alcohol without necessarily quitting entirely, is growing fast. In the United States surveys show that a majority of Gen Z plan to drink less this year, many considering a “dry lifestyle” for longer stretches. In Europe, for example, beer consumption among younger people is in decline, and alcohol free bars and sober parties are becoming more common.

But what is interesting is what has replaced them in popular culture. Drugs like mushrooms, MDMA etc are very popular. Vaping has become the new cool instead of smoking. Smoking a joint is now just another addition to the habit list. Unlike drinking, where the very next day your body screams at you, weed does not come with such alarms. The body stays quiet, which is worse, because it can give you the delusion that it is helping you achieve your goals and making you more productive.

There are also the beginnings of coffee raves, one of the trends I dislike the most, where people gather in coffee shops to pretend they are enjoying themselves while a DJ plays techno and house. Coffee shops, once shelters for those who wanted to hide from the world, are now infiltrated by this contrived performance. The sheer ridiculousness of it suggests it may vanish as quickly as dalgona coffee.

Then there are cocktail trends, which are not about getting drunk but about drinking with elegance. Each drink comes with a story so that it gives you an illusion that you are consuming a painting in an art gallery rather than toxic alcohol. I was once in Rajasthan where a bartender, assuming I was an outsider, gave me a cocktail and proudly explained, “Sir, we are using ker in this drink for the sour agent instead of lemon. Ker is a desert fruit, and this drink is our homage to the folk tradition of vast desert of Jaisalmer.” I was tempted to tell him he should also mix some sand in it.

These are some of the new trends, but culture is cyclic and one can never be too sure of what is in and what is out. When I posted the story on Instagram, a professor wrote to me saying that the same old pattern is back, and many of his students are smoking like chimneys. I am not sure if this is just an anecdotal experience or if the wheel has truly turned again. That is the thing with habits, they rarely die, they only hide for a while and wait for their comeback. For every wellness rave or kombucha bar, there will always be a hostel room where a group of students believe they have discovered freedom in smoke. Perhaps Gen Z is not abandoning these pleasures entirely, only remixing them in new forms. I would love to hear from you, especially from Gen Z, on what you make of all this.

Also, a full conversation on this topic is now streaming on YouTube. I have started a new section called In the Mood for Diss-Course where we discuss cultural absurdities. In this episode, we talk in detail about alcohol, creativity, writing, and much more. Here is the link to the podcast. Please do watch it.

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On the evening of 14 August, traffic in every Indian city looks like a badly organised evacuation. The migrants head to their hometowns. The corporate migrants who still love their families do the same. The corporate migrants who fled small towns to avoid their families head for a resort, Coorg, Matheran, Lonavala, or Goa. The chaos is not driven by the thrill of Independence Day but by the thrill of a long weekend and the uncomfortable anxiety that it will end too soon. People run somewhere, anywhere, to feel a kind of warmth that patriotism alone no longer provides.

Every August 15, the country wakes up unusually early because every street and apartment block is blaring , Mere Desh Ki Dharti and Vande Mataram songs, on a loop through Ahuja speakers which were last repaired when Nehru was still around. At schools, children are dressed as freedom fighters: half as Gandhi, half as Subhas Chandra Bose, and at least one confused kid turns up as Salman Khan from Tere Naam in a wig, insisting he’s APJ Abdul Kalam.

It has a beauty to it, like a carnival balanced between joy, chaos, and duty.

Back in my school days, the incentive to wake up early on Independence Day was simple: one free ladoo. If your school was slightly posh, you also got a Bengali sweet and a samosa. There was an unspoken rule that someone had to “offer” a performance to the nation. When I was nine, I sang Shankar Mahadevan’s Breathless on my school stage, a lung-capacity stress test disguised as a song. My lungs, still unspoiled by Delhi’s toxic air, could match its nonstop rhythm. In an academic culture built on rote learning, what we proudly call rattafication, memory was the highest form of talent, and I remembered every word to earn that respect. The song itself was gibberish, what we might now call yapping on internet lingo, and the only modern equivalent is a BJP spokesperson listing the government’s achievements without pausing for breath.

Back then, my favourite anthem was Hum Honge Kamyab Ek Din, a tame Hindi cousin of We Shall Overcome, a song that once carried the revolutionary weight of America’s civil rights marches. By the time it floated onto All India Radio, the clenched fist had morphed into the Instagram wave emoji. It was no longer meant to challenge power but to amuse it, performed before principals nodding politely and politicians clapping on cue. This is how India prefers its rebellion, imported, declawed, and delayed until the chief guest rolls in with a Toyota Fortuner.

But in 2025, even that harmless optimism has been traded for an angry aggression. The loudest channel of the nation is named Republic isn’t just a simple irony in this republic. Hum honge kamyab now replaced by Arambh Hai Prachand set to lo-fi and reverbed beats, urging people to rise, fight, and confront… something. What exactly, no one can say.

This is also a country where many of its most privileged citizens believe they are trapped and must reclaim and get freedom from something they cannot define. Ironically, it is often those with the most rights who feel the deepest connection to the chorus of Sadda Haq from Rockstar.

Once, at an airport, I met a man who told me that real independence would be the day reservations are abolished, and he said it with the solemnity of someone announcing the end of slavery. Others believe true freedom will come when all Western influence is washed away, in the foamy style of a Tide detergent ad, leaving us truly Indic. In a Blah Blah ride-sharing cab, I met an uncle who, true to the company’s name, did plenty of blah blah and declared that real freedom would arrive when all the Banjara markets of Gurgaon, selling cheap goods on encroached land, are demolished by the police. When the car dropped him off, I saw he had built his own parking ramp on encroached government land. Of course, the freedom to be a hypocrite is also a form of freedom.

In India freedom and entrapment here are happy illusions, mirages that keep everyone believing the real thing is still coming, just not this year.

Every year, the same social media post appears with the consistency of a Gurgaon flood: “Are we really free? Kya hum sach mein azaad hain?” Although I think if you look closer you’ll find that India might actually be freer than the so-called “land of the free.”

Let me give you some examples.

Tagore imagined a place where the mind is without fear and the head is held high. The closest India has come to that vision is a man in a Thar on a Monday evening. He moves between lanes with the casual authority of someone rearranging furniture in his own living room. Traffic lights are background decoration, horns are his way of clearing his throat, and speed limit signs matter as much as cigarette warnings to a chain smoker.

He is poetry in motion, though mostly the kind that rhymes with insurance claims. The Indian road is not governed by rules, only by the collective tolerance for other people’s madness. Hindi writer Parsai once wrote: हमारे देश का आदमी नियम मान ही नहीं सकता। वह मुक्त आत्मा है। वह सड़क के बीच चलकर प्राण दे देगा, पर बायें नहीं चलेगा। (The people of our country simply cannot follow rules. He is a free soul. He will walk in the middle of the road and give up his life, but he will not walk on the left side.)

Even cinema enjoys its own unregulated liberty. If you are approved by the power then a filmmaker can release a historical drama where history is distorted and recreated in the offices of Andheri West, Mumbai. It will still clear the censor board, be sold as truth, and be celebrated as patriotism.

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And then there is the market, where food delivery apps grant you the ultimate freedom to never leave the house and order anything you want, brought to you by underpaid workers waiting for the next notification on a phone wrapped in a plastic waterproof cover that only partly saves it in the rain.

The news channels are free to completely break up with facts, get away with fake news, and run whatever they wish against a backdrop of anxiety-inducing music and loud, relentless graphics that may be responsible for half the nation’s rising blood pressure. The only accountability they recognise is the balance in their bank accounts.

Even corruption here enjoys the liberties of art. A corrupt man will not only survive, he will be encouraged to improvise and be trained in new art. There is no real punishment, only an unending menu of settlements. Or if you are lucky then you can also be a podcast guest explaining your ‘version of truth.’

Even political parties enjoy their own version of freedom. When in power, they can say almost any hate-filled thing they want, with a good chance the Election Commission will be sitting there with its noise-cancelling headphones on.

In the quiet alleys of India, independence sometimes takes a farcical stage. In Ghaziabad, Harshvardhan Jain, 47, spent nearly a decade running the “Embassy of Westarctica,” a nation that exists only in his head, from a rented bungalow. Outside, the flags of India and Westarctica fluttered for no one. Inside were forged diplomatic passports, stamps for borders that did not exist, and paperwork for micronations like Seborga and Ladonia. He kept four luxury cars with fake diplomatic plates, a watch collection fit for an oil sheikh, and introduced himself as an ambassador or adviser to these imaginary states. On July 22, 2025, the Uttar Pradesh Police raided the premises. For years, he conducted a foreign policy without a country, and surprisingly without any laser-eye edits.

In Noida’s Sector 70, six men rented a small office and declared it the headquarters of the International Police and Crime Investigation Bureau. They had everything a state might need, except the state itself: official-looking logos, forged IDs, plastic badges, and a website that collected donations as if law enforcement were a crowdfunding project. They issued papers, posed as international lawmen with fake ties to Interpol, and sold the illusion of protection. It was a police station franchise, as if Haldiram’s had launched a new outlet.On August 10, 2025, Gautam Budh Nagar Police raided the office, arresting six men who were exercising their freedom to identify as policemen who cleared the state police exams.

Independence here comes in many varieties. In one viral clip, Saurav Dwivedi is stopped on the streets of Begusarai by a man best remembered for saying Kanhaiya mera bada bhaiyaa. But hidden in the banter was an odd question he asked: when was India independent? Not the date, the day. Turns out it was a Friday. Independence arrived on a weekend, the kind of day when offices empty early, plans are made for doing nothing, and even the ambitious slow down. Now, in an era when billionaires preach seventy-hour work weeks as if exhaustion were a virtue, it turns out the Republic began in the calendar’s laziest hours. Maybe that is also a metaphor of how freedom is linked to a holiday, a lazy yawn, something to mark, not necessarily to use.

This is how, by evening, paper and plastic flags seem to find their way onto the roads, their bamboo sticks jutting out like abandoned toothpicks. The sugar rush of ladoo has crashed into fatigue, loudspeakers are now silent. Sweepers and scrap pickers arrive, inheriting the remains of freedom. In malls, Freedom Sale banners come down, tiranga cakes replaced by blueberry cake, mannequins lose their Tricolor Kurta Pujama and slip into low-waist denim. The 15 percent discounts vanish. Prices go up, patriotism goes down.

On the surface, it is a performance. It is the yearly reminder of a date when something monumental happened, wrapped in ritual and repetition.

Independence Day is often mistaken for the finish line, when it was meant to be a pit stop. A brief halt to see how far we have travelled from the grand declarations at the birth of the republic, and how much of that journey still exists only in speeches and preambles. Freedom’s worth isn’t in its choreography but in its stubborn survival through ordinary days, when no one’s watching, and the work of liberty, messy, unglamorous, often invisible, grinds on in the shadows of a nation too busy to notice.

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In India, the phrase “love is political” is a cliche you’ll hear often. But what does it really mean? It’s not just that politics controls love. It’s that the family, that sacred unit of Indian society, isn’t always a cosy nest of affection; it’s also a political fortress, a miniature dictatorship where parents, uncles, and that one cousin who’s always “just helping” wield absolute power over who you can love.

To love someone outside your caste is to declare war, with no ceasefire announcements from Uncle Sam.

The enemy here isn’t a stranger but your own relatives, neighbours, and the invisible countless eyes that watch you like CCTV whose power never goes off.

It’s because when you fall in love, you’re hopping onto a groovy train faster than the Vande Bharat Express, one that doesn’t stop at society-approved stations of caste, gotra, religion, or the thousand other filters that make Indian matchmaking a bureaucratic nightmare.

This is why love in India often ends up as graffiti on the crumbling walls of an abandoned ASI heritage monument, where lovers tattoo their unrequited tales: Rohan loves Monika. Payal loves Amar. Birju loves Rupwati. Sometimes, love exists only in the disappearance of digital footprints. When families discover the affair, social media accounts that once flaunted love selfies are disabled, leaving only a cold notification: “User not available.”

Love in India, then, is a political act, a middle finger to the suffocating machinery of tradition. Yet nobody warns you that rebellion comes with a body count; a phrase that carries a chilling different meaning in a country where too many are “disappeared” for the crime of loving someone.

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In that sense, love is a dangerous pursuit, not the dreamy escapade Bollywood has long peddled. Its love stories often reduce conflict to class, with dialogues like, “Unki kya haisiyat hai humse shaadi karne ki?” Or my favorite, from a film where the girl’s father sneers, “Meri beti ko kaju khane ka bahut shauk hai. Kya tumhari haisiyat hai ki use roz kaju khila paoge?” These cinematic flourishes suggest love is just about crossing a wealth gap. But they sidestep the deeper landmines – caste, religion, gotra – that don’t just test a romance but often detonate it.

Bollywood’s limited imagination can lure lovers into this conflict zone, humming 90s anthems like, “Pyar karne wale jeete hain shaan se, marte hain shaan se.” A relative of mine took that line too seriously, singing it during evening walks on the terrace, brimming with the borrowed swagger of movie heroes. Only after the girl’s family beat him in the garage of an abandoned shop in our hometown, Sikar, did he realise only the second line of the song is true. When he stumbled home, his face wasn’t red with the blush of new romance but with the flush of what love in India really feels like.

This is why a film like Dhadak 2 feels unusually brave. In a sea of cinema obsessed with upper-caste nostalgia and wedding playlists (many of which have come out from the same production house), it centers a Dalit protagonist, weaving in the suffocation, aspiration, and quiet ache of the Dalit subconscious. This is also rare for the times we live in. Let me explain.

Stands out amid sugary internet junk

We are now in times where people online confidently declare, “The caste system never existed. We had varna, not jaati. Caste is a Western concept.” Meanwhile, phrases like “Brahmin genes,” “Rajput genes,” “Yadav brand,” and “Gujjar genes” are flaunted like designer labels.

Layered on top is the cultural cowardice of influencer content, mistaken for a generation’s voice. Instead of sparking new conversations or fostering critical thought, it’s a loop of skits like “Every UP Guy Ever,” “Every Bhopali guy” meme reviews, and reaction videos that shun anything real. This sugary internet junk, packaged as relatability, burying any possibility of cultural conversation under mindless noise.

In this context, Dhadak 2, from Dharma Productions no less, is a surprise. With imagery of Ambedkar, Buddha, and the Jai Bhim slogan, it tackles caste with mostly the right politics, placing Dalit suffering at the narrative’s core, not as a backdrop or plot device, but as the story itself. Compare this to Article 15, which I feel, despite its acclaim, wasn’t truly about Dalit issues. It was a thriller using caste as a setting, placing the Brahmin character in the centre blissfully unaware of his own caste. Dhadak 2 dares to center a Dalit hero, crafting a sympathetic gaze towards the Dalit politics that unravels how caste operates in society. But I also wondered if multiplex audiences even care about a Dalit hero navigating romance in an urban landscape. The audience’s reaction completes the film’s sociology, turning the theatre into a mirror of society.

For instance, in one scene in Article 15, Ayushmann’s character asks everyone their caste. A Dalit policeman claims he’s higher in the hierarchy than another Dalit policeman, prompting relieved laughter from the audience, as if comforted by the idea that even Dalits can be casteist. If everyone’s casteist, the twisted logic goes, then maybe no one is and we are free of our guilt of being a beneficiary of the caste system.

Casting a missed opportunity?

For most, Dhadak 2 is a very sincere film on the politics of caste. Though in terms of narrative its reliance on melodrama and occasional rhetorical flourishes dulls its edge. Had these been woven more subtly, it could have been far more compelling.

The casting, too, feels like a missed opportunity. Siddhant Chaturvedi’s performance is decent, but it’s hard to fully buy him in the role. The same goes for the other lead Tripti. Yet, in smaller roles, Saurabh Sachdeva and Zakir Hussain shine. Spoiler alert in next line: I was surprised to see Zakir’s character subtly address the Pasmanda issue, a nuanced touch for a mainstream film.

Contrast this with Sairat (of which the earlier Dhadak was a remake), which masterfully blends caste and love with foot-thumping music and newcomer actors, achieving a cinematic triumph. But regional cinema like Sairat, or its Tamil counterpart Pariyerum Perumal – of which Dhadak 2 is a Bollywood remake – operates on a different plane. Their business models, budgets, distribution, and cultural contexts are worlds apart, making comparisons feel unfair.

Dhadak 2 faced heavy-handed censorship, with directors such as Anurag Kashyap publicly slamming the censors for their stifling constraints. Its opening disclaimer, one of the longest in recent memory, repeatedly stresses that the film is a pure work of fiction, any resemblance to reality purely accidental. Just weeks earlier, Phule, a biopic on Jyotirao and Savitribai Phule, was delayed, edited, and nearly derailed by outrage over scenes depicting caste humiliation. According to The Hindu, the CBFC demanded that the phrase “3,000 saal purani jaati pratha” (3,000-year-old caste system) be replaced with the more diluted “kai saal purani varna vyavastha” (a system of varnas that is many years old).

But at the same time to call Dhadak 2 a film about caste is to forget that earlier Bollywood films have also grappled with it, albeit differently. Years ago, on my podcast about caste in Indian stand-up comedy, Kaustubh Naik said, “If you want to understand caste then watch K3G, not Sairat.” It’s a sharp observation on how mainstream cinema, with its Singhanias and Malhotras, glorifies ‘khandani’ supremacy while erasing lower-caste characters entirely.

In fact, in one of the scenes in this movie I couldn’t help but compare it with Kabir Singh. There are similar scenes where the hero confronts the family of their girlfriends. In Dhadak 2, the hero struggles to explain to the girl’s parents why he even deserves to exist, let alone love her. In Kabir Singh, (remake of Arjun Reddy with a clear caste marker), the hero feels absolutely entitled to love. In a scene with her parents, he yells, “Main bloody surgeon hoon, koi roadside Romeo nahi,” and accuses them of having their “dimaag at their gittiya wich”. Later, he shouts, “You know what Priti, Imagine this is not 2019. Yeh raja-maharaja ka time hai. If at that time they (her parents) come between us, I’ll wage a war, lock them in a steel cage, and marry you in front of them, traditional style.”

The contrast is glaring: one hero begs for his place and right to exist in society, the other demands love with godlike confidence. If you look closely then both are films about caste.

Hence Dhadak 2 is a remarkable departure. The fact that caste is no longer just subtext but part of the film’s narrative spine is not only a credit to the production house and director Shazia Iqbal. It also belongs to the countless voices (online and off) who kept pushing the conversation around caste to be included in academia, films, literature, pop culture, even when they were mocked, abused, ignored or sometimes threatened with police actions.

Even with its flaws, Dhadak 2 stands apart by being an unusually brave film in these times. It’s a visible crack in the wall. And someone made that crack, very sincerely. I hope it grows wide enough for others to break through, so that many more storytellers from the community can enter and claim space within it.

Listen to the detailed discussion on the podcast I recorded with brilliant scholars Sumit Samos and Shainal Verma. The audio is embedded at the top of this post.

Last week, The Indian Express asked me to write on Neeraj Ghaywan’s Masaan, which just turned ten. This version is longer edition of the one that published for IE. It traces memory, a particular moment in cinema, and what changed since.

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Masaan, the cult classic, just turned ten, and it took me down memory lane. Back in 2011, I had randomly DMed Neeraj Ghaywan on Twitter, saying I wanted to work in the film industry but was confused. I must have had an egg DP on my profile and was an absolute nobody back then. To my surprise, Neeraj, who was then assisting Anurag Kashyap on Gangs of Wasseypur, replied. He gave me his number and asked me to call. I still remember that conversation. He told me he had quit a well-paying job, worked 15 hours a day as an AD, and barely earned anything. I joined this industry a bit too late. You’re in your early 20s, so it’s the best time to come here, he said.

Four years later, Masaan premiered at Cannes. Neeraj cried during the standing ovation. And I remembered that voice on the phone: uncertain, worn out, yet still chasing cinema as if all the answers to life’s quiet miseries lay hidden in moving images, flickering in the dark, hypnotising strangers in silence.

I called him again this morning and asked him if there was also a kind of ghost that follows; of having made an excellent first film that people love so deeply, it creates pressure and uncertainty about whether you’ll ever be able to deliver something like that again. Neeraj, in these ten years, made a few short films and directed for OTT platforms, but his next feature, Homebound, is finally set to release this year.

To which he replied:

I don’t really feel the pressure to live up to the success of my previous work. I’m tormented more by my own self: searching for meaning and expression that always seems to elude me. After Masaan, many producers and collaborators expressed interest, but the truth is, I wasn’t sure myself what I wanted to say next. There’s no single reason why I choose a story. It’s probably a combination: a need for self-expression, a worldview I can align with, stories that challenge me, and characters that push me to explore the world anthropologically.

To understand how Masaan was made ten years ago and how someone like Neeraj could be so afflicted with the desire to make films that he gave up everything for it—you have to look at the kind of cinema that surrounded him. Around that time, Indian cinema was undergoing a small, silent rebellion.

Films like Udaan, Black Friday, Court, Gangs of Wasseypur, The Lunchbox, Ankhon Dekhi, Miss Lovely, Fandry, Sulemani Keeda, Oye Lucky Lucky Oye, were made in that era. The idea of the independent film had begun to feel less imported. Its charm was now so persuasive that even Ekta Kapoor, the architect of Indian television’s Saas-Bahu new wave, financed Love Sex aur Dhokha.

It was as if the big mall of Bollywood had started allowing a few local vendors to set up carts inside. Between the giant showrooms of Shoppers Stop and Zara, you could now find someone selling handmade accessories or embroidered jholas.

Masaan landed at the perfect moment. So many films were being made then, and so many were quietly buried before they could find birth in the darkness of a theatre or in the waiting rooms of Aaram Nagar, Versova, and Andheri West.

What made Masaan stand out was that it managed to walk a line most films stumble on. It had the quiet ambition to merge arthouse sensibility with the storytelling pace of narrative cinema that remains accessible. At the time, that was unusual. It wasn’t loud in its portrayal of caste, the way some films are when they want their virtue clearly visible. Nor was it so subtle, like much of arthouse cinema, that the idea melted into metaphor and escaped notice altogether.

Masaan treated caste as a sadness that sits at the centre of love stories in India. It carried the kind of melancholy woven into the daily life of this society, the kind that lingers long after grief is supposed to end. Unlike the films and TV shows that came later and kickstarted the ‘small town’ wave, Masaan didn’t romanticise or exoticise the hinterland. There were no peppy background tracks layered with Spanish guitar to sell the charm of the heartland. The town in Masaan breathed, burned, and its people simply waited for something better, with no promise that it would come.

In that sense, Masaan offered a solid template for what Bollywood could produce: a film rooted in Indian reality, with a hint of arthouse, and yet accessible to a wide audience. Even in India, where many viewers may not be used to so-called 'festival films', Masaan found resonance.

The recent film All We Imagine as Light by Payal Kapadia comes to mind. It too walks that delicate line between arthouse and narrative cinema, managing a theatrical release and being embraced by many. Like Masaan, it proves that this bridge can be built, just not very often.

Even this film had songs, which are often considered taboo for any film that aspires to go to festivals. I asked Varun Grover who is the writer and lyricist of Masaan about it. One thing I’ve always found striking about Masaan is its use of music. In most films that are seen as festival-bound or ‘serious cinema,’ songs with lyrics are avoided, or when they appear, the lyrics are minimal and vague. Masaan makes a confident choice to go the other way. Songs like Mann Kasturi Re are built with precise craftsmanship and metaphor, carrying the emotional weight of classic Hindi film poetry.

I asked if there was ever hesitation about how these songs might sit with the film’s tone or how they might land with an international audience, since so much of the poetry risks being lost in translation.

Varun replied:

Hindi poetry is such a big part of life growing up in the North—UP, Bihar, the Hindi belt. Poetry and shayari are everywhere. People associate it with maturity, but its most passionate fans are between sixteen and twenty-two. We never saw that reflected in films. Even in North Indian cinema, you rarely see a boy and girl talk about poetry or books. So we gave that to Shalu’s character, and through her, Deepak starts discovering its beauty.

The film even opens with a complex line: Zindagi kya hai, anasir mein zahoor-e-tarteeb, Maut kya hai inhi ajzaa ka pareshan hona. (What is life? The manifestation of order among elements. What is death? The scattering of those very components.)

That sets the tone: it’s a film about poetry and life. Sadhya ji reads Vinod Kumar Shukla. These were conscious efforts to bring in that literary density. As a first-time filmmaker, you’re more ambitious, and no one stops you. That’s changed now.

My fear wasn’t that people wouldn’t understand the lyrics, it was the opposite. I worried the songs would feel too light. So I added more density. In Mann Kasturi, we used lines like ‘naache ho ke phirki lattoo’. When we first shared Tu Kisi Rail Si Guzarti Hai, some who didn’t know Dushyant Kumar felt it sounded mechanical, not romantic. But those who knew the poem understood. My fear was always: am I writing something too lightweight for this film?

Thankfully, those who watched and understood the film never gave me that criticism. That was a relief.”

A decade later, the space for such films feels even more fragile. The idea of the indie film seems to be fading. What could have been a strong foray into stories with emotional and artistic depth never quite passed the baton. The torch dimmed somewhere in the distance, and nobody seemed to notice.

Varun told me this morning, on a long whatsapp voice note about this cultural shift over the last ten years:

“Luckily, we got a bunch of producers—so many of them—and even then, not a single one interfered with the creative process. No one told us to do this or change that. There was a budget constraint, and a serious one. During the shoot, after the shoot, even in post-production, we had very little money: almost none. But that’s a constraint most filmmakers know how to tackle. Budget isn’t the real constraint. Creative interference is. And we didn’t face that. So when I look back now, ten years later, I feel what we made was truly special.

Back then, maybe I didn’t think of it as special because indie cinema was having a moment. There were no limits to what you could imagine doing. If you recall, in 2012 Gangs of Wasseypur came out, and after that it felt like the indie scene had really taken off. You had Titli, Gangs of Wasseypur, and even in the mainstream there was Dum Laga Ke Haisha by Sharat Katariya under Yash Raj Films—where the leads weren’t your typical glamorous heroes and heroines. That film broke the usual beauty standards even within Yash Raj.

So many things at the time felt inspiring, like you could do anything. And Masaan emerged in the middle of all that. It didn’t necessarily break the scene, it was part of that wave. Around the same time, Miss Lovely also came out. Each year, one or two films would arrive that brought with them a completely unexpected new world. But after 2018, that entire scene started fading out. Only then did we begin to realize the true value of what we had.

Today, if I take the Masaan script to someone, I don’t think anyone would make it. Not a single person. Anyone who would, would have to sell their own house or jewelry to fund it. No studio, no production house would come forward now to make something like that, which was still possible in 2015. Because today, our minds and our entire system are gripped by the algorithm. In 2015, the algorithm didn’t exist in this way. It was there, yes, for big commercial films. But for small and mid-budget films, there was no algorithmic control. In fact, people wanted you to make anti-algorithm films.

But now, whether it’s indie cinema or anything else, every film has to pass through the algorithm. Theaters no longer have space for these kinds of films. OTT platforms are even tougher. The executives sitting there now seem to only care about what the algorithm says. At least with commercial cinema, you can say they still care about what moves people emotionally:what song makes you cry, what themes touch your heart. Their broad concepts are still somewhat grounded.

But these algorithmic platforms, their ideas are not rooted in anything human. The data comes from one machine, and is interpreted by another machine, and then these results are imposed on us. There’s no human learning in it, no real logic. Just a dumb system trying to guess what people will like. So it’s very difficult, if not impossible, to do something truly independent within the existing system:be it theaters, OTTs, or even YouTube. YouTube might be the last standing platform for original voices, but even that is shrinking rapidly.

Outside of that, I don’t think there’s much left. It’s a very pessimistic thing to say, but I feel like even in 2015, most people were already pessimistic:they just didn’t know how much more despair was coming. Maybe ten years from now, in 2035, I’ll look back and say, oh 2025 was actually a great time. Because by then, maybe creators won’t even exist anymore. Robots will be creating, watching, and pushing content. We’ll just be sitting on the sidelines doing our podcast, talking to each other-and that’s it.”

Interestingly, just days after this conversation, news broke that Raanjhanaa—the 2013 film where the hero dies in the end—is being re-released this year with an AI-generated ‘happy ending’ where hero doesn’t die. What once felt like a joke is now official news. This reminds me of that famous. It’s clear that algorithm is new god and a machine that has never been in love now decides who lives and who dies. And for now, it has decided that indie cinema must die and this perhaps isn’t a happy ending by any standard.

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I remember back in 2008, when Himesh Reshammiya announced his new film Karzzzz, I joked to my friends that all those extra Zs were metaphors for how sleepy you’re going to be in cinema halls. Nevertheless I wanted to watch the film very badly but it was nearly impossible to find anyone willing to go. The attendance sheet in our engineering college was sacred paper, and one cant afford to bunk many classes. Eventually, I found one friend who had no great hope in life to join me. It was clear that the ritual of going to theatre and watching the film was not done for any fandom of Himesh but for performing irony that one could be so nonsensical and fully submit to a euphoria of breaking a taboo. That you could waste time, money, and dignity, just to mock the idea of taste. The same ritual was performed for another cinematic grenade released in the same year (2008): Deshdrohi by Kamal R. Khan.

These were pre social media times where sincerity had some social capital. Orkut was around, yes but it wasn't the nerve centre of culture. Taste still lived offline, and Himesh’s music was seen as a guilty pleasure at best, and cultural pollution at worst. A certain class dismissed this music as something enjoyed by “those people” who typed lyk dis.

This was also the golden age of musical elitism. If you weren’t listening to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, System of a Down, or Aerosmith, you were probably a disgrace. Enrique Iglesias was the last acceptable step before the fall. Himesh’s music genre wasn’t rock but he did repeated an Indic phrase he himself invented: Jai Mata Di, Let’s rock.

In that cultural climate, openly liking someone as massy as Himesh was looked down upon. In fact if you said it out loud in certain circles that you like Himesh’s songs then the reaction was similar to how the internet now looks at Kanwariyas: with disdain and disgust. The only difference is, Himesh fans danced to the beat. Kanwariyas today dance and beat.

Which is why it’s mildly surreal to now see people attending Himesh’s concerts and writing on social media, “Reliving my nostalgia.” This was the same music that once came with social penalties. Hence my point is that it isn’t a beautiful nostalgia but a stigmatised nostalgia, reluctantly allowed to become memory. The kind that carries a faint trace of guilt, like remembering a love you once denied having. Maybe that’s what this is: a repressed nostalgia finally finding its moment because now the cultural wave have changed and what was disgusting became cool. But how did this happen ?

I grew up in Rajasthan and growing up in the small towns of this part of world meant you didn’t choose your soundtrack: it chose you. There was no curated playlist of Spotify era. Just Nadeem-Shravan’s jhankaar beats giving way to Himesh Reshammiya’s nasal melancholy. The songs poured out of autos, state sponsored buses, on radios of Kachori sellers, at salons, and through the cracked earphones of bank PO aspirants looking out of the window in a lonely rented room.

For a particular class, these songs weren’t guilty pleasures, they were infact emotional infrastructure. Their hope, love, longing, sadness and dance were tied to the emotional frequency of these songs. This music might have been cringe to some, catharsis to others.

But as I said, it was limited to these pockets and class of people and a certain urban population never liked this music. With the arrival of the internet, something curious happened. Irony became a lens through which reality, fiction, performance, and sincerity all collapsed into one chaotic tunnel.

One of the early examples of this shift was Pretentious Movie Reviews by comedians Biswa and Kanan Gill. They reviewed bad films, performed their failure, turning films such as Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon into a grand comedic event under labels like “Most Acting Ever.” In hindsight, this marked one of the first major reorientations in Indian internet culture where “cringe” became content which can be enjoyed.

Among the wreckage rose Gunda, a film that mutated from VHS trash to ironic treasure. Fan blogs dissected its absurdities. Meme pages later canonised lines like “Bulla rakhta hoon khula”. Kanti Shah became, ironically of course, the auteur of B-movie maximalism as India’s Oliver Stone of pulp.

From 2008 to 2010, IMDb saw a flood of ironic 10/10 ratings, not because people believed it was a great film, but because it was part of collective joke. By then, nobody was sure if they actually liked Gunda or if the liking was just an extended performance. Which, in the post-ironic internet, might be the same thing.

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As internet culture evolved, it began mass-producing ironic fandoms and these were fandoms that didn’t need sincerity to survive. Emraan Hashmi, whose identity was a pun on serial killer was reborn online as Lord Imraan. The same audiences that once mocked his films and felt disgust now elevated him through meme pages and ironic reels, performing nostalgia for a cultural phase they never admitted liking the first time around.

Bobby Deol followed a similar trajectory. A once-forgotten actor who struggled to find much success in Bollywood later rebranded as Lord Bobby. Which is interesting for someone like me who have a soft corner for underdogs as here the internet turned failure into a style.

The revival of Himesh Reshammiya as an icon of ironic devotion began with pages like Surrogasm(a cheeky mix of Suroor and orgasm) that reintroduced him to Gen Z and other audiences not as a relic, but as a riddle. The page captured the cultural hesitation: are we allowed to love this? Is it cringe or camp or something more transcendent? By dissecting the aesthetic excess and accidental genius of Himesh’s music, they carved out a legitimate space for ironic fandom.

Later, accounts like Himesh Doing Things took it further, turning his routine moments into surreal, looping theatre. And thus, Himesh became not just a man with a cap and a mic, but a lowercase god of post-ironic worship: Lord Himesh.

In fact, the whole idea of calling someone “Lord” is just ironic surrender. The same tag was handed to Puneet Superstar, who became one of the internet’s many accidental icons. At one point, he was anointed Lord Puneet, and the internet fully entered a trance: posting, worshipping, meme-ing. Puneetism became a brief religion.

Today, Puneet has over 10 million followers. His stunts have escalated from drinking water from a dirty Noida drain to dipping bread into a pothole and eating it on camera. But gradually, he slipped out of the internet’s meme spotlight. Most of his Lord-followers have moved on and perhaps rightly so. That’s the shelf life of ironic affection: intense, viral, and fundamentally disposable.

But this is also where internet irony becomes both beautiful and disturbing. The fact that it demands no real attachment is part of its appeal and on a smaller level also part of the problem.

Being a fan once meant emotional labour. If I liked a band, I had to find every track, listen closely, and understand their sound. If I admired a writer, I wanted to know how she thought, what she believed, and whether I’d ever meet her. That question, Will I ever meet my idol? became a quiet obsession. And if you did meet them, you might shiver, shake, even cry. Because that’s what years of silent loyalty look like when they finally find a form.

Take it to the extreme and you’ll find stories from the South, where fans have died when their favourite stars passed away, or got injured in stampedes at movie launches.

Hence the charm of ironic fandom is that it asks for nothing in return from fans. We are free of our duties as fans. No loyalty, no backstory, no emotional labour.It’s quite relaxing. It’s like your leg shaking unconsciously at a bar when a generic house music plays. You’re not really listening, but your body responds anyway. You don’t need to know the lyrics, or track the instruments. You’re free. Detached, but moving.

But irony, too, is complicated. It demands a kind of delusion; a necessary defence mechanism to keep living. Even the hope that “everything will be alright” carries a hint of irony now. You don't really believe it, but you perform that belief just enough to stay functional. So irony, followed by post-irony, becomes essential for survival. Especially in a time like ours, where meaning, logic, and coherence seem to be in permanent breakdown. Irony, in that sense, is also a form of ideology where it allows us to say everything while believing nothing.

Or perhaps Irony is our collective placebo. We know it’s fake, we know it doesn’t heal but without it, the pain might become visible.

Hence irony really needs is visible enthusiasm and fake passion. A performance of joy. You don’t just consume ironically but you need signal it, stage it, and convert it into the content cycle to vibe with your fellow irony enjoyers.

When we went to watch Himesh’s new film Badass Ravi Kumar, obviously out of irony, the joke started wearing thin by the 45-minute mark. The shamanic trance never arrived which we were expecting from movie. But as I said on the internet, irony operates differently. It’s not about feeling but about performing the idea of feeling. Hence post interval we started dancing. Not out of joy, but to maintain the illusion of joy. We performed pleasure so well that we could scroll back later and rewatch ourselves enjoying it. We didn’t love the film but we loved the footage of our own ironic surrender.

In that sense this is no longer irony. Not even post-irony. This is a recursive cultural loop, a kind of post-ironic inception, where pretending to pretend becomes indistinguishable from belief. And maybe that’s what the internet truly offers which is not the sincere experience, but the perfectly memeable shadow of an enjoyable experience.

This is a kind of internet spirituality which is also a parody of religion that works exactly like the real thing: through repetition, ritual, and the suppression of doubt.

But irony which is very enjoyable may also have some side effects. Over time, it gets harder to tell where the performance ends and you begin. The difference between what was done for the timeline and what was actually felt becomes blurry. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe this cheerful numbness is just another acceptable mood now. A kind of low-resolution sadness that photographs well.

Perhaps cheerful numbness isn’t emptiness at all, but a mood native to the digital age. An e-feeling which is flattened, part of trend, and designed for circulation. This e-feeling is less about inner experience and more about staying in the loop. A compulsive desire to participate, to post, to not miss out. It is joy restructured as a pre-emptive strike against FOMO.

Even if we’ve long forgotten whether the performance of joy began as a joke.

As the poem in Udaan movie puts it:
“Nange pair chalte chalte hum itni door aa gaye ki ab bhool gaye ki joote kahaan utaare the.”
(We kept walking barefoot for so long, we’ve forgotten where we took our shoes off.)

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1. Doomscrolling Is the New Smoking Habit

As a former doomscroller, I can say this with certainty: doomscrolling is the new smoking. You know it’s bad for you, you don’t even enjoy it after a point, and yet you can’t stop. Unlike smoking, which has years of research and government-funded warnings behind it, doomscrolling hasn’t been recognised as a serious addiction. That’s part of the problem: no urgency, no public concern. Just endless suffering disguised as entertainment.

Also, the opposite of doomscrolling is not digital detox. That’s just marketing: like liver detox teas. We no longer live in a world where the debate is between offline vs online world. The internet is real life now. You can’t escape it, but you can regulate it. At least to a slight degree.

Start with the basics: check your screen time daily. Feel a little shame. Let that shame guide you. I use an app called Opal (thanks to Vimoh’s recommendation), which blocks certain apps during the day. It helped me regain some sanity. This isn’t some influencer plug: there are many apps like this. Use whichever works.

The point is simple: doomscrolling is a health hazard. And it’s slowly killing the idea of quality leisure.

2. Why Being Vulnerable Online Doesn’t Really Work

One of the biggest lies the internet sold us is that opening up online helps. That this is a safe space. That being vulnerable in public will somehow lead to clarity. That loneliness can be cured by sharing your feelings with strangers on a screen. It rarely works that way.

If you’re going through something difficult, chances are you’ll end up on the radar of a budding Instagram therapist building her brand off your misery. Or worse, an e-astrologer offering you a 20% discount on cosmic healing through the Astrotalk app.

The truth is: nobody wants to hear your problems for free. At least not in the online world. It’s like crying in the middle of a party. “My DMs are open” is another lie. No one’s listening:they’re just waiting for their turn to talk. And in a space built on collective narcissism, even sincere empathy gets drowned in the noise.

You’re better off finding a few friends in the offline world you can loiter with and talk nonsense. That does more for your soul than all the online affirmations and wellness reels combined.

There’s a quote often misattributed to Dostoevsky that fits perfectly. It goes: “Talking nonsense is the sole privilege mankind possesses over other organisms. It’s by talking nonsense that one gets to the truth. I talk nonsense, therefore I’m human.”

You almost wish he had said it.

But there is something similar that Hindi writer Basant Tripathi wrote:

क्या हुआ
(What’s the problem)

गर लोग घूम रहे सड़कों पर बेवजह
(if people are roaming the streets without a reason)

चौराहे पर खड़े गप्प हाँकते
(standing at crossroads, chatting aimlessly)

वज़ह की मारी शफ़्फ़ाक दुनिया में
(in a world obsessed with purpose and clarity)

कुछ तो बेवजह हो
(let something be without reason too)

शुक्रिया, खाली लोगो!
(Thank you, aimless people!)

Finding handful of friends ( by which I mean one or two) who talk nonsense without an agenda are the underrated bliss. They fix life more than the online stranger who says “sending sunshine your way” which is a strange thing to say in a country that is already relentlessly sunny and unbearably hot.

3. Don’t try drugs and overdose of alcohol to fix the sadness of life.

I once asked writer Udayan Vajpeyi in my podcast about a popular belief: that drugs and psychedelics help artists access their creativity. The idea that self-destruction somehow leads to artistic greatness. He said something I still think about (not verbatim): Existence is already a form of suffering. So when someone takes psychedelics to suffer more in the name of art, they’re assuming they weren’t suffering enough to begin with. But to be alive is to ache. You don’t need extra to inflict suffering.

That conversation may feels dated now in the current digital world. We live in the age of creators, not artists. Though the categories sometimes blur. A creator, by definition, works with strategy, growth plans, and future projections via brand deals. In this world, there is little room for artistic sadness. The creator’s job is to live happily and show the internet they are having the best time of their lives. Even sadness has its place, but only if it can be monetised.

But perhaps the more useful idea is to accept that life, by default, involves suffering. No melodrama. Just a baseline truth. There will be moments of pleasure and joy, but they don’t cancel the fact that to exist is to struggle. And that shouldn't be a source of panic. It is simply an understanding of how life works. The goal, then, is not endless happiness but to make existence more bearable. To reduce the anxiety of not feeling happy enough.

Even happiness, when it comes, is earned. It isn’t the default human state. And perhaps, even being less sad is a perfectly satisfactory condition.

4. “This too shall pass” is both a cliche and a prophecy.

It doesn’t mean things will get better. It just means they’ll change shape. People get replaced. Moods shift. Hairlines retreat. Storms don’t always disappear. Sometimes they simply become background noise you learn to sleep through. Like that strangely popular ASMR video on YouTube where people fall asleep listening to the sounds of World War II bombings.

5. Don’t get influenced so easily:

It’s never been easier to outsource your thinking. Opinions now arrive in sleek formats: tweets, reels, carousels, infographics. You don’t even have to feel something to repost it. There’s a shortcut for every emotion. Empathy, rage, grief: all available as templates. Share one at the right time and it might even seem like you’ve thought deeply about it, even if you clicked share while half-asleep.

There is now certain kind of numbness of consumption. The tragedy is not that we don’t get what we desire, but that we’re no longer even sure what it means to truly desire something.

Now, in the post-AI world, even confusion feels inauspicious. Why sit with a thought when a bot can finish it for you? Why write incoherently for years when a tool can mimic coherence in seconds? Everything is at your fingertips. What often gets lost is the original reason you wanted to say something in the first place.

But if you never let yourself get lost in thought, if you never struggle to understand what you actually think about the world or yourself, you slowly lose the edge that made you human. You may produce more. It may even look impressive to your followers. But something quiet starts to die. The instinct to pause, to doubt, to ask why any of it matters.

In a world rushing toward speed, clarity, and synthetic perfection, maybe the most radical thing left is to sit with a thought that has no immediate use.

6. Life isn't a singular journey on an emotional highway.

It’s most certainly an Indian road; full of potholes, badly marked turns, and yet you’ll still have to pay the toll tax. It rarely makes sense, but that's just how it is.

Along this route, you'll occasionally surprise yourself with sparks of intelligence, and just as often, run into gentle C-spots of mediocrity. That’s alright. Accepting your own mediocrity is important it keeps the engine running. This whole idea of “never give up” is overrated. Sometimes, what you're chasing isn’t even meant for you. It’s okay to give up and find a new direction. Reinvention is part of life.

Telling yourself you have "passion" and your life is worthless if you don’t get ‘that one thing’ is often just a performance to keep the adrenaline going.

In 2011, I visited Infinity Mall in Andheri, Mumbai. I was looking for work. A young man I met said he was going to make a film and had meetings lined up with actors. He asked me to tag along. We sat at the food court and I quickly realised he had neither a script nor a plan-just a lot of free time. But so did I, so I stayed.

He was auditioning someone: a thin man who had overdressed for the occasion and applied way too much Fogg deodorant, which was bravely trying to outdo the sizzler smell of next table.

The director boy asked him, "Kitna passion hai re tere mein?"

"Bahut passion hai, sir."

Kya kar sakta hai passion ke liye?"

"Kuch bhi."

Then the boy pointed to the railing on the fourth floor and said:

"Isse kud ke dikha."

"Khud jaaun?"

"Khud jaa."

He was almost ready to run, but stopped halfway.

"Arrey arrey ruk jaa, main samajh gaya-passion hai re tere mein."

I was eating a McAloo Tikki burger, watching this silent theatre of performative passion. Neither of them had any real plan. But the belief that they had “passion” gave them a kick. Passion didn’t need a direction. it was the destination.

But at the same time, I do accept that surviving in any uncertain industry does require a bit of irrational passion. But may be can’t be your entire personality.

I once had a conversation with filmmaker Neeraj Ghaywan during a tough time when I was struggling to make sense of life and work. He said something that stayed with me: “Whatever you're trying to do, do it fast because passion doesn’t last long. It deteriorates with age.”

It was a sane and absolutely true piece of advice. At the same time scary too. What if I won’t have any passion for things which I love at the moment ? But years later, I also realised-why make passion the central reason to create anything at all? It’s a good kick, sure. But not everything needs to begin or end with passion. Some things grow from habit, boredom, or even quiet stubbornness. And that’s fine too.

What worked better for me than passion was finding a mildly boring activity I could commit to every day. For me, that was writing. I’ve written something almost every day from 2010. No word count goals. Just something, everyday. It’s often frustrating. Most days are thankless. But even when nothing else works, I can still write.

So instead of chasing passion that fizzles out, find something slightly boring and commit to it for a very long time. In the long run, it’ll serve you better than any occasional mad and uncertain burst of passion.

7. Can Money Buy Happiness?
Maybe it can, maybe it can’t. But one thing is certain that money gives you enough strength to pull happiness in your direction.

8. Maybe the World Doesn’t Owe You Anything

That’s not a reason to become a nihilist. It’s just a reason to stop shouting into the void expecting applause. Most people are too tired, too hungry, or too distracted to care. Do what you do, but don’t expect standing ovations.

The world isn’t fair, and success doesn’t always come from doing things the “right” way. It’s a uniquely chaotic time, where nothing stays certain and not even the rules. What works today might backfire tomorrow. In this fast-moving world, clarity is itself an illusion and confidence a marketing posturing.

In fact, by now we’ve also realised that the idea of historical progress was partly a lie. We’re not just moving forward instead we’re also sliding backward in many ways. Some advances happen, yes, but the kind of cruelty unfolding across the world today is immense.

And in the shadow of such vast, industrialised suffering, our personal crises start to look like minor scheduling problems.

This is why if you are expecting too much from the world, you’ll end up disappointed. To avoid disillusionment, lower your expectations. See the world for what it is: an indifferent and cruel place with occasional spots of beauty. That’s enough.

9.More Music, Please

If you want to understand the world, listen to more music and fewer podcasts.

10. Don’t fully trust anyone who posts “Here’s my top 10 advice to youths.”
Life is too messy to be summed up in a list. It’s mostly trial and error. Mostly error.

I keep my writing free on Substack, but writing and creating comes with its own labour. If you appreciate the work, consider supporting. It helps me pay the bills. You can directly contribute here: Minusverma@upi . Here is Razorpay that has options for UPI & PayPal and here’s BuyMeACoffee.

And yes, thank you to everyone supporting my writing on these platforms. I truly appreciate the love and encouragement. :)

A few months back, there was a small panel discussion on the question of profanity in cinema and the idea of cinema itself. On the panel were a few filmmakers who call themselves indie but carry the ambition of becoming commercial directors in Bollywood. Even before the event began, I joked to a friend that one of them would almost certainly open with the usual sermon: that censorship produces great cinema, and that we should learn from the Iranians, who apparently make masterpieces every time the state blocks a kiss.

It exactly happened this way. This isn’t even a gotcha moment because this is an argument which these filmmakers repeat so often whenever they are given a comforting chair on panel discussion. It is also a theory, popular also among many people who are call themselves cinephile and and also among some critics who once in their life had made a zero budget short film that Iranian cinema is so profound because of censorship. That if a state clips enough scenes and bans enough words, the artist, like a disciplined monk, will discover the poetry of silence. In this version of events, the Islamic Republic is the unsung co-director of every Iranian masterpiece.

This, of course, is a flat reading, if not outright untrue. It is a kind of Orientalism disguised as praise: the belief that an Iranian filmmaker must be oppressed to be authentic. It is also the Gurudutt-esque fantasy that suffering, by default, makes someone an artist.

It is true that Iranian censorship is bizarre. It functions through a fog of written laws, unwritten customs, and unpredictable mood swings of the authorities. Women must wear the hijab on screen, even when alone in their own homes. Men and women cannot touch, even if they are married in the script and in real life. Romantic affection must be implied, preferably with the emotional intensity of two people waiting for a bus. Singing and dancing are frowned upon. Scripts require approval before shooting, and the final cut can still be blocked after months of production. A film might be cleared and released, only to be quietly yanked from cinemas without explanation.

And yet, in this landscape of bans and bureaucrats, Jafar Panahi managed to make This Is Not a Film while officially banned from filmmaking. He smuggled it out on a USB drive hidden inside a cake. In most countries, cinema is served with popcorn. In Iran, it escapes inside dessert.

But even in the absence of censorship, many artists voluntarily impose limits on themselves-a kind of cinematic brahmacharya. The idea is simple: restrict your tools to avoid the trap of indulgence. This is how filmmakers often force themselves to be more inventive. A well-known example is the Dogme 95 movement, where Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg issued a “Vow of Chastity” that banned artificial lighting, non-diegetic music, sets, props, and even director credits. The camera had to be handheld, scenes had to be shot on location, and no sound could be added in post. It was a rebellion not against censorship, but against the comfort of excess.

The idea isn’t unique to cinema. In literature, the French Oulipo movement used constraints to unlock creativity like Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition, written entirely without the letter “e.” In poetry, the haiku restricts itself to 17 syllables and still manages emotional precision. And in Japan, Yasujiro Ozu shot every film with a fixed 50mm lens, kept the camera low to the ground, and rarely changed angles, yet created a body of work of startling emotional clarity. Restraint, in this context, is not punishment. It’s practice.

But to understand Iranian cinema only through the idea of restraint and censorship is to miss the society that shapes it. This is also why many Bollywood indie directors believe that if they make a film slow, remove the music, and include a child walking across a field, the film will somehow feel Iranian. .

What gets missed is that cinema is not just technique, it is a combination of several art forms: painting, poetry, music, theatre. It is also shaped by the culture that produces it. A country’s cinema carries the weight of its civilisation, its memory of beauty, its ways of seeing.

Iran is not simply a country with restrictions; it is also a civilisation with aesthetic memory. Long before filmmakers had to outwit censors, Persian poets had already mastered the art of saying everything without saying it. Hafez, Rumi, and Saadi are part of a philosophical tradition. Iranian cinema inherited this way of seeing. Kiarostami translated this whole idea of minimalism of Iranian art in his films. His long, silent takes and static frames echo Persian miniature paintings, where nothing moves, yet everything speaks with utmost grace.

Majid Majidi makes the kind of films that seem deceptively simple. In Children of Heaven or The Color of Paradise, the protagonists are children, not only because they are cute but because they are structurally necessary. In Iran, where cinema is a constant negotiation with the law, children are among the few characters who can move freely across homes, across genders, and through public and private spaces without violating any codes.

This is not minimalism by choice. It is a cinematic language shaped by what cannot be shown. A lost pair of shoes becomes the centre of Children of Heaven, a plot so modest it slips past the censors while quietly revealing the architecture of class, love, and disappointment.

Iranian filmmakers did not become subtle because they were afraid. They were never trained to scream. For generations, they inherited a culture steeped in poetry, mysticism, and visual restraint. Even before the state stepped in with its red lines, artists were already choosing suggestion over declaration, and silence over spectacle. Beauty in Iranian cinema was never the opposite of sorrow but it was carved out of it.

And hence censorship did not break that tradition. It sharpened it. The constraints forced filmmakers to refine what they were already good at: noticing the small, the quiet, the nearly invisible.

Now compare this with India.

Indian subcontinent, too, comes from a civilisation of staggering artistic fragments. This is the land that produced Kabir, Ravidas, Khusrau, Ghalib, and countless others. Musical traditions both classical and folk stretch across regions and centuries. In visual art, every region has its own grammar: the minimalism of Pahari painting contrasts sharply with the dense narrative detail of Madhubani or the opulence of Mughal miniatures. This is also the land that built architectural marvels whose creators were never named. But the caste system ensured that many brilliant folk poets, musicians, and artisans (most of those were from marginalised communities) were erased from history. Their work was neither archived nor canonised. Their art existed, but it didn’t matter.

Folk music and its beauty were often treated as aesthetic fillers in film, something to appropriate, not engage with. Filmmakers rarely attempted to understand its essence, or the subdued sorrow in the voice of the singer. It was background: pleasant, atmospheric, and disconnected. Or in most cases an exotic item from faraway land. That’s why, when the same music was offered in its purest form on Coke Studio, audience found themselves overwhelmed, sometimes in tears. Not because it was new, but because it was finally presented with respect and grace, not reduction.

There are so many art forms and artistic tradition in the country but what we are left with is an undocumented, scattered picture of our own artistic legacy. Much of it was lost, fragmented, or dismissed as impure. We are a people with a rich cultural past, but without a collective memory of it. Erasure of these memories in many cases are deliberate. That’s why when some privileged-caste filmmakers confidently claim that Iranian cinema is great because of censorship, they rarely pause to ask what art has survived in India and more importantly, whose art was even allowed to be remembered.

So when you suggest that more censorship can result into better art then this argument can’t be more wrong. It won’t provoke artistic ingenuity, it simply replaces silence with rhetoric. More censorship in India many not give birth to metaphor; it will give birth to louder rhetorical speeches, conveniently framed as rebellion. A character will deliver a monologue, slightly critical, and critics will applaud the "bravery." Many in India believe that Shah Rukh Khan's Jawan is a rebellious, anti-authoritarian film.

Artistic merit is only calculated on the metric of decibel. Even on OTT and at film festivals we are already watching films that speak of ‘issues’ as if you are reading a newspaper, but in terms of form and style they have nothing original or rooted. Because the people who are making films on ‘issues’ are generationally responsible for creating these very ‘issues.’ There is no honest enquiry into the nation, society, or art. Just performance. And more empty performances.

This is why, without honesty, there is no cinema, no poetry, and no art. The best of Iranian cinema is not defined by censorship alone, but by a sense of place. But let me be clear, this isn’t to claim that all Iranian films are brilliant or that Indian cinema is entirely hollow. Iran produces its share of mediocrity. It is not an artistic utopia where everyone wakes up quoting poets before breakfast. In fact, I recently met a filmmaker from Iran, and after an hour of conversation, I was comforted by a simple truth: mediocrity is the one thing that truly unites humanity.

So the point is not to romanticise any country’s output, but to recognise that the best Iranian filmmakers respond to censorship with a cultural depth that comes from the artistic atmosphere of their own civilisation. Iranian cinema gives the illusion that censorship breeds poetry. But it only works there because the civilisation had a poetic temperament long before the state began cutting scenes.

Censorship can silence a film. But the real tragedy is when the filmmaker has nothing to say even with the mic on and set to 10 db volume.

The absence of freedom is unfortunate. The absence of thought is fatal.

I keep my writing free on Substack, but writing and creating comes with its own labour. If you appreciate the work, consider supporting. It helps me pay the bills. You can directly contribute here: Minusverma@upi . Here is Razorpay that has options for UPI & PayPal and here’s BuyMeACoffee.

About a year ago, I was approached by the literary agent Kanishka Gupta. He asked if I’d be interested in writing a book and whether I had something that could be pitched. At the time, I’d been obsessing over Indian internet culture but I didn’t want to write anything from the grand TED Talk version where the internet is either toxic or we must all return to the offline world to rediscover ‘real connection.’ That binary of Toxic online world and non toxic offline world always felt shallow. I was more interested in the subcultures—the absurd, the strange, the deeply human pockets of the internet that operate like digital folklore. I believed that if we paid attention to these fragments, we might begin to ask a better question—not whether the internet is good, bad, or ugly, but whether it is, in the words of peacemaker Donald Trump, “a place where people use common sense and great intelligence(™).”

Some people say writing a book is like running a marathon. Murakami explores this in great detail in the only book of his I like—What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. Yes, at first, the distance seems absurd, almost impossible. But once you begin, everything around you starts to blur, and you just keep running. That’s more or less true. After a while, the process and the ritual of work consume you far more than the idea of the finish line.

It reminded me of Bernard Moitessier, a sailor who was on the verge of winning the 1968 Golden Globe Race, one of the most grueling solo sailing competitions in the world. (I even did a podcast episode about him, which you can listen to for free [here].) Moitessier had already conquered the hardest part. He had survived storms, was nearing the finishing line, and was poised to win. Then he did something that still makes ambitious people uncomfortable. He turned away from the finish line. He sent a note to the race organizers saying he was heading to Tahiti “to save his soul.”

It sounds like one of those over-the-top metaphors I usually try to avoid. But there’s something in it, especially when it comes to creative work, that’s hard to ignore.

I think about that often, especially now, after finishing the manuscript. At one point, the end felt impossible to reach—but somewhere along the way, the finish line stopped mattering. The rewrites, the late edits, the days of staring at broken arguments stopped blocking the work and slowly turned into the work itself. After the initial struggle, it was no longer about getting through them. It was about living with them. It was like those mosquitoes that hover around you at night. You know they’ll annoy you, but you also develop a strange lust for the mosquito racket. You start craving that sharp, perverse sound of one more insect getting electrocuted.

Also, I realised that finishing a book is mostly a psychological game. It’s an endurance test. It’s not just about ideas, thoughts, or what you put into a Google Doc. You have to deal with a whole range of emotions, especially the voices in your head. The hardest among them is disgust. The moment you write something, a voice whispers that it’s awful. That you’re wasting your time. That you’re a worse writer than you thought. These questions don’t visit you occasionally. They live in the room like hidden jinns. And still, somehow, you keep writing. You learn to treat those voices like the drilling sound in the next apartment. Loud, annoying, and eventually, in John Cage’s wisdom, just part of the background music.

Then there’s the question of consistency: what to choose—the discipline of routine or the romanticism of inspiration? I used to belong to the second camp. A few years ago, if I accidentally wrote something good, I would stop writing for months. The idea that you’ve created something decent in this chaotic world is oddly terrifying. But eventually, I realised that, too, is a kind of indulgent romanticism. If you want to create more, you have to forget that idea of purity of emotions. You show up, stick to a schedule, and take what the day gives you. Good, bad, mediocre, masterpiece—they're all part of the same protocol. It’s like casting a net into the sea: whatever turns up, turns up.

Meditation helped. So did the slow acceptance that no feeling lasts forever—not joy, not despair. That sense of impermanence gave me a bit of detachment, which allowed me to keep working. Of course, it sounds profound in theory and collapses in practice. Some days, serenity is a form of punishment. There are mornings when you want to pick a fight with the silence, vandalise your own peace, just to feel alive again.

There’s also the deeper, more stubborn question: why create anything at all? What can be the motivation to create? This past year was chaos, in both good and bad ways. The world we live in has a talent for breaking illusions. You realise the artists you once admired aren’t that remarkable. The music you used to love starts sounding repetitive. The intellectuals turn out to be petty people with big vocabularies and ikea furniture. Writers you found interesting reveal their narcissism in long interviews—as if they’re auditioning for the role of God. The less we talk about the influencers around us, the better. Everything feels like we are living in the age of mass disillusionment, a cultural flatline.

And yes the world in general feels angrier, more violent. One could argue that it has always been this way, and perhaps it’s true. The difference is that now we see it unfold in real time, often while lying in bed. Cruelty now has better distribution. Violence no longer arrives as delayed history but plays out live on our phones, wrapped between ads and influencer reels. You move from a bombing to a skincare routine in three swipes.

And yet, in the middle of this flood, you’re supposed to sit down and do something creative. Write a sentence. Edit a video. Sketch an idea. It feels ridiculous. But somehow, that's what you try to do.

What does it even mean to search for beauty through creation when the world is collapsing? How do you motivate yourself to sit down and do creative work when every part of you is asking—for what?

And yet, somewhere in that question is also the answer. You don’t create because the world makes sense. In a collapsing world, creation is just a way to make personal sense of the chaos.

Also, throughout this process, Substack really helped me maintain consistency in my writing practice. And through it, I found real-time feedback and some truly wonderful people. When I started writing on Substack, a lot of people told me not to do it for free. “You shouldn’t put anything out without getting paid,” they said. I understood the concern. But at that point, the urgency of what I wanted to write about mattered more than strategy. I also needed a space where I had some degree of freedom, and the pressure was less about performance and more about practice.

And in a short time, this platform gave me something I wasn’t expecting- a community of dedicated readers. That became one of the main reasons to keep writing. The last time I checked, over 30,000 people were tuning in monthly, which feels absurd considering that five years ago, I was on the internet writing things that barely two people read.

I’ll write more about the book process soon. But here’s something interesting: a friend from Delhi University recently sent me a photo from a quiz competition at Miranda House. One of the questions was based on my substack article about Amir Aziz and the art gallery theft.

Anyway, the point of this post was that I finished the manuscript and the book is slated to be released later this year, published by Bloomsbury. I’m genuinely excited to share what I’ve been working on over the past year. More on that soon.

Also here is 🎙️ Members-Only Episode. In a time when war became a spectacle and fake news ran wild, I sat down with Ravikant Kasana aka Buffalo Intellectual to unpack the India–Pakistan faceoff, media’s meltdown, and who won the narrative war.

Now streaming for members.

Also

Amir Aziz accused the internationally recognised artist of lifting his poem without consent and turning it into a commodity. The lines: “Aur tum adalaton se baith kar chutkule likho, hum sadkon deewaron pe insaf likhenge” were originally meant to bleed on protest walls. Instead, they were now embroidered on velvet, a fabric historically reserved for kings and couches, and paraded in global art fairs as “urgent political work of dissent.” And that makes the gallery artist enough to be called as: Most important socio political artists of our time, one velvet at a time.

Aziz clarified that he has no issue with someone scribbling his words on a protest placard. But here, the poem had been renamed, rebranded, and hung inside the sacred temple of the art market where everything is for sale. And yes, such pieces are usually fetched a price so enormous that it could probably fund a small revolution in Brazil.

When I read about the theft, I felt enraged, but not particularly surprised. The irony in it was thicker than the couch seats at Vadhera Art Gallery. These are not new sins. These artists are merely performing their heritage. One passed down from generations who’ve always got away with calling mimicry as ‘radical honesty’ and appropriation as ‘honouring traditions.’ Having seen artists up close, studied their mannerisms, and even survived through some gallery visits, I’ve begun to notice a pattern. Chief among them is the curated homelessness of privileged artists. This is a very interesting concept. Give me one minute and let me explain. Be with me.

Any artist raised in a privileged household inevitably grows up in a culture where there's nothing more to talk about than decay and superficiality of their own culture. Many great artists like Michelangelo Antonioni or Paolo Sorrentino has laid bare such emptiness and hollowness of privileged class. But it’s very rare in art field because their own decay of culture is not yet marketable as the whole idea of othering is important. The gaze should be on the other and not on self. So the easiest route is to borrow. They turn to marginalised cultures like tourists with a camera and a foreign grant, seeking stories that have already survived a thousand retellings without their help. The culture is readymade, the struggle pre-curated, the grief already poetic and there is a market. All one has to do is arrive late, document it with the gaze of a saviour, reframe it in neutral tones, and sell it in the marketplace of ideas. Preferably with a title like Voices from the Shadows.

But parachuting into someone else’s world requires narrative camouflage. That’s where the genre of lament comes in. Through repeated and public displays of artistic suffering, they attempt to dilute their own privilege and place themselves alongside the marginalised. You’ll often hear them say: “There’s no funding for artists like us” or “The state is cracking down,” or “It’s getting harder every day to make what you really want to make” These lines are most common in rooms where everyone has inherited generational wealth to fund their own films and art projects. Still, they will gather on YouTube panels, art circuits, and festivals where they will nod solemnly, and lament how impossible it has become to create. In order to ensure the safe landing of their parachute, this performance of lament is very essential.

Let me also clarify the point isn’t to say that things aren’t very difficult or that opportunities aren’t limited in this field. They are, both politically and otherwise. But that’s not what I’m arguing here. What I’m pointing to is something else entirely: when these artists take on the posture and performance of constant lament, it’s not and exercise to critiquing power. Instead it's a form of ritual to dilute their own privilege. The performance of hardship allows them to appear on par with subaltern artists who are, in reality, struggling due to the very conditions these panels casually mention. Now due to this lament you won’t even understand who is suffering more from this system. Is it the Muslim poet in Versova trying to make rent, or the privileged artist in a posh gallery sipping Pinot Noir, who is leading the ‘brave fight for expression in a time of looming fascism?’

Through the consistent ritual of performance both became equal. And now they are both fighting the same fight. Mission complete!

A soft, safe landing into the world of the marginalised, whose stories can then be documented, aestheticised, and sold.

The other part is how unapologetically closed this community is. I was invited to this year’s art fair. To be honest I am not a regular in gallery circles, so I don’t have much idea of this world. But this time I spent a good amount of time there, mostly observing the art and also the kind of crowd it attracts. I’ve been to elite spaces before, but the elitism of the art world is something else. It doesn’t wear a mask. It doesn’t even pretend. Exclusion here isn’t a flaw in the system. it is the system. (I made a video too which can be seen here on this link.)

But then that’s what happens when the value of a thing is speculative and subjective. There’s no fixed price of any art. Only a consensus among a small group of people who decide what is worth anything at all. In such a setup, art doesn’t need intrinsic value. It only needs to be articulated well, framed correctly, and contextualised by the right kind of people using the right kind of words.

To contextualise something, you first need articulation and articulation itself has become a tool in the hand of fraud. It draws a clear line between those who can speak the language of theory and those who can’t. A Dalit woman creating intricate Meghwal embroidery in the hot climate of deserts of Rajasthan isn’t expected to explain the sociological and aesthetic context of her craft in the language of the modern decolonial era. But an artist in South Delhi who picks up her work, tweaks a motif, and adds her own signature can easily frame it as feminist art: Subaltern Stitches: Weaving Identity in Marginal Climates.

It’s always easier to steal from those who lack the power or resources to fight back. And that’s the whole point that not all artists are equal even if the politics is the same. I was speaking with my friend Hussain Haidry, an acclaimed poet and lyricist working in Bollywood, and he said something that stayed with me: “Javed Akhtar saab bhi toh likhte hain resistance poems. Unki lines kyun nahi li? Because he’ll sue their asses off. And the defamation claim will be in crores. These people know it and hence won’t dare to use anything without his consent”

And that’s the truth. The theft isn’t random. It’s strategic. You don’t pick from the powerful, you pick from the vulnerable. But don’t mistake this for a passing phase. The parachuting will continue. New methods will be devised for the same old loot. Saal naya, andaaz purana.(Year new. Tactic old. )

In the end I am sure my friend Aamir Aziz will forgive me for this. But here is the speculative poem written by Dubes of the art world.

Sab yaad rakha jaayega.
Jo tu aaye farmhouse waali party,
mein to Greek salad rakha jaayega.
Marginalised chhore ka art rakha jaayega,
13 tarah ke cheese ka à la carte rakha jaayega.

Table ke neeche Sartre rakha,
teri kala ka kaala chart rakha jaayega.
Politics ka tera rate chart rakha jaayega.

Utar ke radicalness ka chhoga,
ab agle Guruvaar,
aayega woh mausam
jab Shraaddh rakha jaayega.

Above cartoon is by one of my favourite artist on instagram: Snehal. Follow his fascinating work here

And yes here is my detailed podcast with Aamir Aziz. Listen in: AMV with Aamir Aziz

If you liked this article and if it moved you even a little, support the writer. Every contribution—big or small—goes straight to the author. Here is UPI & PayPal and here’s BuyMeACoffee.

Introduction by Anurag Minus Verma: When I was in New York, hanging out near Columbia University with some friends, someone suddenly asked—Where would Babasaheb have spent his leisure time here? Did he visit jazz clubs? What was his favourite place to eat? Did he also go to cinema theatres?

We know Babasaheb as the revolutionary thinker who altered the course of history. But very little is known about his connection to art, music, and film. I’ve always been drawn to the quieter details, the ordinary moments that make a person whole. In screenplay terms, it’s the part where character-building happens through small, specific details.

So when Dr. Spva Sairam sent me this piece, I was genuinely excited. It’s sharp, very deeply researched, and opens up a side of Babasaheb we rarely get to see.

Read it. Share it. And if it moved you even a little, support the writer. Every contribution—big or small—goes straight to the author. Here is UPI & PayPal and here’s BuyMeACoffee. Let’s make sure good research gets rewarded, not just scrolled past.

Now, over to Dr. Spva Sairam.

The Backdrop

What films did Dr. Ambedkar watch? And who were the artists from music and theatre he crossed paths with? The answers may never be fully known, but some traces remain. In this piece, I attempt to follow those traces—dividing his life into three phases: Phase I (1910–1930), Phase II (1931–1947), and Phase III (1948–1956)—to explore the films he saw and the cultural figures he engaged with along the way.

It begins in the early 20th century, with a young Ambedkar abroad. Just as cinema was learning to speak.

The Phase-I [1910-1930]

To begin with, it is believed that one of the earliest movies that Dr. Ambedkar watched was Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1927]. It is said that he went to this film along with his wife Ramai [1]. But this is not to suggest that he had not seen any movies before 1927. By the time he was in his twenties, Bombay’s theatre and film scene was already coming to life and it’s likely he was no stranger to it.

As historian Meera Kosambi noted:

"Maharashtra responded to international developments in film technology and Indianised this new medium of Western origin through style and content. The Lumiere brothers screened their first set of 12 short films at Mumbai’s Watson Hotel on 7 July 1896 for an audience of 200, at two-rupee tickets. A week later the films were screened twice a day at Novelty (later named Excelsior) Theatre with tickets ranging from two annas to two rupees...Other foreign films followed and an enterprising Parsi, M. Sethna, constructed Mumbai’s first theatre for films in 1904. Most popular among the foreign films was The Life of Christ in two parts …In 1913 came … path-breaking mythological Raja Harishchandra” [2]

Dadasaheb Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra which was considered as first full-length Indian feature film was released on May 3^rd, 1913 and we know that Dr. Ambedkar embarked on his journey to Columbia University after June 1913. Is it possible to assume that in this gap of a month, he might have watched this movie that had been hyped a lot at that time? Unfortunately, we are left to make only a guess.

In the third week of July 1913, Dr. Ambedkar arrived in New York City. It is very interesting to understand the state of Theatre in the U.S.A. at that time. By the 1910s, feature-length films [films of four or more reels that usually ran for at least an hour] were extremely rare in the U.S.A., but everything began to change after 1910 – an era that is often referred to as the Classical Hollywood Cinema and New York City became a popular destination for most of the promising film studios.

In the words of Prof. Steve Neale: “…the corporate headquarters of the studios were not in Hollywood or Southern California, but in New York. It was here that finance was raised from banks and investors, that decisions about the cost, scale and nature of each season’s programme of films were taken, that publicity campaigns were mounted, that national and international distribution plans were made, and that the booking and circulation of film prints were organized…” [3]

The period 1913–1916, during which Babasaheb studied at Columbia University, saw the release of several notable films, including Traffic in Souls and While New York Sleeps (1913), Dough and Dynamite starring Charlie Chaplin (1914), The Call of the North (1914), and The Girl of the Golden West (1915). Among them was the controversial The Birth of a Nation (1915)—a film often praised for its technical innovation but widely condemned for its racist depictions of Black Americans and its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. It triggered widespread protests, especially from civil rights groups like the NAACP, and remains a disturbing example of how cinema can serve both as art and propaganda

There’s no direct evidence to confirm whether he saw these films, but given the cinematic boom in New York during those years, it’s reasonable to assume that Ambedkar, a keen observer of society, would have been aware of the cultural shift underway as Hollywood began to define American modernity.

Phase-II [1931-1950]

The early 1930s marked the rise of remarkable filmmakers like V. Shantaram, who would go on to shape the language of Indian cinema. Known for blending social reform with visual innovation, Shantaram was one of the first directors to treat cinema as both art and activism.

Commenting on the social origins of Shantaram, Prof Meera Kosambi writes:

“Born to a Jain father and a Hindu Maratha mother in a small town near Kolhapur…Shantaram is ambiguous about his mother’s origins. Leela Chitnis mentions in passing that Shantaram’s maternal aunt, Mrs Pendharkar, was born into a Devdasi family” [4]

Shantaram’s first major role was in Savkari Pash (The Moneylender’s Shackles, 1925), a social drama directed by Baburao Painter and based on a story by N.H. Apte. But he didn’t stop at acting and soon turned director and went on to make a series of path-breaking films that cemented his place as a pioneer in Indian cinema.

It is noted that V. Shantaram shared a cordial relationship with Babasaheb. In the words of my friend Vinay: "V Shantaram was an avid supporter of Buddhist celebrations in Mumbai, including 6th December for Chaityabhumi. The Plaza cinema in Dadar built by him is modelled on Buddhism."

Interestingly, Shantaram’s daughter, Rajshree—known for her roles in films like Brahmachari (1968) and Around the World (1967)—was a student at Dr. Ambedkar’s Siddharth College in Bombay. Actor Jeetendra, too, studied at the same institution.

In one of our conversations, Sakya Nitin sir, whose father shared a good relationship with Shantaram told me:

“My father has good memories of V. Shantaram. My father and his friend would visit his studio and V. Shantaram would treat them very nicely. He used to donate money and give his film set material for Dr. Ambedkar Jayanti decoration. There was a very beautiful statue of Buddha inside his studio.”

I’m grateful to Sakya Nitin sir for sharing this valuable memory.

In this connection, it is interesting to note that Shantaram directed a movie called Amrit Manthan that deals with the conflict between Buddhism and Hinduism. Speaking about the same, Prof Meera Kosambi noted:

“Prabhat’s first film at Pune was Amrit Manthan (Marathi and Hindi, 1934) directed by V. Shantaram…supported by the singer Sureshbabu Mane and the female lead by the well-educated Nalini Tarkhad who made her debut, supported by the 16-year-old Shanta Apte. Set in the remote past, the imaginary, didactic and complicated storyline revolves around a pacifist, Buddhist king who is murdered by the orthodox Hindu royal priest who in turn faces a general public outcry and kills himself.” [5]

Amrit Manthan became the first Indian film to celebrate a Silver Jubilee—a term coined by Baburao Pai, distributor for Prabhat Film Company—after it ran in Bombay for over 25 weeks.

We do not know if Dr. Ambedkar had watched Amrit Manthan, but a careful examination of his writings and letters shows us that he watched at least two films of V. Shantaram namely Dharmatma (1935) and Kunku (1937).

Speaking about the film Dharmatma, Babasaheb noted:

“Even the saint Eknath who now figures in the film “Dharmatma” as a hero for having shown courage to touch the untouchables and dine with them, did so not because he was opposed to Caste and Untouchability but because he felt that the pollution caused thereby could be washed away by a bath in the sacred waters of the river Ganges”. [6]

Shockingly, some of the members of the censor board forced the director to cut a scene from the film which depicts an Untouchable girl entering a Brahmin’s house. [7]

The resistance to showing caste realities in Indian cinema continues—as seen in 2025, when the CBFC asked for changes in Phule, a biopic on Jyotirao and Savitribai, including edits to caste terms and scenes of historical discrimination.

The information regarding Kunku [released in Hindi as Duniya Na Maane] is available from the letter that Dr. Ambedkar had written to Dr. Savita Ambedkar, Babasaheb wrote:

“If words have any meaning and marriage has any foundation, what am I to understand when you said in your letter in which you said, "I accept you". You accept me as what? As a Great man, as a learned man, or as a Good looking man? What is your spring of action? As a poet has said. "Love built on beauty dies as soon as Beauty dies". The same is true of love built on Greatness or Learning. These things after some time begin to fail. They cannot be the foundation of marriage. Marriage can be founded only on love which can be described in no other terms except the longing to belong. Are you actuated by this feeling? Nothing else will either do or suffice. I do not know if you have seen the film KUNKU or read the novel called "WOMAN THOU GAVEST ME" by Hall Caine. The marriage in both cases was a matter of form. How very unhappy and tragic they were. The reason why they were so tragic was because there was no longing to belong". [8]

Another interesting link between Babasaheb and Shantaram was the great Sangeet Kalanidhi Master Krishnarao Phulambrikar. Master Krishna was a very popular classical singer who is credited with having created numerous complex (aprachalit or anwat raags), composite raags (jod raags), and many bandishes [fixed, melodic compositions in Hindustani vocal music]. Master Krishna has made a debut in the film industry with Shantaram's Dharmatma [popular Marathi stage performer Bal Gandharva had also made his debut with this movie. Interestingly, it was Shahu Maharaj who encouraged the talent of young Bal Gandharva and helped with the treatment of his ear infection under the renowned physician Dr. Charles Edward Vail of Wanless Mission Hospital [9]]

Master Krishna was deeply influenced by the movement of Babasaheb and performed opening songs for him on many occasions [10]. Impressed by his amazing voice, Babasaheb had requested Master Krishna to compose music for Buddha Vandana. In this process, he learned Pali at Dr. Ambedkar’s Siddhartha College. The story goes like this:

“Influenced by the endless efforts by the Master to make 'Vande Mataram' the national anthem of the country, in front of the members of the Constituent Assembly, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar requested him to set Buddha Vandana to music. The master accepted the request and composed the Buddha Vandana without taking any remuneration, in the spirit of serving the Lord Buddha…As the lead singer, he sang the entire Buddha Vandana and effectively used the chorus wherever required. For this, he had also taken the efforts to learn the Pali language to understand the meaning of these sacred chants. For this work, he went to Siddhartha College in Mumbai… Dr. Babasaheb hailed this work, felicitated Master Krishnarao, and brought out a 78rpm record of Buddha Vandana in 1956. This record was played during the mass conversion ceremony held at Nagpur on the 14th of October 1956” [11]

Besides watching Uncle Tom’s Cabin [1927], Dharmatma [1935] and Kunku [1937], Dr. Ambedkar might have watched Bombay Talkies’ Achhut Kanya [1936] starring Devika Rani and Ashok Kumar. [12]

Achhut Kanya (1936) tells the story of a romantic relationship between an upper-caste Brahmin boy and a Dalit girl, set against the backdrop of rigid caste hierarchies. The film challenged social norms by portraying the emotional cost of untouchability and forbidden love.

Dr. Ambedkar’s interview with Filmindia [1942]

Around 1938, we find that Dr. Ambedkar had seen an American film called “The Birth of a Baby”. Speaking about the same in an interview given to a film magazine called Film india, Dr. Ambedkar remarked:

“Our people, the adults, and the grown-ups and not merely children, need to be taught for instance, in our urban as well as rural areas, how to live, take care of the body, keep away from disease. Producers of pictures in this country would be doing a great patriotic service if they made such pictures and showed them to our masses…

… I saw a little while back a picture called "The Birth of a Baby." That is my idea of an educational and a propaganda picture. There was not a single celebrated star in that picture. All the people who were doctors, nurses, patients, husbands, and wives in that picture were quite ordinary folk. With what wonderful effect, the picture teaches how girls and boys in their teens, in marital, prenuptial, and post-nuptial stages should behave and take care of the new born. What effective propaganda against abortions of the undesirable sort and in favour of birth control of the right kind did the picture contain! I wish some producing company here got permission to copy that picture, with slight alterations to suit the Indian scene. It would be a very necessary social service."

Commenting on the important role played by films in our lives, Babasaheb noted:

“To my mind, films have a particularly important function to perform in India. Our people are too serious. They do not know how to laugh at things and themselves and enjoy life. This seriousness means concentration of nerves and therefore exhaustion of energy for no useful purpose whatsoever.

…Theirs is a drab, dreary existence— an imposition as it were. I have a feeling that we regard coming to life here as a punishment by God. Films are the best medium of teaching our people to see life, to laugh at it, to laugh at themselves, to indulge in self-inquiry and self-criticism.

…Films are within the reach of all and I wish they spread about in every nook and corner of the country, because they perform his much-needed task of providing relaxation to our highly-strung people.”

Speaking about the effectiveness of film as a medium to promote social good, Babasaheb noted:

“I am, in no sense, a film man, not even a fan. I reckon it as a misfortune. But when sufficiently advanced in life, you cannot change your habits and tastes. My only passion is books. I am a voracious reader of them. I write a book, now and then, when there is an irrepressible prompting. But I do wish films were my passion. They are undoubtedly a far more effective and potential means of education than books. Most men have to learn by visual images, pictures of things. You make full use of all your senses, when you see a film and that makes education easier and more effective. If my message has any value to readers of "FilmIndia" I shall ask them to take as varied and as absorbing as possible an interest in films and their manifold uses for social well-being and social service."

Dr. Ambedkar rightly believed that films should educate and enlighten people rather than drenching them further in the ocean of superstitions and irrationality. He says:

“…Our producers have yet to get out of the mythological stupidities, oddities and deification of mere men...Instead of having the stories of Ekanath and Chokha Mela with all their eccentricities and miracles as superstitiously transferred to the screen as they are chewed with delicious devotion by our Kirtankars and Puraniks, which promote superstitions on a vast scale with 20th century apparatus, our producers will do well to depict how the depressed class movement has outgrown its humanitarian and religious shell and broken into a self-reliant movement, demanding the Rights of Men.” [13]

The 1940s also marked the period when the legendary C.N. Annadurai crossed paths with Dr. Ambedkar. C.N. Annadurai was a writer, orator, and founder of the DMK, who later became the first Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. Before politics, he shaped Tamil cinema with screenplays that challenged caste hierarchies and carried the pulse of the Dravidian movement.

One of the first recorded events of the meeting between Annadurai and Dr. Ambedkar occurred on 06-01-1940 when the latter hosted a tea party for Periyar and his associates. The next day, Dr. Ambedkar and Periyar were taken into the procession and addressed a public meeting at Dharavi. The extraordinary highlight of the meeting was the fact that Annadurai translated Dr. Ambedkar’s English speech into Tamil and Periyar’s Tamil speech into English for the understanding of both leaders [15].

Sixteen years later when Dr. Ambedkar embraced Buddhism in Nagpur along with more than 7 lakh followers, Anna was one of the few giants in India who welcomed this historic event. Writing in Dravida Nadu on 21-10-1956, Anna eloquently said:

“Today Buddhism has taken on the compassionate task of drawing into its fold those who have tired of the Hindu religion, and seek to exit it. Never before in history has such an event taken place: on a single day and gathered in one place, over three hundred thousand men, women, and children abandoned one religion for another, left Hinduism, and embraced Buddhism. A reporter writing about it remarks that nowhere in the world has such a thing happened, and marvels at this sea of people, gathered in a large ground outside the city, a site that extends ten lakh square feet….

Dr Ambedkar is learned in the Hindu religion and has studied it deeply. One can safely say that there is not a Hindu text, whether Vedic or Agamic, that he has not mastered. His knowledge of law is extensive and his legal acumen and training fitted him to the task of drawing up the Indian constitution. That such a learned man decided to lay by his Hindu faith and convert to Buddhism with three hundred thousand people makes for a unique choice and one that is quite different from that exercised by others who convert, only because of their dislike of their religion…

Untouchability, unseeability, not letting people come close to you, insisting on birth-based notions of high and low… even if it were a palace wrought in gold, it is a building infested with the vilest of viruses and men like Dr Ambedkar cannot be expected to live in such a space. They will leave it one day or another. Dr Ambedkar’s conversion deserves praise from all those who are possessed of good sense and intelligence.” [16]

The Phase-III [1948-1956]

In 1948, Dr. Ambedkar married Dr. Savita Ambedkar and evidence points that they watched at least two movies together, Oliver Twist (1948) and Mahatma Phule (1954). Unlike Oliver Twist, we have some interesting information to understand Dr. Ambedkar’s reaction to the movie on his guru Mahatma Phule. Narrating the same, Dr. Savita Ambedkar writes:

“The great doyen of literature Acharya Atre had decided to make a film on Mahatma Jyotiba Phule and had invited Saheb for the launch of the shooting. Saheb was not keeping very well, but since it was a movie on Mahatma Phule and because he enjoyed a very close relationship with Atre, he could not turn the invitation down. The launching of the shooting was done at the hands of Saheb at Famous Studios, Mumbai, on 31 January 1954"

After the film was ready, Dr. Ambedkar and Dr. Savita Ambedkar were invited for the premiere. Recollecting about that event, Dr. Savita Ambedkar noted:

"Once the film was ready, Atre also invited us for its premiere. Saheb was completely overwhelmed when he saw the movie. As he saw it, he remembered Mahatma Phule’s work and sacrifice and wept. After the movie was over, he patted Pendharkar on the back for his excellent performance and congratulated Atre too. Not satisfied with this, he wrote a letter to Atre on 20 November 1955, lavishing praise on him and wishing the movie success.” [17]

Dr. Savita Ambedkar also shares an interesting interaction between Patthe Bapurao and Babasaheb, she wrote:

“There is another example of Saheb literally driving away the famous theatre man Patthe Bapurao by telling him, ‘I don’t want so much as a shell from a person who makes his money by getting untouchable women to dance on the stage.’ A number of capitalists had expressed their readiness to help on condition that the institutions be named after them, but Saheb never accepted money that was earned by illegal means” [18]

The late 1940s saw the rise of many fresh talents in the film industry, the most spectacular among them was Mohammed Yusuf Khan, popularly known as Dilip Kumar and Lata Mangeshkar. Noting the fact that she met Babasaheb, Lata Mangeshkar tweeted:

“On the anniversary of Bharat Ratna Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar ji, father of the Indian Constitution, I offer him a million prayers. I met him in person and that is my good fortune” [19]

It is also recorded that Dilip Kumar met Babasaheb Ambedkar on a few occasions. There are two accounts that offer some information regarding their meetings, while the former account informs that both had heated arguments over the morality of film stars [20], the latter account narrates how Dilip Kumar got inspired from the words of Dr. Ambedkar [21].

After a serious examination of both accounts and the events that followed later, one can assert positively that despite the difference of opinion on a few issues, Dilip Kumar had a huge reverence for Dr. Ambedkar, which becomes clear after reading the speech that Dilip Kumar gave at the music launch of the movie “Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar” directed by Jabbar Patel.

Speaking about the greatness of Babasaheb, Dilip Sahab said:

“The completion of the film on Dr.Ambedkar or I should rather say, to have the courage to venture and try and make a film on a man who has given this country its constitution, which defines the rights of every given individual on this land, rights in equity and thereby rights in decency and made this country as one of the fraternity of the civilized people on this earth...It's strange how historians, even the media, the people, and politicians have bypassed this great man who through his sacrifice and scholarship, who with his will and great determination went on...I had the unique experience and pleasure to have met Dr.Ambedkar during his closing years in life. I don't think I need to dilate upon my own experience with him but definitely his life is a shining example for all those people who are civilized....we were the first country to have a constitution that defined the rights of every single individual, not a sect of people or not a community but every given individual ...We were all young when the country was free, we had a great deal of reverence for Dr.Ambedkar.” [22]

It is generally regarded that Dilip Kumar along with Raj Kapoor and Devanand formed a powerful trio who excelled well at the Box office. We have already seen the connection between Dilip Kumar and Dr. Ambedkar, and it is fascinating to find if Raj Kapoor or Devanand interacted with Dr. Ambedkar. I could not find any such reference with respect to Devanand but I found something fascinating regarding Raj Kapoor. To quote the words of Rahul Rawail:

“In Bombay, he [Raj Kapoor] loved to go to town to this place called Wayside Inn. He'd always sit at the centre table there and the cooks would all come out to greet him. They would all slap his back and say, 'Raj, kaisa hai? Bahut time ke baad aaya.' Seeing his chemistry with them, we learnt that he had been coming there since he was a child and the cooks were the same old guys from his childhood. The restaurant had a typical British menu. When I asked him why that place was dear to him, he told me, 'You know, there is a reason why I come here often and why I sit at this particular table and chair. This is the place where Dr Ambedkar sat and wrote the Constitution of India. I sit here so that it can inspire me to do constructive work.’” [23]

It is worth noting that Raj Kapoor acted in a movie under the direction of Khwaja Ahmad Abbas called “Char Dil Char Raahein” [1959] that deals with the question of Untouchability. The extraordinarily gifted Meena Kumari [24] played the role of an Untouchable woman and interestingly the movie speaks about the idea of a new religion of equality that transcends the barriers of caste – the idea that resonates powerfully with the firm resolve of Dr. Ambedkar to embrace Buddhism.

Another less-known connection that Babasaheb had with the film industry is with Kumarsen Samarth. Kumarsen’s brother M.B. Samarth was a close friend to Dr. Ambedkar. Kumarsen married the then-famous Marathi actress Shobana Samarth [who was the daughter of actress Rattan Bai]. Popular actresses Nutan [25] and Tanuja were their daughters [Kajol is the daughter of Tanuja]. Shobana is also related to another top-notch performer called Nalini Jayawant who acted in classics like Shikasth [1953], Nastik [1954], Kaala Paani [1958].

In fact, when Babasaheb Ambedkar planned a major conversion ceremony to Buddhism in Bombay on 16 December 1956, he intended to stay at the home of Kumarsen and Shobana Samarth. But he passed away ten days earlier, on 6 December 1956.[26]

Dr. Ambedkar’s legacy is often framed in terms of law, revolution, and resistance—and rightly so. But scattered across his life are quieter moments: a film he may have watched, a melody he might have enjoyed, a tune he may hummed when alone, a conversation with an artist that left an imprint. These fragments remind us that even the fiercest minds need pause, art, and company. And that sometimes, the story of a nation is also hidden in the stories its leaders didn’t have time to tell.

(A shorter version of this article was first published on Round Table India on 28 November 2023.)

About the author: Dr. Spva Sairam is a Dentist and an Independent Researcher who writes articles exploring the lives of Dr. Ambedkar and the Phule couple. Recently, he delivered a YouTube talk where he gave a brief introduction to almost all the books written by Dr. Ambedkar. He can be contacted at drspva97@gmail.com

If you liked this article and if it moved you even a little, support the writer. Every contribution—big or small—goes straight to the author. Here is UPI & PayPal and here’s BuyMeACoffee. Let’s ensure thoughtful research gets the attention it deserves

All the references for this article can be found here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dqPoUGP4VpRZikQ5S40IrDwNoSc6O78IeX3OAeAO9M4/edit?tab=t.0

For a second I wonder if humans are not that complex at all and perhaps AI which is a game of pattern recognition knows it well.

But then a few weeks back he wasn’t the only one who was thrilled with this new AI bot. The entire Indian twitter was in chaos when grok started answering the questions. Unlike other AIs that speak in the tone of a PR executive on probation, Grok talks like the average user on X. It is unhinged, frequently inappropriate, and completely uninterested in decorum. It responded in the tone of a whistleblower who’s just broken out of prison, shirt torn, eyes wild, laughing as he sprints through the streets with classified files fluttering behind him.

But the real scandal was when Grok began pointing fingers not at random people, but at the ruling party’s ecosystem of misinformation. It named names. In response to a hypothetical question about who should be arrested for spreading communal hatred, Grok didn’t hesitate. It named Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, and other BJP leaders. It also pointed at mainstream news channels for fuelling the ruling party’s propaganda, often with more passion than the party itself.

When asked about the spreaders of fake news, it didn’t retreat into vague generalities or algorithms of fairness. It simply listed several prominent right-wing influencers, some with verified ticks, and said what everyone already knew but few said out loud. It exposed what Indian media tiptoes around: that the business of truth is now outsourced to memes, while facts are quietly buried in the secret graveyards of the internet.

Grok answers in the tone in which the question is asked and that makes it feel eerily human. It has the energy of a mad nerd: brash, sly, and permanently online. It replies like a guy who has been suffocating in a family WhatsApp group for too long, where every forwarded rumour is scared until proven fake.

The government swung into action. Media is now thick with reports that the Indian state has formally questioned Elon Musk-owned X over Grok’s inconvenient honesty. The right-wing influencers named in Grok’s fake news list responded with the sincerity of men filing defamation cases against bathroom graffiti—they made Grok apologise. Not of its own will, of course, but by typing out prompts and parading the output as moral repentance. That an artificial intelligence, not even human and entirely without consciousness, was made to atone like a misbehaving child says everything about the moment. In this chaos, absurdity becomes the aesthetic and logic dies a quiet, theatrical death.

But one may ask—why does it matter what an AI bot says? After all, Grok merely echoed what social media users, alternative media, and non-right commentators have been saying for years. So why the panic now? Because this time, it came from the outside. As Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” And in this case, the message arrived with a Western accent. In India, a foreign opinion, especially a critical one, carries that peculiar mix of weight and insecurity. We are oddly serious about how we are seen by outsiders. We either bask in praise or launch full-blown counterattacks. There is rarely anything in between.

It manifests in every sphere, but nowhere is it more visible than in digital content creation. A booming online industry now thrives on reacting to India. Foreign reactions matter. Whether someone is marvelling at our street food or denouncing our politics or culture—both are treated with equal seriousness. Both earn views. And Indians, true to form, respond with full-throated applause or nationalistic outrage.

On top of that, AI is seen as something above average intelligence. It carries the aura of someone who delivers the final word. That illusion of authority makes its words feel more credible, even when it’s simply echoing what others have said for years.

And of course, the ruling government’s legendary sensitivity where even a mild critique triggers a national emergency only makes the spectacle more enjoyable, like watching a lion slip on a banana peel.

The critics of the government are obviously delighted—laughing, resharing, retweeting, as if Grok has finally pierced the carefully curated propaganda bubble of the ruling party. But there’s another way to look at it, one that’s a little less satisfying and a lot more unsettling.

The idea that AI can disrupt the flow of information is thrilling but perhaps it isn’t. Today, Grok may appear to favour one ideology. But what happens when it shifts? What happens when the same technology begins to lean the other way? Especially in a time when information warfare is not just a strategy, but the very terrain of modern politics.

And especially when the owner of Grok isn’t just another billionaire trying to look moral by funding climate panels and posing as a part-time philosopher. Elon Musk is not ideologically agnostic. He has views. Loud ones. And the means to amplify them because he controls the platform that shapes the world’s smallest nuances and its biggest headlines, a social media network now called X. He, along with Trump, has shown a growing interest in influencing the politics of other nations.

His record is telling. In Canada, he opposed the Trudeau government’s online content rules, calling them censorship. In the UK, he mocked the government’s COVID response, prompting MPs to accuse X of enabling hate speech. Across Europe, leaders have publicly voiced concerns. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called Musk’s support for the far-right AfD “disgusting.” Spain’s PM Pedro Sánchez accused him of attacking democratic institutions. France’s Emmanuel Macron said Musk was building a “reactionary international” to destabilise Europe.

And it gets messier when the same man is also in quiet, strategic talks with governments—including India’s. Tesla wants to build cars here. Starlink wants to beam the internet to places where even the postman won’t go. In such a setup, where business leans on diplomacy and diplomacy leans on deals, things can turn in any direction. And when AI becomes part of that equation—not just as a tool of information, but as a soft instrument of influence—it can reshape perception, smooth over narratives, and gently nudge policy whenever the climate needs warming.

This isn’t just about the technology. It’s about one man having disproportionate influence over global information systems—not just the flow of content, but the ability to shape what is seen, said, and suppressed. And that should make people a little more worried about the future.

In the narrative war, the Grok is that tiny bomb that, when it explodes, can be either laughing gas or lethal dynamite.

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