Wrote about how words are disappearing from our digital lives. Emojis, reacjis, gifs, stickers that once supplemented our conversations, now act as substitute for words in our interactions.
Technology has slowly eaten into our need to use words, even as generative AI erodes our ability to string them together into cohesive sentences.
What started with SMS shorthand born out of character limits and evolved through erstwhile Twitter’s brevity, has eventually come to all platforms prioritising visuals over text.
Across social media and messaging apps, emojis, GIFs, stickers, reacjis, template replies and AI-generated suggestions occupy the spaces where sentences framed by a human once thrived.
In effect, words have not just become less common; they’ve become optional.
Leaving us to contend with how this changes the way we express, connect with, and understand each other and ourselves.
Wrote about this phenomenon for Mint Lounge's cover story last week.
Once in a while, you get paid to write a story you'll happily pay to write...
✍🏽 Wrote about the rise, erasure, and quiet resurgence of small-town creators long considered 'outsiders' to Instagram's dominant aesthetic, for Mint Lounge's cover story a fortnight ago.
TikTok’s rise in early 2020 had briefly put small-town creators on the map, promising a more democratic internet fame. Creators from non-urban, less economically privileged backgrounds amassed audiences of millions on content that urban India often dismissed as “cringe”.
When TikTok was banned later that year, many of these creators were displaced overnight as Instagram’s quietly enforced “posh” aesthetic made them feel they didn’t belong on the Meta-owned platform.
In the last few years, however, a new wave of small-town creators has followed a different trajectory. Without conforming to Instagram’s visual ideals, they’ve found acceptance, and increasingly admiration, among urban, affluent audiences.
Whether this signals a lasting shift remains unclear. But the moment is a reason to consider how urban India consumes content today, and whether belonging online is ever permanent.
Feels like everyone in our manicured metro zindagi is a brand now, or trying to become one.
I often wonder if the person inside the brand is also tired watching the content calendars play out, the authentic vulnerability scheduled to go live Tuesday at 8.
There's also enough gyaan floating about from all sides. This is just a musing (from an interaction with @varunduggi for @takeapausewithvarunduggi ) on what could possibly help when it gets a bit overwhelming. Try to remember the why. Surround yourself with people who function like alarms when they need to be, even if they are cheerleaders on most days.
Sometimes it also helps to know that if you are a brand to someone, they will love you the way you love your favourite brand... until a better one comes along.
Baaki theek hi hai. Zyaada kuch hai nahi.
One wakes up to a new threat to journalism every morning. Archives closing, bills passing, curators profiting off reporters' labour. The impossible math of building distribution *and* doing the actual work.
The business models are broken; nobody has any answers.
It often takes me back to this very straightforward but loaded question @varunduggi had asked me on his podcast @takeapausewithvarunduggi early last year. "Where do you see journalism going?" What I said then is what I remind myself every single day, too. "Journalism is the art of the possible," a senior journalist had once said to a room full of aspiring journalists (including yours truly). Journalists will find a way to thrive, to tell you the stories that need to be told.
In 1964, Satyajit Ray’s Mahanagar built its entire emotional architecture around a husband’s sudden unemployment, the quiet shame of it, the way it forced his wife into the workforce and undid the family’s sense of itself.
A decade later, Roti Kapda Aur Makaan (1974) made job loss a political act. In Japan, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata (2008) followed a salaryman who loses his job and rides the train every day for months rather than tell his family.
Hollywood’s Up in the Air (2009) centred on the toll of job loss told through the gaze of a man in charge of delivering the news of layoffs. Even Bollywood’s Bewakoofiyan (2014), starring Ayushmann Khurrana, while lighter in tone, uses a job loss to crack open ideas of love and pride.
These films existed because job loss was the kind of event that required a reckoning. You didn’t just lose income. You lost a role, a version of yourself, so much so that it would take a film to contain it. Now it often just takes a meme.
✍ Wrote about how memes around layoffs, that started as a coping mechanism at first, might be changing not only how we perceive job loss, but also how we process it, often desensitising us to the real repercussions. The story was out in Mint early March.
Not to take away from the conversations dominating the moment, but this one, with its industry-wide implications, has quietly fallen by the wayside, I feel, and it might carry more weight than we think.
So I wrote about it for Mint Lounge last week.
The discourse: your follower count doesn’t matter anymore; the algorithm has democratised reach, and a good piece of content can come from anywhere and go places.
It’s largely true, but...
Unfortunately, it also tells us where we are in the creator economy’s evolution—more crowded, more competitive, more monetised than ever—and how that dictates who chooses to amplify whom, an essential ingredient for growth, if not the most critical.
An edited version of this piece appeared in Mint Lounge last week.
Early 2025, in reply to my post about Shruti's wedding, Aditi had dropped three oversized red hearts. I remember telling her then, “Teri baari bhi karungi, Ditsu.” I was convinced she’d tie the knot before the year ends. I just didn’t know that when it finally happens, I’ll reach her impossibly grand wedding venue against all odds, only to miss the actual day’s rituals.
But thank god for women finding one of their own wherever they go. I found Aditi’s former roommate, who--without a second thought--took charge of re-draping my saree properly. And then, just like that, became our anchor for pictures and videos from the wedding day.
Somewhere between catching glimpses of her across functions, in one stunning bridal look after another, you find your mind slipping backwards. To the first time you really sat down together. To everything that followed. You’ve seen the work she’s put in to build the life she wanted. So when you catch that glow on her face now, it reflects on you, too.
File it under all things bridesmaids. Sitting in on sangeet rehearsals of her childhood friends. You note the little surprises her friends have woven into the dance. Feel grateful this time you won't be forgetting any steps and making a collective fool of yourself as you have at every other behen's wedding before (this merits a separate post). You find yourself irrationally invested in those silly wedding games because it’s never really about the game. It’s about your side winning. Always.
Plus, December weddings carry their own mythology, no? They arrive layered with fevers that refuse to leave, with another behen ke parents who won’t accept anything less than complete, over-the-top care for you. Midnight drive from Pushkar to Ajmer, where each speedbreaker causes more laughter than a bumpy ride.
Then there’s Rajan, of course. The newest jiju in da house. Proof that when it’s right, you just fit seamlessly into an allegedly intimidating group.
So we make up for what we missed, the only way one can. We create new memories to hold/hoard on to. We keep that monkey video saved on our drive, even if it’s eating into precious storage space. Only partially because it's too damn funny.
in our 30s, we either do lazy couch hangs or early morning workouts 🐳
so grateful to be in the same city as @shephalibhatt 🥰 and actually, so grateful for shephu anywhere and everywhere in the world!
aqua pilates with @onapilates.in at @bombayswimclub 🎀
(things to do in Mumbai, workout, women who workout, pilates, aqua pilates, movement, fun, safe spaces, pilates in Mumbai)
#pilates #mumbai #womenwhomove #besties #workout
