AYC-EDIT MAGAZINE

DIGITAL COVER 01: MARY ANN ALEXANDER We’re sitting down with Mary Ann after a day of six outfit changes in a cozy Bandra apartment we chose for her to move into. There’s a lot of moving happening throughout the day: furniture, teams, lights, even venues, Mary Ann poking out of a tent placed on a bed, there’s a lot going on. By nightfall, there’s an exhilarated exhaustion falling over the set. Everything’s very red and yellow and a little drowsy, her wax curls glimmer under lamplight, and she’s holding her cough for the interview. The self-willed side of talent is perhaps the toughest. Mary Ann Alexander does what she does best, and does it every day. Each release is accompanied by reels that she cooks up catchy hooks for, build-ups where she shows off the process of mapping melodies and working with producers, and music videos that she co-directs. There’s a deep involvement in every step of the creative process that makes the fans feel like they’ve watched the whole thing come to life from scratch. We love the journey: Her past in the studio with her dad makes her an efficient collaborator, and all of her aspects channel themselves brilliantly. FULL STORY COMING SOON. Hair: @moxiebeautyofficial Sneakers: @thecometuniverse Editorial & Creative Director: Suprit Parulkar @supritparulkar Photographer: Rachel Pachuau @ruatpuii Managing Editor: Abhishek Gandhi @abhishekgandhii Digital Editor & Writer: Mannav Jaisinghani @mannavmedia Producer: Siddharth Parulkar @siddharthparulkar Make Up: Ananya Bajaj @makeupbyananyabajaj Hair: Sunny Roy @sunnyroyy_official BTS Videographer & Editor: Aditya Nehru @adienzai Content Videographer & Editor: Balendu Shekhar @bala16102 Venue: @staycesindia Creative Assistant: Vibha Parekh @vibha_parekh Set Assistants: Jadyn Fernandes @__jadyn___ & Ashok Yadav Dressman: Satish Kumar Yadav Artist Management: SW Entertainment @sw_entertainmentworld

Oddly specific victory: If you look up ‘stand up comedy’ on YouTube, a modest 80% of the most viewed videos (sorted by “popularity”) are from India. The view counts are flabbergasting: 56M, 77M, 97M. More people have watched Anubhav Singh Bassi than people have died this year (so far!). One sleepless night at the EDIT habitat struggled to find a comparable metric. The bisexuality of growing conservatism perplexed us. If it’s written off to just ‘population’, then where are the Indian masses this dedicated and dominant? Our guesses weren’t globally comparable: Devotional music, spiritual content, cricket— undebatable Indian truths, prone to violence, endlessly rewatched. How are we in bed with both religion and it’s antithesis? Abhishek Upmanyu (@aupmanyu ) is the third leg of our religion condition. A country of 1.4 billion sends 2.8 billion eyes flying across the world. But the patriotism surrounding the big three is true to us. Laughter by vandalism, singing to god, and cricket are the best medicine. The Snitch-sponsored Comedy Land, India’s first All Headliner “comedy” “festival” was nearly empty—most of our worship is free online. If we’re not at comedy shows, are they the side hoe to our arranged marriage to religion? You don’t buy comedy flowers, you archive it’s chats and only watch late at night. We’re having an affair with the semi-truths of comedy. The 97,543,676 (and counting) hit in ‘Cheating’ by Bassi (@be_a_bassi ) has a community held within it. The comments section has been alive and well for seven years. Failing exams, passing exams, finishing exams, hacking exams, discussion is arife. The collective competitive academic nature of India is god-fearing, therefore subtle atheism via cheating, or laughing about cheating, is something you could watch on loop like a bhajan. Is the relatability of ‘Childhood Dreams’ (40M) or ‘Parents’ (24M) purposefully doctrinal, following in the footsteps of cricket and religion to preach to the masses? How much of our own dissonance do we have to swallow to get along? How faithless is our search history? Is comedy our only mistress, or are there more statistical anomalies between the sheets?

LINK IN BIO. ENTRY VIA ICE ONLY.

There’s a particular pride that travels fast on Indian group chats. It’s a default response to a default occasion. The group chat exploded: Indians found living it up abroad. Who was on those steps? What did their being there mean? Is the pride due to cultural representation, or are we confusing net worth with cultural weight? This year’s Met Gala was sponsored, for the first time in its history, not by a fashion house but by Jeff and Lauren Bezos, to the tune of ~$10 million. The richest business families in India have been buying their way onto the same carpet. Somewhere in that wealth performing as cultural largesse, Isha Ambani and Ananya Birla stood in Indian craft. Is our celebration of Indians on the guestlist a double standard? Is it a longing to see ourselves in spaces we’ve historically been excluded from? The Met Gala is a spectacle machine. Spectacle, by design, makes you feel like a participant when you’re actually an audience member. The craft was real. Subodh Gupta had actual artwork on two bodies at the Met in the same evening, without attending. The Indians didn’t show up with borrowed Cartier. But the people who kept these crafts alive are not at the Met. For years, watching global fashion meant watching your grandmother’s aesthetic repackaged and sold back at a markup, India’s Met play is aatmanirbhar. The pride narrative uses invisibility as a feature. You’re not celebrating inclusion that touches the ground. The slow grind of Aishwarya at Cannes, Priyanka marrying in, Shah Rukh Khan generating the highest earned-media value last year, all feel like a video game upgrade. One level at a time. There is a version of Indian presence in global spaces that happens because Indian art, craft, fashion, and cultural production deserve space. And there is a version that happens because Ambani and Birla can write a check large enough to access any room. Two Indias, even abroad. Can we tell them apart? Does it matter if we can’t? Are you celebrating the fact that a billionaire from India is in the same room as a billionaire abroad, and everyone is wearing good clothes? Or that there were Indians worth including on a carpet made by Indians?

A book is a rectangular object, typically between 200 and 900 pages, bound at the spine, available in hardcover and paperback. The hardcover is heavier, more architectural, better for stacking. The paperback yellows, which some people find charming and others engineer deliberately using tea and a low oven. A book does not require assembly. A book does not require reading. What it requires is placement. The right book in the right room tells your guests everything about you without you having to be interesting at them for the entire evening. This is its primary function. Here are ten.

The cockroach of tradition outlives all optimism. One of the many live-love-laugh millennial tropes we took from the West was disdain for vegans. They became verbal punching bags for the globally aware of the 2010s. But our caste-residue pseudo-vegetarian practices make veganism look like fun. The Indian professional class semi-recently discovered that their diet functioned as a cover letter. Not commitment, just upwas on Sankranti. “I don’t eat non-veg on Mondays, it’s a family thing.” is announced with a careful casualness. Regression infiltrates, disguised as a progressive choice. The non-committal vegetarian is the conservative polyamorist of the table, traversing tradition and self-exploration with oblivious ease. We’re in a commitment-deficit generation. Can’t pick an aesthetic, can’t pick a stance, can’t pick a job, can’t pick a partner, can’t pick a diet. The bi-weekly vegetarian™️ cannot made a decision, instead they co-opt several aesthetics. Their performance is calibrated to produce conversation without demanding sacrifice: Wholesale Virtue. The spiritual discipline of their grandmother’s fasting calendar is scraped clean of theology and repurposed as personality. The larger cosmology of these spiritual practices are polished down, an alternative to full-time morality. Brahmin vegetarianism is a control mechanism keeping certain hands away from certain kitchens. It reaches the animal-free conclusion of vegans in different ways, perpetrating the hierarchy we swear we forwent generations ago. The Indian vegan is also able to live this clean life due to several privileges: affording alternatives, their rejection of non-veg being socially acceptable, their appropriation of pre-existing practices in rural India. The vegetarian and the vegan are cousins from your dad’s side. Do the diet wars have a winner? Is the “paneer samajh ke kha le” dirtbag at your dinner a hero? Food’s stance is always dictated by larger social patterns that also soy-milked yoga into this wellness wonderland. While the vegan commits, the bi-weekly vegetarian™️ simply lives out a modern interpretation of oppression disguised as compassion.

All petitions go to heaven. Because as well-intentioned and optimistic as these signing sprees are, they end. You either die a movement, or live long enough to become a URL. We’re conducting a few follow-up calls regarding internet activism landmarks from over five years ago. While transparency should be the norm when you give up your precious email for petitions (and their subsequent spam), it isn’t. Our collection of former stars has some wins, some losses, some plea purgatory. Some of them were solved or dissolved by non-petition means entirely. There’s a genre of friendlier issues that are like bread and circuses for the wokes. If you’ve ever filled out a petition, they only email you to fill out more unrelated ones. The ‘inaction through action’ method gives internet activists the idea that signing is enough, and a lack of follow-ups verifies that mindset.

“Seriously dangerous movies if you miss the point” is a listicle born out of our grief over the carnage these pieces of satire have left in their misunderstood wake. Cinema has always had a parasocial relationship with its own critique. The director builds the trap, the audience walks in, takes a selfie, and captions it “main character energy.” There is a specific, well-documented, deeply stupid phenomenon where a film is made to indict a certain kind of person, and that exact person watches it, feels seen in the best possible way, and leaves the theatre more themselves than when they entered. [refer: your friend with a Rick and Morty T-shirt] Radhe from Tere Naam was meant to be a cautionary tale about what unchecked obsession looks like when it’s wearing a good haircut. Rustom was meant to be a courtroom, not a standing ovation. Arthur Fleck was meant to make you uncomfortable about who you’re rooting for and why. The more interesting question is what happens when the filmmaking is so good, so precise, so genuinely pleasurable to sit inside, that the critique becomes invisible. Scorsese gives you three hours of the party and buries the invoice. Ray gives you four charming men on a holiday and quietly, without announcement, shows you everyone absorbing the cost of their charm. Kubrick lets Humbert narrate his own redemption and trusts you to notice that Dolores never gets to speak. Some of you noticed. Most did not. So here’s a compilation of fifteen films that were made to say one thing, and received as another. We’re not above it. The films are too good. That’s exactly the problem. A good conversation starter to keep in your back pocket for the inevitable film buffs you’ll go on dates with this summer.

The collective split of social responsibility is uneven, service tax always falls to the marginalised. Around the auspicious season of Large Political Event comes a slew of internet circus acts diving and flipping and tightroping around the actual point, almost to say; “Look at how much I can make this about myself!” The modern-day activist wears a lot of hats: Revolutionary, free-thinker, graphic designer, asset manager, event planner and pro-level virtue-signaller. In the storm of all of these responsibilities, you might’ve forgotten the actual allyship part of supporting a cause. We don’t blame you. Privilege can be difficult. Hold a mirror up to your IG stories, figure out where you stand with the Hard Game for Soft Allies. A personal-inclusion-paradox plagues the new crop of backseat change-drivers. 0-3 probably the hardest ally for miles, looks like 4-6 needs some more hardening 7-9 flaccid ally 10-12 you think posting is praxis 13-15 you did not expect to be here, huh? SOFT! 16-18 textbook soft ally. predictable 19-21 soft ally supreme, should be charged in court 22[and above] you are the bingo card and it identifies as apolitical how hard are you rn?

Email [email protected] Apply [email protected] Caress [email protected] Enjoy [email protected] Entertain [email protected] Court [email protected] Thank [email protected]

Our Chief Fashion Correspondent brought along a (very excited) (audio warning) friend to @lakmefashionwk today. The only way for QSR fashion to make it to runways is hard cash sponsorships, and this gives the wrong brands the right ideas. We agree with our friend; Max Fashion (@maxfashionindia ) represents fashion to the massy-er world, and makes us wonder if said world deserves better. The most irritating person you know is rocking the Unserious Everything collection today onwards.

Anurag Gupta (@label_anurag_gupta ), winner of Nexa Presents The Spotlight At Lakme Fashion Week (@lakmefashionwk ) 2026 asks perhaps the bravest question of them all: “What if the AQI got worse?”. Anurag’s milquetoast Indo-futurist-college-project imagines a future where people wrap themselves in towels to deal with the elements. Having the smoke machine run before your presentation on air pollution is painfully pedantic. The Koi Mil Gaya Couture left our fashion correspondent with more questions than answers.