It starts with a toss but ends with a cultural takeover. The Indian Premier League, now in its seventeenth year, has become more than just a sporting phenomenon. Over time, it’s India’s most potent soft power tool. What began as a domestic T20 tournament has evolved into a slick, high-gloss spectacle that shapes how the world sees India: fast, chaotic, competitive, and endlessly entertaining.
At a time when national identity is increasingly built through pop culture and media, the IPL operates as a shorthand for modern India. It’s not just the cricket that draws global attention — it’s the Bollywood-backed team ownerships, international player rosters, drone-shot stadium cinematics, and theme music that sounds like it belongs in an action film trailer. For millions abroad, this is India at its most visible — a nation where entertainment and ambition collide in dazzling colour.
The numbers reflect that reach. The IPL is one of the most-watched sporting leagues in the world, with streaming deals stretching across continents. For international brands — from Saudi tourism boards to global soft drink giants — IPL sponsorships are a way to tap into India’s massive consumer base while aligning with the league’s aspirational sheen.
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If Hollywood was America’s soft power in the 20th century, the IPL may be India’s in the 21st. It packages sport, celebrity, nationalism, and commerce into a single, irresistible export.
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But the IPL’s soft power isn’t just external. It also reflects India’s self-image. In the league’s aesthetic, we see a country willing to negotiate tradition and hypermodernity — cricket whites have been replaced with neon kits, devotional chants have been repurposed as crowd anthems, and local dialects have been woven into high-production promos. The IPL champions hustle culture, regional pride, and pan-Indian unity — all on a three-hour broadcast.
That said, this cultural diplomacy comes with contradictions. The tournament’s embrace of spectacle can overshadow deeper conversations around labour rights, gender parity in sport, and access to resources. And while Indian players are front and centre, the tournament is still often run with a corporate logic that flattens regional nuance into easily marketable archetypes.
An Indian flag waving in the crowd at the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup | Image Credit: Raunaq Sachdev on Pexels
Still, if Hollywood was America’s soft power in the 20th century, the IPL may be India’s in the 21st. It packages sport, celebrity, nationalism, and commerce into a single, irresistible export. And whether you’re watching from Chennai or Chicago, one thing’s clear — this isn’t just about cricket anymore. It’s about image. And India knows exactly how to play the game.
Rolled out in kitchens across the Indian subcontinent, roti has remained a humble flatbread that has travelled far and wide in tiffins and memories, surviving displacement, scarcity, and change. It moved in the hands of traders, sailors, migrants, and indentured labourers — its shape shifting with every border it crossed. Even in its earliest forms, roti wasn’t just sustenance; it was a migrant story. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, after the abolition of slavery, Britain sent over 1.3 million Indian indentured labourers to far-flung colonies — about 145,000 to Trinidad alone between 1845 and 1917. Alongside clothes and keepsakes, they carried recipes and muscle memory: the instinct to make something familiar in an unfamiliar land.
Where wheat was scarce, they improvised. In the Caribbean, that meant lentils — giving rise to dhalpuri, roti stuffed with split peas and blistered on a hot plate. In Malaysia, Indian Muslim migrants known as mamak stretched dough into roti canai, paired with dhal or sweetened condensed milk. Even Mexico’s tortilla, though corn-based, echoes roti’s logic of adaptability: a flatbread shaped by the land it’s made on. What this really shows is that roti’s evolution has always been tied to power — who moves, who adapts, and whose foodways get preserved or erased.
Culinary Power and Ownership: Who Gets to Tell the Story?
Today, Indian cuisine means different things in different parts of the world. In London, it may appear on a tasting menu; in Trinidad, in a lunchtime wrap; in Kuala Lumpur, at breakfast. This diversity hints at the breadth of Indian food’s migration — but also reveals who gets celebrated and who gets edited out of the frame.
Sliced beef and vegetables on a tortilla | Image Credit: Los Muertos Crew on Pexels
In some Western dining spaces, Indian flavours are reframed as modern or refined, often with little acknowledgement of the histories they carry. British chef Tom Kerridge’s £28 Butter Chicken, for instance, reflects its market and audience, yet became a talking point because of how casually it detached a dish rooted in Delhi homes and dhabas from its cultural context. For many, the issue wasn’t the reinvention — it was the idea of presenting it at a luxury price point without any real nod to where it came from. On supermarket shelves, boutique spice brands continue to favour polished packaging even as conversations about sourcing and credit grow more urgent with the rise of diaspora-led brands.
Of the few Michelin-recognised Indian restaurants in the world, many sit outside India — a reminder that global prestige often arrives only when Indian cuisine is filtered through Western institutions. London alone has multiple Michelin-starred Indian restaurants, while India has none under the official Michelin Guide, which still doesn’t operate in the country. The symbolism writes itself.
At the same time, borrowing isn’t a one-way street. Indian chefs reinterpret French pâtisserie, Japanese matcha, and New York bagels, layering their own histories onto global forms. The question isn’t whether adaptation is allowed — it’s whether the origin story stays visible, and whether those who shaped a dish have a seat at the table when its value is determined.
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Picture a grandmother in Port of Spain dusting flour off her palms, or a student in London making roti on a tiny stovetop because it tastes like home. For many, cooking it is an act of remembrance. For others, it’s the start of experimentation.
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Reception and Reality
The flavours may be the same, but the reception rarely is. Restaurants serving “elevated Indian street food” often draw critical attention, while Indian-run dhabas offering similar dishes are rarely spotlighted. Part of this is access — who can secure prime real estate, hire PR, or design spaces that match fine-dining expectations. Part of it is perception: dishes become more “approachable” when plated minimally, spiced subtly, and narrated through a Western frame.
Economically, the landscape mirrors this. The market for Indian packaged foods and spices has grown rapidly, with diaspora-led brands driving global curiosity. Those who control the narrative often control the profits, too.
But these tensions exist within the diaspora as well. A Trinidadian dhalpuri won’t taste like a Punjabi roti, yet both carry the same emotional resonance for those who grew up eating them. Authenticity becomes a question of belonging rather than purity: who decides what counts, and what gets preserved?
A serving of soft-shell tacos | Image Credit: ROMAN ODINTSOV on Pexels
Preserving and Redefining Roti Across Borders
Despite all its migrations and reinventions, roti is still rolled out each morning — soft, warm, familiar. Picture a grandmother in Port of Spain dusting flour off her palms, or a student in London making roti on a tiny stovetop because it tastes like home. For many, cooking it is an act of remembrance. For others, it’s the start of experimentation. Across the globe, chefs, home cooks, and street vendors add to roti’s atlas of identities, each version shaped by history, geography, and personal taste.
In the end, roti’s story isn’t about drawing hard lines between “pure” and “changed.” It’s about recognising that every flatbread — whether folded around curry in Trinidad, flipped in a Malaysian street stall, or plated in a New York bistro — carries the imprint of the hands that made it and the landscapes it travelled through. The challenge is making sure those hands and landscapes aren’t forgotten when the dish arrives at the table.
On a weekday morning in New York, the subway car settles into its usual choreography. Headphones in. Eyes lowered. Everyone practises a small, private neutrality to get through the day. Then someone glances up and frowns. A poster, bold, smug, a little too pleased with itself, has broken the spell. Faces follow the gaze, a ripple of annoyance travels down the carriage, and for a moment strangers are united by a single, shared reaction.
The ad has succeeded. Not because people liked it, but because they couldn’t ignore it.
Ragebait used to belong to political campaigns or the murkier corners of the internet. Now it’s creeping into beauty ads, grooming brands, tech startups, sparkling-water companies, places that once sold pleasure or convenience. And that shift isn’t accidental. It’s a clue to the emotional climate of American public life, and to the new tactics brands are using to cut through a landscape thick with noise.
The rise of irritation as strategy
Provocation has become a design choice. Marketers may not call it ragebait, but the vocabulary is unmistakable: “disrupt the scroll,” “spark conversation,” “stop people in their tracks.” It’s the language of rupture, not persuasion.
This approach works because irritation is more legible than charm. Charm takes effort; irritation is instant. Digital platforms long ago taught brands that strong emotions travel fastest, and anger, even mild anger, generates reactions. Reactions keep content circulating.
Provocation has become a design choice | Image Credit: Anthony Hortin on Unsplash
Circulation becomes visibility. And visibility is the currency that every brand is scrambling for.
What’s new is how this digital logic is spilling into the physical world. The subway has become a testing ground for emotional disruption. You’re captive. You’re overstimulated. Your guard is down. A provocative poster doesn’t feel playful. It feels like an intrusion. And that’s precisely why advertisers place it there.
How public space absorbs online atmosphere
Walk through any major American city and you can sense the shift. Once, public advertising aimed to entertain or inform. Now it often aims to interrupt. The mood mimics the internet — quick, reactive, slightly abrasive. Public space begins to feel less like a commons and more like a comment section.
The effect is subtle but cumulative. Irritation becomes ambient. The day begins with a small jolt of friction rather than ease. Not enough to push anyone over the edge, but enough to raise the emotional temperature by a degree or two.
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In a landscape where calm is scarce, irritation becomes oddly efficient. A shortcut to visibility. A cheap emotional spike. Brands aren’t creating the exhaustion; they’re capitalising on it.
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This isn’t about sensitivity. It’s about the atmosphere. When brands treat everyday life as raw material for agitation, the commute becomes a site of emotional extraction. The poster isn’t merely selling a product. It’s shaping the emotional texture of the morning.
The cost to brand identity
The strategy delivers attention, but attention is not loyalty. This is the quiet paradox of ragebait: a brand can win the moment and lose the meaning.
If a company irritates you into remembering them, they become associated with irritation — not trust, not aspiration, not desire. Even if people don’t consciously reject the product, they mentally downgrade the brand. The emotional temperature sticks to the name.
The long-term danger is erosion. Warmth disappears. Coherence dissolves. Consumers may recall the punchline but not the product. And gimmicks rarely scale. What provokes today becomes wallpaper tomorrow, and suddenly the brand has trained its audience to expect stunts rather than substance.
Provocation is incredibly easy to copy and nearly impossible to own. When every brand starts raising its voice, no one stands out. The volume goes up, but the meaning drains out.
A culture stretched thin
It’s tempting to blame algorithms or generational habits, but the deeper cause is cultural fatigue. Americans are overwhelmed by the sheer velocity of stimuli — alerts, feeds, notifications, headlines, ads stitched onto every inch of public and private space.
In a landscape where calm is scarce, irritation becomes oddly efficient. A shortcut to visibility. A cheap emotional spike. Brands aren’t creating the exhaustion; they’re capitalising on it. But desperation is not a strategy.
Campaigns are being built on gentleness instead of aggression | Image Credit: Olena Kamenetska on Unsplash
What comes after the provocation
Every emotional cycle has a counter-cycle, and small signs of a cultural correction are emerging. People seek quieter retail spaces, restaurants with no screens, hotels that emphasise stillness, even “silent flights.” The desire is not only for escape but for clarity. Calm becomes a commodity.
Some brands are already leaning into this shift. Campaigns built on gentleness instead of aggression. Long-form storytelling instead of short-term shock. A return to consistency rather than spectacle.
The cultural pendulum is moving toward relief — brands that lower the temperature rather than raise it. Not purity, not nostalgia, but something subtler: the pleasure of not being yelled at by your own commute.
What this moment reveals
Ragebait advertising isn’t a trend so much as a symptom. It reveals something about the current American mood: overstimulated, emotionally thin-skinned from too much noise, and increasingly attuned to disruption as the default instead of the exception.
When public ads adopt the tone of online conflict, the boundaries between physical and digital life blur. We start to inhabit the same emotional posture everywhere — reactive, watchful, slightly on edge.
Subways have always been cultural barometers. They show you the city’s preoccupations long before the city can name them. Today they tell us something subtle but important: irritation has become ambient. Not explosive, not dramatic, just a faint, steady buzz.
And if that buzz becomes the norm, it’s worth asking who benefits, who adapts, and what emotional costs we’ve quietly agreed to pay.
Open any major platform and a certain pattern appears. A stranger studies quietly on TikTok Live, a creator walks through a supermarket with viewers trailing behind, meditation apps offer modes that resemble shared presence, and AI companions send morning greetings. Productivity tools now include virtual coworkers. These features look like entertainment or efficiency hacks, yet they are built to give people the sense that someone is nearby.
A decade ago, loneliness felt like an interior mood. Now it shapes product decisions across the tech industry. Companies have realised that users return more reliably when something feels companionable. The numbers reflect this shift. Low-interaction livestreams on TikTok have grown steadily over the past two years, AI companion apps have pulled in tens of millions of users around the world, and long, quiet study videos on YouTube continue to draw consistent viewing. The engagement holds even when very little is happening.
The reasons stretch beyond technology. Remote work reduced daily contact, and many shared spaces either changed or disappeared. Cafés raised prices, libraries shortened hours, and neighbourhood spots became harder to maintain. A global survey in 2023 by Meta and Gallup reported that around one in four adults experiences frequent loneliness. It tracks with what people describe in their own lives. As familiar rhythms faded, they began looking for softer forms of connection that could slip into unpredictable days.
Someone’s presence in the background, even through a screen, can soften the day | Image Credit: Libby Penner on Unsplash
AI accelerated the trend. Companion apps offer a feeling of steadiness without the weight of social performance. Conversations take place at a pace people can manage, which often makes them easier than real ones. The appeal here is quiet. Many users are not searching for romance or fantasy. They want acknowledgement that fits into the edges of a scattered routine.
Livestreams and shared-task videos serve a different purpose. Someone’s presence, even through a screen, can create a backdrop that softens the day. Walking streams, cooking sessions, and silent study rooms are simple formats, yet they mimic the comfort of being around others who are also going about their lives. These spaces carry no pressure, which explains their endurance.
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Many people are not seeking grand emotional narratives or deep conversation. They want a softer kind of company that can sit beside work, chores, or study, and the world does not offer that easily anymore.
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The behaviour is most visible among younger users, yet it crosses age groups. Many people feel stretched by erratic schedules, high expectations, and social environments that sometimes feel too demanding. A low-demand connection can feel reliable in a way traditional social life often does not. A livestream does not ask you to keep up. A digital companion stays even when you step away.
Companies respond to what they see. Some now measure engagement in terms of presence rather than taps or clicks. A few surface creators who hold attention simply by showing up regularly. The idea is straightforward. People trust spaces that feel steady, and steadiness keeps them returning.
There are concerns about how these habits develop. Platforms gain when users stay inside their ecosystems, so these environments can expand quietly. Hours drift by. A stream that starts as a background company sometimes takes up a larger share of the day than expected. Comfort and habit can merge without much notice.
Observed among young users, the behaviour crosses age groups | Image Credit: Amanda Vick on Unsplash
Even with the risks, it is clear that these tools fill a gap. Many people are not seeking grand emotional narratives or deep conversation. They want a softer kind of company that can sit beside work, chores, or study, and the world does not offer that easily anymore. Technology stepped into the space left behind by changes in work, housing, mobility, and community life.
The loneliness market is less a verdict on people and more a reflection of the moment. It shows how individuals are rearranging their emotional routines when older forms of casual connection no longer appear without effort. Digital companionship, even when light, offers a sense of continuity that is hard to find elsewhere. The behaviour will shift as the world changes, yet the need that drives it feels durable. People want to move through their day with some feeling of closeness, even when that closeness takes a different shape from what they expected.
Scroll long enough and you’ll find a Gen Z creator explaining compound interest with the same energy someone else uses for a GRWM. Another breaks down taxes the way friends dissect breakups. It’s oddly comforting. Financial advice, once the domain of suits and spreadsheets, now arrives with trending audio and jump cuts.
For Gen Z, money lessons don’t come from a person in a blazer across a mahogany desk. They come from social media. From Instagram Reels explaining how to budget on ₹45,000 a month in a metropolitan city. From TikToks that start with, “Here’s what I wish I’d known at 18.” And while that might sound unserious at first glance, it makes more sense the longer you sit with it.
Nearly 70 per cent of Gen Z turns to social media for financial guidance | Image Credit: rupixen on Unsplash
This is a generation that grew up watching adults lose jobs overnight, watching rent climb faster than salaries, watching the 2008 financial crisis ripple through their families, and watching student debt turn into something closer to inheritance. They’re not hostile to financial knowledge. They’re wary of how it’s been delivered. Too formal. Too opaque. Too late.
So they go where explanations already live, their feeds.
A recent US study found that nearly 70 percent of Gen Z turns to social media or the internet for financial guidance, compared to 57 percent of millennials and 38 percent of Gen X. TikTok leads the pack, followed by Instagram, podcasts, and online communities. That hierarchy matters. TikTok isn’t just popular. It’s where the language feels native. Short. Fast. Personal. No jargon, no shame, no assumption that you already know the basics.
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Social media didn’t replace banks, advisors, or financial education. Institutions left a gap, and the internet filled it. Not always accurately. Not always safely.
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What older observers often miss is that Gen Z doesn’t treat social media advice as gospel. Many openly acknowledge the risks. They cross-check tips on Google, Reddit, or with a friend who “knows this stuff.” They follow multiple creators precisely because they don’t fully trust any single one. The appeal isn’t blind credibility. It’s accessibility.
Formal finance still feels like a club with a dress code. Social media feels like you can walk in wearing pyjamas.
This shift isn’t limited to the United States. In India, “share market” creators explain SIPs and stock basics through memes and masala edits. In Brazil, TikTokers dance while breaking down inflation. In Nigeria, young creators teach forex trading with the same cadence others use for makeup tutorials. In South Korea, finance YouTubers cut advice with K-drama clips and jokes about anxiety that land a little too close to home.
Across contexts, the tone is the same: peer-to-peer, informal, and emotionally fluent. What differs is the risk profile. Misinformation spreads easily. So do exaggerated claims and casual scams. The line between a helpful tip and a dangerous shortcut can blur in a 30-second reel.
Regulators have started to notice. In Australia, nearly one in three young adults follows at least one financial influencer, and most admit those influencers have changed their behaviour. In India, new SEBI guidelines require “fin-fluencers” to disclose sponsorships and avoid offering unlicensed advice. The UK and Brazil are moving in similar directions. The goal isn’t to shut these creators down, but to acknowledge that they’ve become part of the financial ecosystem, whether institutions like it or not.
But focusing only on regulation misses the larger point.
Gen Z lives in an economic reality where traditional markers of stability feel increasingly distant. Homeownership feels abstract. Inflation eats entire paychecks. Long-term planning feels like a luxury reserved for people with cushions. In that context, advice that feels human, immediate, and survivable carries more weight than advice that feels correct but unreachable.
Gen Z lives in a time where traditional stability feels increasingly distant | Image Credit: Leeloo The First on Pexels
Authority used to look like expertise delivered from above. Now it looks like someone slightly ahead of you, explaining what worked and what didn’t, without pretending to have solved everything. That doesn’t mean institutions are obsolete. It means they failed to meet people where they were.
Social media didn’t replace banks, advisors, or financial education. Institutions left a gap, and the internet filled it. Not always accurately. Not always safely. But in a way that feels immediate, democratic, and legible to a generation used to decoding the world in motion.
For older readers trying to understand this shift, the question isn’t why Gen Z trusts TikTok. It’s why so many formal systems still make understanding money feel like homework instead of a conversation.
Once you answer that, the feed starts to make a lot more sense.
A decade ago, global entertainment followed a familiar pattern. A small group of countries produced most of the shows that travelled, and most of those shows were in English. Translation existed, but it was secondary. Subtitles were a courtesy and dubbing was an afterthought. Cultural influence moved outward from a narrow centre, and everyone else adapted to it. This is why shows like Friends and Full House became household names across the world in the 1990s and early 2000s, building devoted subcultures far from the places they were made.
That arrangement held as long as distribution stayed limited and production budgets stayed manageable. By the mid-2010s, both conditions started to collapse. In January 2016, Netflix expanded into more than 130 new countries in a single move, abruptly widening the potential reach of any show it carried. At the same time, the cost of producing flagship domestic originals rose sharply. Translation stepped into that pressure point, and the economics of global storytelling shifted around it.
Platforms learned quickly that international titles offered a different kind of return. A series like Money Heist made this visible. It began as a modestly performing Spanish show and was cancelled by its original broadcaster in 2017. Once acquired, translated, and pushed across markets by Netflix, it found large audiences in Europe, Latin America, and eventually Asia and the Middle East. What mattered wasn’t that it became a hit everywhere at once. It was that language stopped limiting where a story could go.
From a platform’s perspective, the logic was simple. Domestic originals were expensive and risky. International titles, once translated well, travelled cheaply and kept viewers engaged longer. Subtitles and dubbing stopped being support functions and became central to growth strategy. Netflix executives later confirmed this shift in scale, noting that in 2021 alone the company subtitled roughly seven million minutes of content and dubbed more than five million minutes globally. Translation budgets rose, dubbing pipelines expanded, and release schedules began to assume global circulation from day one.
A still from Narcos | Image Credit: IMDb
That shift changed how creators worked. As translation became reliable, the incentive to mimic Anglo-American storytelling weakened. Writers and directors no longer needed to flatten their work to feel “exportable.” A Korean legal drama like Extraordinary Attorney Woo leaned heavily into local workplace hierarchies, social rhythms, and cultural cues and still became one of Netflix’s most-watched non-English series globally in 2022. Nollywood followed a similar pattern. Nigerian films did not need shared history or linguistic familiarity to build viewers abroad once subtitles and dubbing lowered the barrier to entry.
Distinctiveness became an asset rather than a risk. Translation allowed stories to carry their own cultural density without being rewritten for an imagined global norm.
Audiences adapted just as quickly. Once platforms began releasing high-quality subtitled and dubbed versions simultaneously, viewers started exploring work from regions they had rarely encountered before. This shift became unmistakable between 2019 and 2021. Parasite crossed $250 million at the global box office after winning the Palme d’Or and the Academy Award, while Squid Game reached more than 1.65 billion hours viewed in its first 28 days on Netflix, becoming the platform’s most-watched series at the time. What began as curiosity turned into habit.
Viewers learned how to watch across languages. They learned to follow emotion, pacing, and genre conventions without full cultural familiarity. Demand followed, and with it, higher expectations for translation quality.
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Influence now travels through subtitlers, dubbing artists, and release schedules rather than diplomats. It arrives quietly, embedded in character choices, humour, and ordinary life.
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Platforms responded by investing in dedicated dubbing hubs in Madrid, Seoul, Mumbai, and Los Angeles. Translation became less about literal accuracy and more about tone. Humour, timing, and emotional cadence mattered because they kept people watching. A poorly dubbed show now risked losing audiences who had learned what good translation sounded like.
These dynamics altered the creative map. Spanish thrillers began influencing crime writing beyond Spain. Korean dramas reshaped expectations around emotional arcs and character development. Anime’s visual language informed animation choices far outside Japan. Once translated, these works carried not just plots but social cues, everyday behaviour, and ways of relating that had previously struggled to travel.
This unsettled older assumptions about cultural power. English-language entertainment still commands large audiences, but it no longer defines global taste on its own. Viewers routinely choose shows in languages they do not speak, drawn to atmosphere, character, and emotional structure rather than familiarity. Recognition has shifted away from linguistic proximity toward resonance.
Translation is not neutral and it is certainly not perfect. Context is sometimes smoothed over and meaning is often shifted. Decisions about what to explain and what to leave implicit shape how cultures are perceived. These debates matter and remain unresolved. Even so, platforms continue to expand translation budgets because the returns are clear. Netflix’s own engagement reports show non-English-language titles now account for a substantial share of total viewing hours across regions, particularly outside North America. International titles retain subscribers, and their value compounds over time.
A still from Crash Landing on You | Image Credit: IMDb
What emerges is a form of soft power that operates without official choreography. South Korea’s surge in global cultural visibility after Squid Game did not come from a state-led export campaign, but from audiences absorbing language, social hierarchies, food, games, and emotional codes through a translated series they chose to watch. Influence now travels through subtitlers, dubbing artists, and release schedules rather than diplomats. It arrives quietly, embedded in character choices, humour, and ordinary life.
Translation reshaped global storytelling because it reshaped the incentives underneath it. Platforms needed scale, creators needed freedom, and audiences wanted variety that did not feel engineered. When those needs aligned, translation became infrastructure rather than accessory.
The result is a global media environment where stories circulate with fewer gatekeepers and fewer assumptions about whose voice travels best. Soft power now grows less from dominance than from availability. It grows because translation widened access and because viewers learned, willingly, to listen across languages.
Or, as Bong Joon-ho said when his subtitled film stood on a global stage in 2020, “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”
The industry, it seems, spent a decade turning that insight into infrastructure.
Every day in Mumbai starts with a familiar beat: the hum of rickshaws, the ring of local trains, and making their way through it all, a steady procession of men in white. In cotton shirts and Nehru caps, they navigate crowds with lunchboxes balanced on bicycles or slung over shoulders. These are the dabbawalas — a service that began in 1890 to bring home-cooked meals to office workers. More than deliverymen, they are guardians of trust: carrying a family’s food, keys, or sometimes even cash across a sprawling city, and returning it safely.
For more than a century, dabbawalas have perfected a system that modern apps and algorithms continue to study: moving 200,000 meals every day across Mumbai, without a single GPS ping, and with an error rate so low it has earned a Six Sigma certification — near perfection in a city where even Google Maps often falters. Harvard has studied it; global figures from Prince Charles to Richard Branson have praised it.
But this isn’t a story about statistics. It’s about how Mumbai — in the thick of modernity, chaos, and congestion — still makes room for human care.
The Soul in the Steel Box
Mumbai is a city of commuters. Every morning, millions cram into local trains, leaving home at 6 a.m. to reach offices by 9. For most, carrying a tiffin is a logistical impossibility. One dabbawala collects your lunch at 8:30 a.m., bikes it to a train station, passes it to a colleague riding into the city, and finally hands it to the last-mile courier who delivers it to your desk. By afternoon, the empty box is back home, often before you even leave the office.
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In today's fast-paced world, the dabbawalas demonstrate that slower can be smarter. And in their persistence, in their quiet mastery of turmoil, they resemble Mumbai itself: durable, resourceful, and vibrant.
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There’s no tech, just a brilliant system of colour-coded markings: a squiggle for Churchgate Station, a number for a specific office tower in Nariman Point. The code is memorised by heart, often by men with little formal schooling. They are mostly from Maharashtra’s Varkari community, working as equal stakeholders in a co-operative. They take home modest earnings — ₹9,000 to ₹12,000 (roughly $100–$130 USD) per month — globally admired, yet financially vulnerable. Yet the system hums with remarkable consistency, day after day.
Trust in Motion
The dabbawalas’ fame belies the intimacy of their work. Office workers hand them spare keys, forgotten wallets, and even cash with quiet confidence. Many have survived monsoon floods, negotiating swollen streets to deliver on time. They embody precision amid the city’s controlled chaos: Six Sigma meets overcrowded trains, unmarked lanes, and a city that rarely stops moving.
A dabbawala making deliveries in Mumbai | Image Credit: Abhishek Mishra on Pexels
When the World Paused
The COVID-19 lockdown tested this century-old system. Trains halted, offices closed, and the number of daily deliveries fell from 200,000 to a few hundred. While some dabbawalas went back to their communities, others switched to delivering groceries or medications. Some tried digital payments and orders based on WhatsApp. By 2022, the “Digital Dabbawala” had emerged, extending to new last-mile delivery models while maintaining its foundation in human contact and trust. It was a shift embraced cautiously: the work remained personal, the relationships remained central.
More Than a Logistics Miracle
Globally, they are studied for efficiency. In Mumbai, they are woven into the city’s rhythms. The approach is based on local knowledge, intuition, and interpersonal interactions. It is also low-carbon, with bicycles, trains, and a commitment replacing engines and paper.
In today’s fast-paced world, the dabbawalas demonstrate that slower can be smarter. And in their persistence, in their quiet mastery of turmoil, they resemble Mumbai itself: durable, resourceful, and vibrant.
So the next time you see a man in white pedaling past, dabbas clinking like wind chimes, remember that you are experiencing the city’s heartbeat.
Ask a mainstream AI chatbot for directions in Quechua, or try to joke with it in colloquial Marathi, and something feels off. The words may come back technically correct, but the meaning doesn’t quite land. The response sounds like someone who learned the language formally and missed how it’s actually used.
That gap isn’t accidental. It reflects where today’s most widely used AI systems come from.
Large language models are overwhelmingly trained on English-language data, much of it drawn from formal writing, Western media, and standardised registers. When other languages appear, they tend to show up in their most polished forms: textbook Hindi, European Spanish, or standard French. Everyday speech, regional slang, oral traditions, and cultural reference points are far less visible.
For people outside those defaults, using AI often means translating yourself first.
That’s beginning to change, largely through regional efforts to rebuild the interface itself.
Across Latin America, a coalition of universities and researchers is working on LatamGPT, a regionally developed language model trained on Latin American data and contexts. The goal is not scale, but representation, and to build systems that understand how language is actually spoken across the region.
That matters in a place where Spanish varies sharply by country and class, and where millions speak Indigenous languages such as Guarani in Paraguay, Nahuatl in Mexico, or Mapudungun among Mapuche communities in Chile and Argentina. These languages carry grammatical structures, metaphors, and ways of reasoning that don’t map cleanly onto English.
A model trained on lived languages can understand context | Image Credit: Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
The challenge goes beyond vocabulary.
In 2023, ChatGPT was asked to translate the Mexican idiom “me cayó el veinte.” The literal output, “the twenty fell on me,” missed the point entirely. What the phrase actually means is closer to “I finally got it” or “the penny dropped,” a reference to old payphones that only worked once a 20-cent coin clicked into place.
A model trained on dictionaries can translate the words. A model trained on lived languages understands the context.
That distinction explains why regional models are gaining urgency.
India faces a parallel problem at a different scale. With 22 official languages and thousands of dialects, linguistic exclusion is built into digital systems by default. The government-backed Bhashini programme aims to create open language datasets that allow translation and speech tools to function across Indian languages. Alongside it, companies like Sarvam AI are building Indic-language models trained primarily on Indian data, rather than adapting English-first systems after the fact.
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When machines begin to understand how people actually speak, they don’t just talk differently. They also listen differently.
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These efforts mirror earlier shifts in digital adoption. WhatsApp’s success in India wasn’t just about cost. It was about accommodation. Voice notes, regional scripts, and flexible keyboards allowed people to communicate without switching registers. Users didn’t have to learn the platform. Instead, the platform learned them for the users.
Building AI that works this way requires different data and different ethics.
Much of the world’s linguistic richness isn’t archived neatly online. It exists in oral histories, local television, community radio, street signs, and WhatsApp messages. Turning that into training data raises questions of consent and ownership.
Projects like Masakhane in Africa and Karya in India approach this collaboratively, paying contributors and keeping datasets open and community-owned. The work is slower and messier than scraping the web. It is also more accountable.
What’s emerging is not just a technical correction, but a shift in power.
As AI moves into healthcare, education, and public services, language stops being a cosmetic feature. It becomes the interface through which people are recognised or ignored. When systems understand only formal, standardised speech, they privilege certain users over others.
When machines begin to understand how people actually speak, they don’t just talk differently. They also listen differently.
Warli figures appear in museum gift shops in Europe, on walls at international design fairs, and in branding campaigns meant to signal “authenticity” to a global audience. Madhubani motifs surface in fashion collaborations abroad, stripped of text and context, translated into pattern. Pattachitra turns up in curated exhibitions on “traditional art,” far from the communities that practise it.
Indian folk art has always travelled. What’s different now is the scale, the polish, and the prestige of the spaces it moves through. The recent resurgence has brought visibility, funding, and institutional attention. But the artists who created these forms are far less mobile.
What’s unfolding is often described as a revival. In practice, it looks more like a redistribution of cultural value where visibility increases and control diminishes. Folk art enters international circuits as a premium aesthetic, while the people who have sustained it over generations remain largely absent from the spaces that now define its worth.
This imbalance becomes most visible outside India.
From 2026 to 2028, a major collaboration between the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) and the Museum of Sacred Art (MOSA) in Belgium will bring Indian folk and tribal art to Europe through at least five exhibitions a year across seven countries, including Germany, France, Italy, and Hungary. Drawn from MOSA’s collection of over 1,500 works, the initiative is framed as a celebration of “authentic” traditions. It reflects a growing appetite among European institutions for Indian folk art, positioned as cultural heritage with global relevance.
An art stall display with Madhubani paintings | Image Credit: Nishant Aneja on Pexels
Similar moments are unfolding elsewhere. In London, the Runjeet Singh Gallery is exhibiting a collection of Mithila paintings acquired directly from artists in the 1970s as part of Asian Art in London. Online, international folk art exhibitions organised by foundations working with Madhubani and tribal artists have begun reaching global audiences. Warli artists such as Mayur and Tushar Vayeda have been featured in exhibitions across Europe, Japan, and Australia.
The work is travelling widely. The terms under which it travels are less clear.
In global exhibitions and design showcases, Indian folk traditions are often framed through curatorial language that emphasises heritage, symbolism, and timelessness. The art is presented as collective and ancient rather than authored and contemporary. That framing makes the work legible to international audiences, but it also erases the conditions under which artists might assert rights, negotiate credit, or influence how their work is reproduced.
Warli art offers a clear example. Developed by the Warli Adivasi community in Maharashtra, its visual language of stick figures, rituals, and everyday life has become a global shorthand for “indigenous India.” Designers and institutions often collaborate with Indian studios or illustrators to reinterpret the style for international markets. The original artists are rarely part of those transactions.
When artists are included, it is often through NGOs or intermediaries who control access, pricing, and timelines. While the work moves, the credit often does not.
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Folk art is no longer confined to tourist markets or state-sponsored exhibitions. It is being absorbed into the global premium economy, where cultural difference functions as distinction.
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The same pattern repeats with Madhubani. Once painted on walls and floors in Mithila using natural pigments, the form is now reproduced across textiles, stationery, and décor for export markets. Attribution is frequently reduced to “inspired by,” a phrase that dissolves responsibility. Inspiration carries no obligation to compensate, credit, or consult.
Artists are not unaware of this imbalance. “It’s not that people don’t want to work with us,” one Mithila painter told The Moment. “They just want us cheap. And quiet.”
This is not a uniquely Indian story. Indigenous Australian dot paintings circulate widely through international galleries and museum shops, even as Aboriginal artists continue to contest how their work is licensed and reproduced. West African textile traditions like adire are globally popular as “tie-dye,” their origins flattened into trend. In the United States, Native American motifs have long been absorbed into fashion and homeware under the banner of “Southwestern” design, often without collaboration or consent.
Across contexts, the pattern is familiar, communal art forms move easily through global markets, while the communities that sustain them remain peripheral to the value created.
What makes the current moment distinct is the status of the platforms involved. Folk art is no longer confined to tourist markets or state-sponsored exhibitions. It is being absorbed into the global premium economy, where cultural difference functions as distinction. Museum stores, fashion houses, and international festivals benefit from the aura of tradition without fully engaging with questions of authorship, labour, or rights.
An example of a Pichwai painting | Image Credit: oskar holm on Unsplash
There are exceptions. Some organisations insist on naming artists, negotiating fair compensation, and sustaining long-term relationships rather than one-off commissions. Groups like Dastkar and artist-led collectives have pushed back against extractive models, while newer platforms are experimenting with licensing, profit-sharing, and direct representation. But these remain marginal within a system that continues to reward speed, scalability, and aesthetic flexibility over accountability.
The problem is not that Indian folk art is being seen globally. Visibility is not the enemy. The problem is that the structures governing its circulation were never designed to include artists as agents.
What we are calling a revival, then, is uneven by design. The forms travel, the value accrues, but the artists remain asked to perform continuity without power. Until that imbalance is taken seriously, Indian folk art will continue to be admired abroad while its makers remain peripheral to the success of their own work.
Folk art is moving faster than the systems meant to protect the people who make it. That gap, more than the revival itself, is perhaps the story of this moment.
On most evenings in mid-20th-century Mumbai, Shivaji Park was not an “amenity.” It was just where people went. Elderly men walked its perimeter. Teenagers practised cricket with taped tennis balls. Women sat on the grass and talked. No tickets. No programming. No expectation that anyone needed to be doing something productive.
Similar scenes existed elsewhere. In New York, Jane Jacobs wrote about Washington Square Park in the 1950s and 60s as a place people passed through, paused in, argued in, lingered in. In Seoul, neighbourhood parks and local jjimjilbangs functioned as everyday social infrastructure well before the city’s current emphasis on speed, efficiency, and twenty-four-hour productivity. These spaces were not neutral or perfect, but they shared a defining feature: you could be there without explanation.
That condition has become increasingly rare.
An al fresco cafè | Image Credit: Sami TÜRK on Pexels
In 1989, American sociologist Ray Oldenburg gave these environments a name in The Great Good Place. He called them “third places”: informal, low-cost spaces outside home and work where people could gather without obligation. Oldenburg’s argument was not sentimental. He was precise. What made third places work was not charm or design, but accessibility. They tolerated idleness. They allowed regulars without requiring membership. They made room for people whose only reason for showing up was time.
What has changed since then is not simply taste. It is structured.
Most third places did not disappear overnight. They were slowly made inhospitable. In Mumbai, Irani cafés like Kyani and Café Ideal once functioned as all-day linger spaces, especially for people who had nowhere else to go between shifts or errands. Rising rents, shrinking margins, and redevelopment pressures have since pushed cafés toward faster turnover. Sitting too long now carries an implicit cost.
In New York, public seating has been systematically reduced or redesigned. Benches are removed, divided, or made deliberately uncomfortable. Parks that once absorbed unstructured social life are increasingly surveilled, policed, or programmed. The goal is not gathering, but control. Space that does not circulate people efficiently or generate revenue is treated as a problem to be managed.
This is not accidental. Cities over the last three decades have been redesigned around transit, productivity, and risk mitigation. Loitering becomes a security concern. Lingering becomes inefficiency. Free time, once an ordinary part of public life, starts to read as indulgence.
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So the question is not whether third places mattered. They did. The harder question is why we have become so comfortable designing cities that no longer tolerate them.
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The language follows the logic. “Third place” now appears in real estate decks and brand strategy documents, used to describe co-working cafés, members’ clubs, or lifestyle lounges. These spaces promise community, but only through access. You can belong, but briefly. You can stay, but not for free. Presence is permitted only when it can be justified, monetised, or optimised.
Functionally, this changes how social life feels.
When cafés double as offices, sitting without a laptop becomes suspect. When libraries close or shrink, quiet public refuge disappears. When promenades are designed as backdrops for events and content, stillness feels out of place. The value of doing nothing together erodes, replaced by the expectation that time in public must produce something: work, networking, or proof.
The pandemic accelerated this shift, but it did not invent it. Lockdowns disrupted social reflexes, and the return to public life came with new rules. Interaction felt safer when it was structured: a class, a workshop, a ticketed gathering. Presence alone no longer felt sufficient. There had to be a reason. A receipt.
What gets lost in this transition is difficult to measure, which is why it is easy to dismiss. It is not just space, but familiarity. The quiet recognition of seeing the same strangers every week. The trust that forms without conversation. These are social capacities that emerge slowly, and only in places where people are allowed to exist without performing usefulness.
A crowded restaurant at daytime | Image Credit: CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash
People sense this loss, even if they do not name it. That is why new, improvised versions keep appearing. Community fridges on street corners. Zine fairs in half-empty malls. Chai circles in parking lots. Skate crews occupying forgotten patches of city. These are not nostalgic recreations. They are workarounds. Evidence that the desire for unstructured public life persists even as the conditions that once supported it are withdrawn.
So the question is not whether third places mattered. They did. The harder question is why we have become so comfortable designing cities that no longer tolerate them.
Not everything needs to be activated. Not every gathering needs a theme. Sometimes what is missing is not innovation, but permission: a place where you can sit, take up space, and not be asked what you are doing there.
