Technology has a way of making radical change feel matter-of-factly incremental. The arrival of the digital world has enhanced our capabilities in ways that are profound, but this dramatic change is consumed as if it were the most natural thing in the world. That one can listen to virtually any song in the world, for instance, when one feels like it, is a truly incredible facility. Similarly, streaming services have made access to all kinds of films and television shows available whenever one desires. Conceptually, this is a fundamental shift. We are in effect trading off longitudinal ownership of a little for latitudinal usership of a lot. By limiting our claim over a film or a piece of music, by foregoing any permanent right to it, we are able to in effect get access to it without restrictions. The idea of subscription acts as a sort of master key that unlocks a dazzling array of options.

The shift from a world based on the idea of ownership to that of ‘usership’ has been well documented. Underlying this, we are experiencing a more fundamental shift in orientation. Our mental models are moving from being rooted in the idea of accumulation (stock) to that of continuous experience (flow). Earlier we thought as progress as the gradual accretion of assets – a cycle, a two-wheeler, a car, gadgets of various kinds, money in one’s bank account, a house and so on. So many of our everyday practices are rooted in this stock orientation, on the idea that progress is additive.

Shops are essentially godowns full of inventory, as are kitchens at home. The wardrobe accumulates clothing of all kinds, out of which we use a mere fraction at any given point in time. Even devices that try to capture the flow of time have tended to be little pieces of frozen accumulations – magazines, the daily newspaper, and the 9 pm news. The photo album is a repository of memories. The home is a collection of objects acquired painstakingly through the years. A job is a fixed allocation of time and attention to a single employer. A cab stand, an aggregation of hireable vehicles. A restaurant, a residence with a fixed menu.

The trajectory of change is unmistakable. Today we are able to live much more in the present continuous tense. We can shop wherever we might be, listen to music on the go, and order any food of choice at the most inopportune time. Food delivery apps can, in theory, make the idea of a well-stocked kitchen redundant. Already one can order ingredients that go into a specific dish, and all one has to do is to cook it. Albums of photographs give way to an endless stream of selfies and other markers of the present. The photograph itself is not so much a document that preserves memories as much as a marker of what is happening today. The news timeline moves rapidly, every moment of the day. Social media is all flow and very little stock; the past disappears rapidly under ever-new bits of the present. The gig economy converts work from being fixed to fluid. Co-working spaces with ‘hot desks’ dismantle the idea of a fixed office.

The idea of abundance too changes from possessing a lot to being able to access whatever one desires, whenever one desires it, as effortlessly as possible. Being wealthy is increasingly not about owning more things but about being able to bridge the gap between desire and fulfilment. If one could have whatever one wanted whenever one wanted it, why would one need to accumulate anything? The pursuit of material acquisition could well give way to cherishing ever-new experiences.

Going forward, imagine a life where one’s needs are on call. We could get our food, whether cooked or in an ingredient form, on call. Instead of owning an elaborate wardrobe, we could order whatever we wish to wear on a daily basis. It isn’t as outlandish as it sounds – already renting clothes is a rapidly growing business, and there is no reason why it cannot become more mainstream.

The possibilities are many. A flow-based world could look at money very differently. Imagine work resulting in getting placed on a band of entitlements, and within each band, getting one’s desired lifestyle streamed. In effect, it would mean an all-inclusive subscription to a lifestyle. Everything you want, available to you for consumption, not for ownership. The clothes you will wear today, the furniture you use this year, the food you will cook at the next meal, and the car you will take a ride in to get to the office.

Such a system would need a new mental model of money, because money today is essentially stored labour. Work is converted into money, which in turn lets you buy what you want. In a world of entitlement bands, money’s job would shift from a store of value to a passport, moving you between levels of entitlement. But a band is not a stored claim the way a house or a sum in the bank is. It is a live relationship, granted only for as long as one continues to qualify, and it dies the moment participation stops. Inheritance grows stranger in such a world too. What does a parent leave a child when entitlement itself cannot be stored, but only currency can?

In such a scenario, things begin to lose their materiality; the solid becomes vapour, and choosing things becomes a life pursuit. The need to save diminishes. The need for self-knowledge deepens, for only when one knows oneself can one choose the life one wishes to surround oneself with. The act of choosing also changes in a world dominated by flow. There is no meal without a menu of ten thousand options, no evening without a scroll through everything ever filmed, no morning without the wardrobe of the world offered up for the day’s choosing. The chooser is never finished choosing.

This is a different order of fatigue than the anxiety of a single big decision. It is a low, continuous hum of micro-deliberation that never resolves into rest. Seen this way, the rise of the algorithmic shuffle, the surprise me, the auto-play, and the omakase are not laziness or the abdication of taste. It is a rational adaptation to a world that has made choosing too cheap and too constant to bear consciously. We are outsourcing selection not because we no longer care what we get but because caring about everything, all the time, is not a sustainable way to live.

The other consequence of a flow orientation is that we are forever reacting in the instant to the world around us. The focus is on consequent action rather than foundational thought. Actions are increasingly tied to primitive instincts rather than reasoned, deliberate positions. Opinion, too, is less analysis and more commentary, for the former is an account of what has passed and the latter a way of framing the present. Extempore debate is privileged over historical perspective and transient events over enduring phenomena.

There are many more implications that will inevitably follow such a foundational shift in human priorities. A change of this kind creates possibilities of many kinds, some liberating, others terrifying. The casualty will be the gathering of a coherent sense of self, which will be distributed across this array of possibilities.

And yet some things will not change. A marriage will not stream. A skill built over fifteen years perfecting the shehnai, or the quiet, cumulative expertise of having studied a subject deeply rather than skimmed it in the day’s feed, these remain stubbornly of the old world, resistant to subscription, and indifferent to on-demand logic.

In a world where everything flows, islands of stock might become more valuable. Flow democratises access, but stock, in its old and slower sense, may become the mark of those who can still afford, in time, in attention, in patience, to resist it. The truly wealthy in a flow economy may not be those with the most bands of entitlement but those who no longer need any bands at all because they have retained the one thing flow cannot manufacture on demand, a self that has taken the long way to become who it is.

We now live between two kinds of time. Hard time is time with a spine. Someone outside you decides when it starts, when it ends and what happens inside it. A class, a flight, a court hearing, a wedding. It is time without escape. No windows to peep out from, no batwing doors to stroll out through. You show up at a particular moment, in a particular role, often with other people. Your presence or absence has consequences.

Soft time behaves like liquid. It is time interlaced with other time, neither of which makes demands of mutual exclusivity. You decide when to begin, how long to continue, and when to stop. There is no fixed slot, no shared clock, no real penalty for drifting away. Scrolling on the phone, watching a series, gaming, hopping between chats, dipping into news. You can do everything together. You can abandon any of these in the middle with no explanation. Nothing is exactly missed. It simply flows on.

Both kinds of time have always existed, but their proportions have flipped. Earlier, institutional life held most of our hard time. Offices, schools, factories, trains, religious practices, cinemas, news bulletins, even television came with fixed timings and shared rituals. Soft time seeped around those blocks and filled the gaps. Lazy Sunday mornings, an odd picnic, the annual vacation -- these escaped the grip of hard time, but otherwise life made its demands in blocks of hard time.
Today the phone has turned every gap liquid. Work reaches out through mail and messaging. Leisure arrives as an endless stream of fragments. We no longer go somewhere once a week to be entertained. We pull entertainment into every unused moment in the day. A remarkable share of our waking hours has become soft.

This has inverted the old rhythm, where hard time took up most of our day, with some soft time interludes. Today, more of our time is spent in liquid attention, with time made for the occasional hard-time engagement. Hard-time fixtures like meetings, conferences, and television watching today are awash in soft time. Hard time peeks out from within its folds, cobbling together bits of undivided attention. The exception is now the rule and the rule now an exception. It feels so comfortable that we haven’t noticed.

The difference between hard and soft times is that the former resists us, while the latter obeys us. A flight doesn’t care about how we feel about getting up at the crack of dawn. A wedding begins whether we are ready or not. A cinema show starts at 9.15. Hard time encounters a reality with its own schedule and its own indifference to us.

Soft time panders, cossets, and pampers. We come first. The episode waits. The meeting cannot prevent us from tweeting. The feed refreshes. The music pauses. The flirting goes on while we are being scolded by our parents. We spent centuries trying to make the world bend more fully to our wishes. We finally succeeded.

Soft time suits the way our mind wanders. The natural human condition is for the mind to go traipsing among the back alleys of thought, drifting from one idea to another. Concentration requires effort; it needs distractions to be silenced so we can train our minds on a single activity. Hard time was the technology that produced concentration. Soft time restores to the mind its natural tendency, allowing us to jaywalk down different paths. Of course the algorithm serves up the choices, but they are endless, and we have been trained to scroll, scroll, scroll.

Perhaps civilisation itself is the act of constructing hard time enclosures that bind us to our life in more structured ways. School, college, work, commuting, concerts, courts, shopping at stores. We moved from one hard-time event to another, distributing ourselves always in sequence.

The shift to a soft-time mindset has consequences. Cinema shows this shift clearly. Going to the theatre is pure hard time. The show begins at a fixed hour in a fixed building. You travel to it, buy a ticket, sit in the dark and share a story with strangers. The hardness of that time gave the outing its meaning. Going to the cinema was an event, with its very distinctive grammar. Going to book the ticket, standing in a line, hoping that the seats would not run out. Returning for the show itself, finding one’s seats. Watching the documentary, the ads and the trailers and then excitedly watching the titles roll. The interval, the food, the shuffling out of the hall, the returning home. Post-film analyses, reactions, and playback of certain scenes and dialogues. A paisa vasool experience, no matter how terrible the film was. Which is why film stars were demigods. Film stars are the product of hard time; influencers of soft.

Now the same kind of narrative experience is abundantly available in soft time at home. Streaming platforms have not only taken away content. They have taken it from hard time into soft time. You can start a series late at night, stop after twenty minutes, resume three days later or abandon it without shame. The story may be similar. The time inside which it lives is completely different. There is no experience, just the film.

But there is enormous convenience. A film you want to see is available for the asking.
Which means that only a narrow band of films still feels worthy of the hall. The ones that work behave like events. They offer mass emotion, a sense of being in a rally, and a chance to feel part of a roaring crowd. The quiet, mid-scale films that once defined the multiplex belong far more naturally to soft time.

Work and relationships are making the same journey. Office hours and commutes are softening at the edges, but a few islands of hard time at work remain charged with anxiety. The workday no longer has fixed boundaries; work bleeds into our lives, staining it malodorously. The hard time at work has turned mushy and liquid as our phones allow us to float away several times in the day. But equally liquid work seeps into the hours that were otherwise ours. Of course, not all this work is forced upon us. There is something within that cannot resist dipping into our mail to see if something has happened, something that needs our attention.

We are neither present nor absent. We exist in a permanent state of low-grade availability. You can have us any time, but only a little part is made available.

Many relationships are now maintained almost entirely in soft time, through a drizzle of messages, shared links and late-night chats. Very few people get undistracted hours of our hard time. We are generous with our soft time -- a like here, a thank you emoji there. Responsive, but in a dotted-line way. The intimacy is real but diffused, like light through frosted glass.

Love today is often maintained in soft time but tested in hard time. The relationship that works fine on WhatsApp develops cracks during a holiday when two people have to confront each other’s entirety.

Without the screen separating us, we are overwhelmed by how much of a person we have to deal with. Soft time was the advertising; hard time shows us the product, and the result doesn’t always lead to a happy ending.

Religion and politics are pulled in both directions. Rituals, pilgrimages, rallies and elections remain classic hard-time projects that ask for punctuality and collective presence. Everyday belief and everyday politics now live inside the soft time of the feed. Devotional songs, spiritual quotes, small provocations, slivers of history, and national pride cut to film music arrive as casual content. That mixing can dilute rigid belief. The same mechanism can also irrigate fundamentalism by soaking people in a single emotional colour, a little every day, without any dramatic moment of choice. Reel by reel, tweet by tweet, between watching a TV show or munching on aloo bhujia, one can get radicalised.

The deepest difference between hard and soft time may lie in how they sit in memory. Hard time has edges. It creates landmarks. People remember life as a chain of hard moments, from school and exams to jobs, weddings, illnesses and deaths. Even smaller hard events get lodged in memory because they were bounded and shared. The family trip to Mussoorie where you got photographed wearing those ridiculous costumes. The family fight that broke out before your cousin’s trip to the US. The first holiday in your newly bought second-hand Maruti 800. They reside in our memory because they had a beginning, an awkward middle and an end. They have shape; they carry weight. The album was a document of hard time, while the photographs on the phone live in the soft time of the ever-present. They are like a torrent of images, a flood of similar-looking photographs that we flip through in a blur of motion. Gushing rivers, not still lakes of memory.

Soft time tends to melt into a blur. You seldom remember which evening you scrolled which feed or which weekend you watched which season. Life is densely filled with activity and strangely thin in retrospect. Time feels faster because there are fewer solid pegs on which to hang recollection.

Some of us still live in hard time. The gig economy worker whose hard time enables our time to remain soft. The homemaker who cooks full meals while the rest of the family drowns in soft time. Soft time is a privilege for those who can afford to be in two places at the same time, mentally.

As more of our time becomes soft, we will seek out hard time. Whether it is by way of live concerts, treks in places without connectivity, we will hunt out experiences that pull us out of the stickiness of soft time. And yet, we will ask hard questions of anything that demands hard time from us. Experiences will have to be spectacular; productions will have to be mesmerising. After all, soft time is a formidable competitor.

(This is an expanded version of an article that has appeared previously in the Times of India)

This is also why hard time is becoming a luxury product. Festivals, retreats, destination weddings, live sport, pilgrimages — these are increasingly things people save and pay for. What they are really purchasing is re-entry into a world that will not wait for them. The experience economy is, in large part, a market in retrieved hard time.
This frame does not explain everything, but it offers a new axis along which to read the present. But when time changes its character, then surely everything changes. Beginning with the self, which today oozes into the crevices of time, occasionally gathering itself to give us a sense of coherence. The self, distributed effortlessly over so many simultaneous pursuits is stretched thin. The cracks are showing.

Luxury is absurd.

The prices are ridiculous. Some of the products that are sold as luxury are mind-bogglingly stupid. Social media is full of creators highlighting the many absurdities of luxury.

And yet, people who buy luxury goods are, by and large, not stupid. These are enormously wealthy people who did not get to where they are by being naïve, gullible or unaware of the concept of good value. A lot of them are owners of large businesses and negotiate deals for a living. So what value do they see in these exorbitantly priced scarves that the rest of us don’t?

To dismiss luxury is easy for those who cannot afford to. To understand it is more complex.

Luxury is a way of thinking. A way of assigning value. A way of creating distance.

Luxury, at its heart, is a measure of distance. Distance from the everyday. From necessity. From others.

Being great is not good enough for a luxury good. It must be difficult to access. It must feel removed from ordinary life. Even when it claims to celebrate the artisan, the land, and the material, it does so only after these have been stripped of familiarity and soaked in meanings that only a select few can afford to decode. The journey from artisan to brand is an exercise in shedding inherited meaning and acquiring new layers of it.

The object is not the point; often it is little more than a placeholder.

The Hermès scarf, the Prada sandal, and the hand-thrown ceramic bowl all tell stories of great plausibility: of heritage, attention, restraint, and craftsmanship. But these stories, magnificent as they are, are meant to be seen through. That is part of their design. You are not deceived by luxury; you are willingly seduced. Everyone knows the game.

Louis Vuitton is a luxury object that happens to be a bag. The bag costs more than whatever it will carry. Its function is inconsequential.

It is not a receptacle for things. It is a vessel of meaning.

That is true of most luxury goods. They are not expensive because they perform a function. Or because they are made of expensive material, although that is often true. They are expensive because function has become irrelevant. The object has escaped its category. A Balenciaga keychain with a packet of chips with the logo sells on Amazon for over a lakh rupees. Clearly nobody is buying the empty packet of chips.

A Hermès Birkin is no longer competing with other handbags. A Patek Philippe is no longer competing with other watches. A luxury object is consumption attempting to distance itself from mere necessity.

Which is why all luxury is, in a certain sense, ridiculous.

It offers what might be called plausible incomprehensibility. It must be expensive enough to seem absurd but explained just well enough to justify its existence. It gives the unimaginably rich what feels like access to a secret, even though it is often just a more expensive version of something they already have.

While most luxury consumers imagine themselves to be connoisseurs, those rare beings who discern notes of meaning invisible to the masses, most are simply part of a herd. They buy not from the inside of meaning but from the outside of it. They recognise the signs but cannot read the code.

One particular code that luxury follows is that it mimics nature at its most exquisite. Not to honour nature, but to transfer its excellence onto the user.

It imitates the texture of aged wood, the scent of early rain, the softness of peach skin, the patina of age, and the beauty of imperfection. But not for their own sake. These reconstructions exist to suggest that the person wearing or using them is what nature was trying to create all along.

Luxury imitates nature at its most exquisite in order to suggest that its user is nature’s most exquisite outcome. Luxury makes the individual the pinnacle of nature.

And yet, to dismiss luxury as a con would be a mistake.

Because there is something real at the heart of all this.

Let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine that you possessed unlimited wealth. So much of it that you could buy anything anywhere without a second thought.

What would you value?

What lies beyond the pale of consumption?

What do you crave if you can have everything in the world?

Not things. But feelings.

Time. Authenticity. Beauty. Sensation. Trust. Mystery. Even friction.

That is exactly what luxury seeks to offer us.

At its most potent, luxury places at the pinnacle all that makes human experience special: time, care, slowness, attention, tactility, and proportion. These are things we already possess but are too hurried or distracted to notice. These were things that got wrapped up in the process of living, and we lost our sense of their significance.

To recognise their worth, we need them on a pedestal. We need them placed at a distance. We need them wrapped in ritual and price. Life needs to become reimagined as art.

Luxury doesn’t give us anything new. It simply places, at great distance and cost, what we already have so we can notice it again.

This is why the logic of luxury begins long before couture or crystal.

It starts without ceremony, in the pantry.

As incomes rise, the milk becomes A2, the tea organic, the bread sourdough, and the ice cream artisanal. The price increase is often three or four times the ordinary alternative. It’s not stratospheric, just expensive. Just enough for it to register as special. Just enough to mark distance that cannot be easily explained.

It is not really about buying better things. It is about becoming the sort of person for whom better things feel necessary.

Long before we buy luxury, we become the kind of person who starts to believe in our specialness. And look for reflection of that feeling in the things we buy. Expensive things.

Most of us spend our lives trying to turn meaning into money. Luxury on the other hand, turns money into meaning.

When abundant wealth makes money feel trivial and inconsequential, luxury restores meaning to it..

Luxury is the currency wealth speaks in because money, by itself, is no longer enough. Money needs to be attached to some form of gravity for it to register. That gravity is the meaning that money finds once again.

That is why luxury prices are so ridiculous.

Their absurdity is part of the design. Only at that level of absurdity, only in those stratospheric heights, does money become unrecognisable – it becomes a kind of meaning that only a few have access to.

When money is scarce, when money is striven for, counted, and planned, it carries enormous meaning. Every time money is spent, there is a sense of depletion, a depletion that demands palpable value in return. All expenses are consequential.

But what happens when wealth reaches a point where money ceases to matter, where it becomes a form of ether? When spending money does not feel like a form of depletion?

Luxury exists to solve that problem.

Luxury is the language wealth turns to when money becomes too inarticulate a language.

Only when Hermès prices reach cardiac arrest-inducing levels does money begin to feel meaningful again. Money becomes rarefied air, breathable only by those who need their wealth to signify something more than purchasing power.

This is why luxury uses money as a signifier of how far outside ourselves we must travel to feel like our authentic selves. It is not the object we are paying for. It is the price of reconnection. Of feeling once again the wonder we lost the instinct to recognise.

There is something fundamentally sad about that.

Not because luxury is hollow, but because we have become hollow to the things that once needed no explanation.

The sadness lies in how luxury sells back to us wonder, care, reverence and attention – things that were once freely available. But this is not merely a personal failure of attention or gratitude. Something more systematic has happened. Luxury has made financial distance the precondition for recognising beauty. Beauty has been removed from ordinary experience and relocated inside the consumption code.

The exquisiteness of the natural when passed through the lens of consumption becomes luxury. We could not have engineered a more efficient way to make wonder inaccessible: first exhaust it through abundance, then sell it back at prices that exclude most of the people for whom it was once simply the texture of daily life.

In some ways the exclusion does not really matter. For people who are not wealthy, luxury remains one of the many inexplicable whims of the ultra-rich. It is only those who are on the periphery of wealth for whom luxury brands feel like a club to which they are not invited. They aspire to a kind of specialness that their money currently cannot buy.

The specialness sought has a special character. Perhaps the deepest fantasy hidden inside luxury is not admiration but inevitability.

We admire old aristocracies not merely because they are rich but because their privilege appears God-given. They have occupied a place in the world that they were ordained to hold.

Luxury attempts to manufacture that feeling. It allows acquired privilege to masquerade as inherited privilege. Success to masquerade as destiny.

Luxury does not merely want to be envied. It wants to appear as though it could never have been otherwise.

Luxury turns red blood blue. It makes the buyer retrospectively aristocratic. It invents a new species beyond the pale of consumption.

The mystery of luxury is that it is simultaneously ridiculous and profound. At first glance, it feels like a con job pulled on the wealthy – a brilliant con because the buyer knows exactly what is happening and experiences that knowledge as part of the privilege.

The profundity sits deeper, at a structural level.

Luxury transfers value from the object to the person buying it. It gives form to the idea of distinction. Luxury has always sold distinction. What has changed is the form distinction takes. Once it signalled power and status. Today it increasingly signals the ability to rise above and beyond. Rising above speed, noise, abundance, distraction and artificiality.

The luxury market has spent centuries learning a simple truth: once survival is secured, people do not crave more objects. They crave more meaning. They seek affirmation of the fact that wealth fundamentally made them into a different category. Ordinary human laws no longer apply. Luxury is simply the code used to underline this.

In the end, luxury isn’t just about what one has. It is the language we invented when wealth stopped being surprising and

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being ordinary stopped being bearable.

Picture the things we set aside when their use wears thin. A house, its hearth cold, its laughter stilled. A factory, machines mute, its clamour gone. Beyond buildings—a chip packet, crumpled, its last crumbs savoured; a charger, orphaned by a lost phone. We abandon when utility fades, when purpose—the thread tying us to a thing—snaps. It’s a soft goodbye, born of disutility.

An abandoned building simultaneously represents both failure and possibility, both loss and liberation. It has been divested of its original purpose, lies forgotten and discarded, standing forlorn. But it is simultaneously released from the network of expectations and demands that once defined it. It has shed the burden of use and imposed meaning. Like a retired person suddenly free from the obligations of work, it exists in a state of potential freedom, even if that freedom wasn't chosen.

That is the thing about things that are useful. Often their use does not fully consume them. We cannot suck at the sap of life without leaving something behind. Consider the universal drawer of miscellaneous items that exists in every Indian home - old phone chargers, nameless wires for long discarded gadgets, unknown keys, warranty cards for disposed appliances, perhaps even a hard disk that carries cryptocurrency when it was being sold for peanuts, who knows. These objects occupy a liminal space between utility and waste, between purpose and purposelessness. They cannot be thrown away because they might be needed someday, yet they serve no present purpose except as talismans against future inconvenience. They are simultaneously abandoned and retained, their very uselessness making them impossible to fully abandon. It is as if their present uselessness is a sign of their value, which might suddenly appear when least expected.

Our cities are full of such spaces - not fully abandoned but not fully utilized, spaces that resist both complete use and complete abandonment. They waste away in limbo till suddenly they are repurposed and become vibrant receptacles of a completely different world. Consider how abandoned industrial spaces transform into artists' colonies, how old warehouses become luxury lofts, how defunct railway lines become elevated parks. Like that drawer of miscellaneous items, these spaces exist in a state of potential, waiting for necessity or insight to reveal their next purpose. The Tate Modern in London, housed in a former power station, or closer home, the transformation of Mumbai's textile mills into cultural and commercial spaces - these aren't just examples of recycling buildings but of spaces being liberated from their original purposes to discover entirely new meanings.

And then there are spaces that have been definitively abandoned and lie in ruins. Nature reclaims them with mossy glee. Time leaves its grubby paws all over it, stripping away its grandeur in a half-hearted way. And yet, this degradation reveals a new kind of beauty, one that is rooted in an authentic experience of time.

The ruin has abandoned itself to time, and in doing so, has achieved a different kind of permanence - what we might call a "comfortable permanence," having made its peace with irrelevance. A ruin might evoke a very particular moment of time, but all ruins share a certain meaning - they lie suspended between two moments of time  belonging to neither.

A well-preserved monument is a grand testament to the past, allowing us to come face to face with its majesty. But at the same time it is forever bound to represent the past trapped in a perpetual present, it is an embodiment of the past perfect tense–a frozen artefact of a specific moment, a specific intention.

Should ruins be preserved or should they be allowed to surrender to time? Should they be authentic accounts of the relationship between the present and the past, instead being a simulacrum of the past? Better minds than me can answer that question.

This dual nature of abandonment shapes not just physical space but emotional territory as well. After a breakup, certain places become uninhabitable, heavy with what we might call emotional sediment. We have to draw new maps of our cities, marking places that carry too much residue to be casually revisited. Yet this very abandonment of familiar places can be liberating - the creation of new emotional geographies, new ways of inhabiting the city.

And then there is the residue of dreams. The guitar gathering dust, bought in a burst of musical ambition; the exercise equipment that has become an expensive clothes hanger; the half-written novel saved in a folder named 'New Beginnings' - these are not mere objects but embodiments of alternate selves that never materialized. They represent both the burden of abandoned aspirations and the freedom from those same aspirations. Their very presence reminds us of paths not taken, yet their abandonment represents a kind of acceptance, a release from the tyranny of potential.

There exists in Indian consciousness a deeper understanding of this duality - one that predates modern notions of purpose and productivity. It manifests in the bartanwala, who still cycles through neighbourhoods, exchanging old clothes for steel utensils. This isn't mere recycling but a recognition that abandonment is never complete, that everything exists in a state of potential transformation. What has been abandoned by one purpose is free to be claimed by another. There is an underlying Indian respect for any form of materiality - a belief that a substance never quite loses use - it is for us to find it.

In the Indian kitchen, nothing is truly waste until it has exhausted all possibilities of transformation - vegetable peels become chutneys, stale bread becomes upma, leftover rice finds new life in curd rice. Each transformation represents both an abandonment of the original form and a liberation into a new possibility. Let alone abandon things, we are haunted by a reluctance to let new things become old; witness the hideous green cloth we put on our brand new sofas to prevent them from getting used. We wait for a special occasion to unveil them, and of course no occasion is truly that special.

The practice of cremation in Indian culture offers a profound metaphor here - the recognition that all material forms, including our buildings, are temporary assemblages that must be both abandoned and released back to their elements. This is not an ending but a transformation, much like how fallen leaves nourish the soil that will birth new growth. In nature's laboratory, every abandonment is also a release into a new possibility.

Of course things are changing. We live in an age increasingly oriented toward singular purposes, toward spaces so specifically designed that they resist both abandonment and transformation. Our buildings don't age into ruins but deteriorate into waste. They're not worthy of abandonment because they are optimised such that they can be consumed by their use. There is an absence of memory within them which makes it easy to simply tear them down and build something equally memoryless in their place. Buildings today seem to erase temporality, exceptions apart. Previous civilizations left us ruins that still speak eloquently of their values, their understanding of human nature, their relationship with time. What will our glass and steel towers tell future generations?

The challenge for contemporary architecture might be to rediscover what I call "ruinability" - the capacity for buildings to age and be abandoned with dignity. But beyond this, we need to design with transformation in mind. The most successful examples of adaptive reuse are often in buildings that were overbuilt for their original purpose - their generous proportions, robust materials, and flexible spaces making them adaptable to uses their original architects never imagined. The great industrial buildings of the 19th century have proven more adaptable than many purpose-built structures of our own time. This doesn't mean designing for decay, but rather creating spaces that can hold both memory and possibility, that can exist in that fertile liminal space between purpose and purposelessness. We think of tradition as something that resides in the past, but surely we are manufacturers of traditions for the generations to come. What are we leaving behind?

In conclusion, I want to suggest that abandonment, in both its meanings, might be our most underappreciated teacher. It shows us that lasting meaning comes not from rigid adherence to purpose but from the capacity for both retention and release, both memory and possibility. The question for us might not be "How do we create spaces that maintain their purpose forever?" but rather "How do we create spaces that can be meaningfully abandoned - spaces that can both hold our residue and be released into new life?"

Let us recognise that the past we are creating needs its shrines too. For a world that thinks so highly of itself, one which accords itself pride of place in the pantheon of past generations, it is surprising how little it is concerned with leaving a trail of memory behind. WE are leaving our digital footprints everywhere but there is a difference between data and memory. The digital is understood much more as a breathless record of the present than as an album of the past. All of us have thousands of photographs on our phones, but the pictures we remember are still those that were stuck in a frayed photo album years ago.

Perhaps what matters most is not just what we create, but what we release – and how gracefully that which we abandon can transition between memory and possibility, between residue and renewal. For in that graceful transition lies a profound kind of beauty – one that acknowledges time rather than defying it, one that embraces both the permanence of our impact and the impermanence of our intentions.

I want to talk today about Brand India and its future. Now, that phrase Brand India usually brings to mind India’s image in the outside world—how we are perceived by investors, journalists, the diaspora, or tourists. It is an idea that we are quite invested in. 

And often, that image can often provoke anxiety. Every time something goes wrong in India, we ask: what will this mean for Brand India? Have we slipped in the world’s estimation? Every time a major Western publication carries a negative article, there is outrage and a defiant assertion that their opinion does not matter, while revealing just how much it does.

The irony is that while Brand India is obsessed with its reflection in the world’s mirror, it rarely pauses to as what it looks like to itself.

For a brand is not merely what the world sees. Good or bad. Biased or Fair.

A brand, stripped of all marketing jargon, is simply a pattern of expectations. It is a system of meaning that coheres around a core idea. It is formed through actions, big and small, voluntary and involuntary. We don’t decide what our brand is—it is inferred from how we act over a period of time. Brands themselves have limited control over how they are received. For country brands, where the sources of brand meaning are so many, it is even more difficult to control the narrative.

So, what does India mean to us? What is the lived experience of India? What patterns of meaning emerge from its choices, its instincts, its actions? 

Take Gandhi as an example—not as a historical figure, but as a brand. We don’t remember him for a single act, but for a patterned way of being. His use of satyagraha, an extraordinary innovation, what Richard Lannoy called weakness made perfect, the Dandi March, a cinematic act of non-violence, the use of the fasts, a mode of self-denial, as a political instrument, his insistence on cleaning toilets, his unsettling experiments with truth, and his claim that his life was his message—these form a coherent idea. That of discovering extraordinary strength through the rigorous moral disciplining of the self. 

The question, of course, is—can a country as vast, diverse, and layered as India ever be described through a single brand idea? Surely, the experience of India for a Dalit woman weaver in Odisha is different from that of a stockbroker in Mumbai or a techie in Bengaluru. As it for a faceless unemployed you who finds a sense of identity and purpose as a gau rakshak in Gwalior and a Muslim family whose house has been bulldozed in UP. Any singular description of India will necessary be incomplete or distorted or both.

And yet, there still seems to be-  a flicker of something we can loosely call Indianness that seems to unite this very diversity. At the structural level, there seems to be a common way of dealing with our reality, with the way priorities are accorded and choices are made. 

So what is Brand India at its heart?

For years we have argued that the idea of India lies in its ability to live with contradictions, to find a way that accommodates rather than resolves differences. Where coexistence of innumerable realities has become a way of life.

Today, that feels a little hollow. For we seem to have found a capacity to emphasise differences and to consciously and deliberately deepen divides in order to extract political gain. Social media is full of many axes of division, outrage and hate- whether the issue is political, religious or even involves the choice of your favourite cricketers. This is no longer the Argumentative Indian but the Perpetually Outraged one.

So what then can define Brand India today?

To my mind, what lies at the heart of Brand India is our desire for progress without change.

Or to put it more precisely the search for outward advancement without fundamental internal transformation.

The sensation of motion without dislocation.

India deals with the new in a very particular way. The new in India is not allowed to enter unhindered. Modernity in India has always been a form of negotiated tradition. The new never replaces the old; the old expands to accommodate it.

The arranged marriage becomes the arranged love marriage. Or even the love arranged marriage, where the couple falls in love, and then parents take over and arrange everything thereafter.

Or take an electric ‘akhand’ diya that keeps up the ritual while sacrificing its most important element. As long as the bulb looks like a wick, everyone is happy.

Bhajans are sung to the tune of Hindi films songs that might to the purist seem wholly inappropriate, but we bash on regardless- Mata ke dil mein kya hai sung to the tune of ChoIi Ke Peechhe kya hai. 

Interestingly, in some parts of India we came across the phenomenon of Bhai friends- quasi boyfriends who serve as defanged lifestyle accessories -friends without benefits!

The Indian way is to hollow out both tradition and modernity. If the electric diya empties ritual of its meaning, the Arranged Love Marriage takes a modern institution and makes it part of tradition. 

Hybrid solutions abound- ideas that mash up the old and the new with an underlying intent- contriving to maintain a sense of continuity. To deny the idea of rupture and dislocation.

This ability gives the culture great stability. We want a new lifestyle, but not a new way of life. We are able to guard against external influences which can be overwhelming, while not rejecting them. That is why we can never talk of modernising India without simultaneously talking of Indianising modernity.

At the same time, one must note that this is essentially a defensive posture developed by a culture to resist change or more accurately to make adoption of change extremely selective and contingent upon its ability to become a version of the past.

This means that structural change is very difficult in India. A new India looks vastly different but, in many ways, it feels the same.

Now, there is no denying that a lot has changed in India. Indeed, at one level, the India of today is unrecognisable from the one I grew up in. The roads, the gleaming airports, the malls, UPI and the ease of financial transactions, the ability to consume at will are all signs of a new India.

Even socially, the new self-confidence we see in women, the throbbing energy of small-town India, the blossoming of creative energy among the young, all point to significant change. There is desire for self improvement, an aspiration to do a lot of more and many more avenues are open for the young. The mobile has been a tool of empowerment; a personalised weapon that reminds us every minute that we are individuals and that we share a unique and two-way relationship with the outside world.

So how fair is it to argue that India wants progress without change?

It is true that the airport is dazzling, but step outside and chaos can still rule. T1 in Mumbai, is a good example. The roads are new as are the potholes that spring up on the heels of the inauguration. The cities are dwarfed by skyscrapers which in turn are inundated by floods the moment it rains even a little. I live in Gurgaon, the so-called Millennial City where rain that would be considered a light drizzle in Mumbai gets our cars floating. Every winter, the air turns poisonous, but nothing changes.

And less said about our institutions the better. Their decline has been steady for decades, but in recent years the process has accelerated. The very instruments meant to deliver modern governance have been absorbed into the logic of society. The police act more as brokers of local disputes than representatives of law. The Parliament is dysfunctional, having been reduced a theatre of insincerity. Courts increasingly resemble panchayats, dispensing advice in the name of community sentiment rather than jurisprudence. The media, once an observer-critic, now act as demented stormtroopers for the powerful. Even the Election Commission, once the safeguarder of democracy, now faces a real crisis of credibility.

The bureaucracy, too, exemplifies this inversion. On paper, the great instrument of modern governance. In practice, an adjunct of society.  Its rigidity paradoxically produces fluidity. So many exist rules that the only way forward is through discretion, which comes at a price. Because nothing is ever automatic, everything must be re-secured, producing an air of perpetual contingency and distrust.

It is as if the medicine has been infected by the disease. Every mechanism deployed to regulate society has become its instrument.

Alongside this erosion, politics itself has become deeply personalised. Policy initiatives are framed not as systemic reforms but as ‘gifts’: a gas cylinder, a loan waiver, a tap connection, new trains, welfare schemes. These are presented as the benevolence of leaders, not entitlements of citizenship. Even in a local sense, the nephew of an ex-corporator can wield enough clout so as to make immune to any law.

At independence, we placed a sophisticated political framework over an entrenched social order. In the early decades, the post-Independence elite held sway over politics, bureaucracy, media, and culture. Progressive ideals like secularism, equality, and institutional respect were not universally practised or even believed in, but they set the default terms of public respectability. Views that ran counter to them were delegitimised and stayed largely private or local. 

As democracy became more representative and electoral competition intensified, that monopoly over the national narrative began to crack. The instincts of the broader social base—rooted in social order- caste, religion, and language—moved from the margins to the centre. These identities were not new, but they now entered public life in their own voice, unvarnished and unapologetic. Hypocrisies were abandoned as were standards.

Digital technologies took this further. By turning every individual into a broadcaster, social media removed the last gatekeepers. It rewarded the primal over the measured, and in doing so, legitimised it. What was once whispered in coded terms is now shouted aloud—often to applause—because people discover that their views however extreme they might be are not only shared but celebrated.

Beyond the structural issues, there seem to be deeper cultural mechanisms at work.

We excel at inherited order- caste, family tradition- where relationships are defined by birth and position. Here our responsibility is to follow order which we do rather well.

But we struggle with constructed order-traffic rules, queues, contracts- where legitimacy comes from impersonal agreement rather than inherited hierarchy.

When we are asked to stand in a line or negotiate a roundabout, our instinct is not to comply to subvert. Not because we are lawless, but because we don’t recognise impersonal order as legitimate. We understand reciprocity, not rules. We need hierarchy to make sense of the world and neither traffic nor queues represent hierarchy that we understand. 

Our relationship with rules also follows a distinct pattern. Instead of seeing them as guidelines to be respected, we often see them as a challenge to be overcome. They are an affront to our individuality, a kind of forced belonging to a system that otherwise does not see us. So we sidestep the rules, break them casually, or, if we have the power, rig the system itself. 

And we fiercely protect the status that comes along with hierarchy, sometimes in the most absurd ways. At many airports in the country, there is a board put up which outlines 32 kinds of dignitaries (what a delicious word) who are exempt from pre-embarkation processes, frisking in other words. Although it has changed now, in an earlier version, among the categories, one read 'Governors of states', within brackets - not Lt Governors. We would all be familiar with the massive billboards near toll booths that again outline those who are exempt from paying.

Strength, in such a culture, is often confused with the ability to get away with more. Whether it’s on the road, where the powerful can run over people without consequence, or on the international cricket stage, where the BCCI throws its weight around, strength becomes brutish entitlement. 

Strength confused with impunity explains much about contemporary India. The real task — using strength to dismantle the crumbling structures of the past — is often ignored.

We live by a paradox that looks like a contradiction but is in fact part of a design. We are ritually collectivist and individually anarchic. 

Collectivism anchors us, anarchy frees us. Ritual order reassures us that the social order is intact, while everyday disorder gives us a sense of autonomy. The two together enable a world where formal institutions can remain weak, because society supplies both the discipline and the escape. 

This is why much of Indian modernity feels reactive: it is less a product of vision and more an accommodation of what the world sends our way. We practice a kind of inflation-adjusted change: we accept that change is inevitable but treat it like rising prices — something to manage, absorb, and keep pace with, rather than to shape. By itself, society rarely seeks change; it is a culture waiting to be acted upon rather than acting. Change is imagined as a natural process arising elsewhere, which is then metabolised per our comfort.

Consider the Mandal Commission. At one level, it was perhaps the strongest action taken to reorder social hierarchy since independence. And it did change things significantly — it brought new groups into public life, redistributed opportunity, altered the texture of politics. But even Mandal, over time, was absorbed into the existing order. Its energy dissipated into the competitive arithmetic of electoral politics. The players changed, but the game remained the same. Stronger castes strive to muscle their way in to the list, making reservations an extension of the very system it was trying to resist. Mandal redistributed the access to the existing order without changing the order itself. The cast changed, the script remained the same.

Which is what makes society the invisible behemoth here. More powerful than religion, politics, or economics, it sets the emotional defaults, defines the terms of legitimacy, and decides what change is allowed to mean. Even religion, for all its fervour, tends to act more as a cheerleader than a regulator of society. It lends itself easily to social or political ends, deployed in defence of whatever the societal imperative of the moment might be.

And here lies the great tension at the heart of modern India. The political opportunity lies in using society exactly as it is. Power comes from mobilising existing identities, from deepening reciprocities, from reinforcing hierarchy rather than dismantling it. To win politically is to lean into society’s instinctive design.

But the development opportunity calls for the opposite. It demands that we overhaul these very instincts- make rules impersonal, make contracts reliable, make rights universal, make outcomes predictable. It calls for institutions that are stronger than relationships, and for a vision of equality that runs deeper than hierarchy.

This is why politics and development so often part ways. The very logic that delivers political success undermines developmental progress. Every time politics bends institutions to social logic, society wins—but the promise of systemic change recedes. And every time development is attempted, it risks colliding with society’s invisible boundaries.

The dilemma, of course, is that the very social structures that restrict us also provide value. What is oppressive is often also enabling. The mother-in-law may be the ogre in the domestic imagination, but she is also the one who looks after the child so that her bahu can go to work. The joint family constrains freedom, but it also spreads risk, shares resources, and gives the individual a buffer against the unpredictability of life. Caste discriminates, but it also delivers community and belonging.

This is what makes change in India so elusive. To dismantle a structure is not simply to remove a restriction; it is also to take away a support. And because every structure has this double face—both stifling and sustaining—society clings to it. Reform is never simply reform; it always feels like loss.

This paradox has consequences, not only for society but for the economy. For a while, we have been able to grow in spite of ourselves—riding on demographics, on cheap labour, on entrepreneurial energy that leaps over obstacles rather than clears them. But progress without change extracts a price.

When institutions are weak and everything is negotiable, investment becomes riskier, contracts less reliable, outcomes less predictable. It is no accident that Indian markets remain shallow; trust is scarce. Our bureaucracy, by keeping everything contingent, ensures that even economic certainty is provisional—what is cleared today might be blocked tomorrow, and only those who know how to navigate the maze can hope to succeed.

Caste and community still shape access to opportunity. Land disputes drag on for decades, and the rule of law bends to power. This creates friction everywhere. A factory takes years to build, an idea takes years to scale, and only those with the right social or political capital can move quickly. Growth happens, but it remains uneven—spectacular in some sectors, missing in others.

We are trapped between the sediment and flow. On some levels, India is unstoppable — a restless, surging flow. On others, it is immovable — weighed down by sediment that has been building for centuries. The sediment is an accumulation of habits, hierarchies, workarounds, and unwritten codes. It slows the flow, shapes its course, and ensures that movement happens without too much displacement.

One could argue that this is a half glass full or empty kind of a question. Do we focus on the positive which is undeniable or on the negative which is inescapable? India has definitely changed for the better in so many ways. We are a large, complex nation. Are we being too hard on ourselves?  Should we be more patient, more forgiving?

It isn’t as simple as that for there isn’t an equivalence between the two. The positive resides at the surface, the negative is structural. India has cracked the algorithm for shielding itself and its society from the forces of transformation. 

Politics, which was meant to transform society, has instead been irrevocably transformed by it.

You cannot make the developmental omelette without breaking the societal egg. But in India, we are reluctant to do so. Development is imagined as a meal that can be cooked while leaving the egg intact — the shell preserved, the hierarchy unbroken. This unwillingness to disturb the underlying structure explains why so many grand efforts end up as symbolic gestures rather than real shifts.

The problem is that India now faces a world moving at technological speed, while we still change at cultural speed. We will modernise, but subversively, mincing our steps as we zigzag ahead, much like autorickshaw in a crowded bazaar. 

The journey to being a developed country is not about roads, airports and malls. It is about the soft infrastructure of development. About an air of certainty and trust. In people, in institutions, in professions. In knowing that the police will act regardless of who is involved. In Knowing that the courts will decide impartially and quickly. That people will not drive on the wrong side of the road. That a new road will last 18 years, the average in developed countries. That one will not need a reference from someone important to get school admission. That doctors will not prescribe tests that are not needed. That the media will not concoct stories. That women will be safe being who they are. That access to healthcare and education will be widespread and of good quality. That breathing will not involve an act of courage.

When systems take themselves seriously, people follow. The metro works flawlessly. Airport toilets remain clean because the system expects and delivers cleanliness. Immigration lines are orderly because the system believes in order. People rise to the level of order they experience. Blaming citizens for institutional failures misses this fundamental point.

Can this happen? Do we see viable pathways to this change?.

There are a few possibilities that exist, as far as I can tell.

One option is clear. That we are forced into change. Perhaps by technology, which seems the likeliest candidate. Can AI create a system that overrides social mechanisms and create order? Can blockchain create trust of a new kind? 

It must be said that fundamental change in India has the best chance when it is imposed. Liberalisation is a great example.

Technology has the advantage of working invisibly. It bypasses cultural barriers. A mobile phone makes us individuals not through its ideology but through what its use enables. A touchscreen gives us a sense of personal agency by its form- it responds to every small whisper of a command. Can Ai bring about transformational change without being thwarted or tamed by society? 

However, it would be unwise to underestimate the social response. The same technology that empowers women has also created the world’s most powerful tool of social control- WhatsApp. Social media has helped entrenched regressive ideas more than any previous technology.

And AI too could well have the opposite effect- by deepening divides and creating a new set of haves and have-nots. 

The other possible arc of transformation is that the current political dispensation finds a way to overcome its need for revenge, and the othering of minorities searches for a truly Indian mode of thought. One that seeks to find answers in complexity, that does not think of development as a zero-sum game. One that offers an alternative to the dominant Western modes of development which are far from being perfect. One that distils the philosophical spirit of the past for use in the present rather than attempt a return to it

Again, this is a tenuous hope, with little evidence of it materialising into reality. If anything, we are moving in the opposite direction, by trying to create a closed version of thinking, opposed to the West on the surface while mimicking its structure. The famed Indian ability to accommodate differences is facing a challenge as we set out to literalise religion and harden boundaries.

Or alternatively the pot boils over. The frustration of citizens translates into a political movement that forces change. After all, democracy has been the instrument of change in so many countries. It is not fanciful to believe that the same could happen here. In a democracy, this is the most viable path for change if that what its citizens seek. 

But is that likely? We can have a different regime running things, but there is no promise of fundamental change. There are no political players that are invested in this kind of transformation. Everyone is playing within the implicit rules of the game. Without an alternative political imagination, change of this kind doesn’t look possible. And today, the system doesn’t seem to provide adequate incentive for the same. The process of winning todays’ elections almost guarantees that fundamental change is off the table. 

It is worth remembering that there are two arcs along which change can occur. 

The ideological arc measures outcomes — poverty reduction, gender equality, Hindu pride, minority rights. The systemic arc measures processes -- administrative freedom, insulation from consequences if one upholds the rules, separation of power from personal interest. The tragedy is that while politics obsesses about the ideological arc, the real revolution is needed in the systemic one. Unless processes themselves are reimagined and reinforced, ideological promises, however grand, collapse into rhetoric. And that is where no political formation in India today has either any vision or any incentive to move towards.

The responsibility shifts to the people to make this happen. To use the democratic system to demand change. Is that in the offing? Perhaps not, but one can never underestimate how quickly grassroots movements crystallise and become transformative.

Regardless of how the future pans out , India will not collapse. That is its superpower, It will always find its way. There is a resident wisdom at work, that is deep, even profound. But it will not transform dramatically either -- not in the way we imagine a developed nation rising. We will continue to drift forwards, between the banks of improvement and improvisation, slowly bettering our lot while getting more frustrated as our desires outpace our appetite for change.

As I move towards closing out this talk, I am reminded of Nietschze’s invoking of India as a mythical destination steeped in wisdom” will it perhaps be said of us one day that we too, steering Westward, hoped to reach to reach an India- but that it was our fate to be wrecked against infinity?”

Here in the real, non-metaphorical India, are we looking elsewhere when we should be looking within? Perhaps, there is an elusive wisdom that India represents- one that a single lifetime is insufficient to fully grasp. 

Perhaps a hundred years from now, the countries that are the meteors today may have burned out- consumed in the slipstream of their own velocity. We already see Trumpian America attempting to scrawl over history in block letters with crayons. The developed world is riven by divisions that have emerged in part as a response to their development. 

In contrast, India’s insight might well be that while progress might move at the speed of technology, sustainable change will follow the contours of geology. Societies change far more slowly than technology or GDP numbers. 

Tomorrow’s India may still be moving ahead- in its own messy, conflicted way. Wobbly, but still there. Still charting its own course. Still haggling with the future.

Perhaps that’s the real truth about Brand India.

Not Incredible India, but Inevitable India

Being invited to deliver the Subhas Ghosal memorial Lecture is an absolute privilege, one which is also a terrifying one. Because those of you who are of my vintage would know the weight that name carries. Advertising has always had its share of deities but Mr Ghosal stands apart. His name is never uttered without a touch of hushed reverence. He evokes a time of uprightness, grace and honour, words that feel out of place in any context today, let alone in advertising.

It isn’t just for the work, though the work was considerable. It isn’t just for the institutions he built or the belief he had in the value of people or the many brands he helped build.

It is for something more elusive. A belief, bordering on the sacred, held seriously and enacted consistently, that this profession mattered.

It mattered because it worked for the truth. It mattered because it was a way of making everyday life beautiful. It mattered because it built value, not just in terms of commerce, but in terms of human connection. And finally it mattered because it accepted that it had obligations: to clients, to society, to the people working in the profession and to the consumer. Advertising felt like the pursuit of the civilised in a civilised world.

Things have changed, as they must. It is easy for this talk to be an elegy for a past we have left behind, but that would be self-indulgent, apart from being too simplistic. We live in a transformed world, and advertising, like everything else, must find its own voice within that.

It is a loud world we live in today. It is a world where we react more than we act. Where temperatures seem to be running high all the time, and where communication is largely about two deaf sides screaming at each other. It is the Age of Outrage.

We know this. Who has not lamented about how perpetually outraged we all seem to be. For this talk to have any meaning and interest, it must go beyond what we all already know.

We know that outrage belongs to no single ideology. The right revels in it. The left uses it systematically. The centre deploys it on the rare occasions it remembers it exists. Outrage is a promiscuous beast. It goes willingly with everyone.

We know that outrage is very often manufactured. That algorithms gorge on it. Because outrage is the highest yield emotional fuel available. More reliable than joy. More durable than sadness. More transmissible than the second phase of Covid.

We know it is self-replicating. Outrage multiplies itself. Your outrage feeds mine which in turn feeds theirs. Because it is cheap.

We know it has no sense of proportion. The outrage over a casting decision and the outrage over a massacre carry the same emotional pitch, the same edge of hysteria.

But why is it this way? For while the algorithms have certainly made a difference, there is something deeper at work. There is something in us that makes us respond to algorithms in this way.

At its heart, outrage is about significance.

An ordinary person, faceless except for the few who know them, throws a pebble into the world and watches in amazement and satisfaction as the ripples radiate outwards, generating more ripples, and then even more.

There is a pleasure in this. It is deeply satisfying. It always was, even as children.

This is the pleasure of causation. The feeling that I matter. That I can make things happen at a scale far beyond the small world I inhabit. Of watching a world where you were nothing but a data point, a monthly active user, a demographic coordinate, a target, react at your provocation.

I moved the pond.

This is a new experience. Genuinely new, at this scale. For most of human history, causing ripples beyond your immediate circle required power or wealth or talent or proximity to catastrophe. The right to broadcast was a jealously guarded resource. Controlled by the powerful.

We sometimes do not acknowledge how extraordinary this is, the fact that every individual is a broadcaster today. The generation I grew up in had very few means of being heard. Either the three measly letters to the Editor in a newspaper, or maybe farmaishes on Vividh Bharati. The sum total of our voice, unless one was somebody.

At one level the right to broadcast was hardly democratic, but as a result it built formidable quality standards. Not everyone could get it, and in order to do so, many hurdles needed to be passed. It became an act of responsibility where truth and verification mattered, where the quality of thinking was valued, and above all there was the idea of accountability. To facts. To public welfare. To consequence. To one’s audience. You simply could not publish what came to your mind.

Now when anyone can broadcast their views not just to an immediate audience but potentially to the world, the grammar of knowledge has changed. Today opinions are everyone’s right. They are instantaneous, operating from the outermost surface of the mind. They circulate with great velocity and they can be anonymous. The Overton window for what is deemed acceptable has shifted dramatically.

In real life someone with extreme views had to be careful with airing them. Today the most bigoted perspective gets instant endorsement from thousands of others, emboldening all extreme views. Nothing is deemed too offensive to be off the table. Paradoxically, nothing is too trivial to take offence to.

One more thing. There is something about the nature of time that has changed which has helped create the conditions for the production, consumption and circulation of outrage.

I call this soft time. The time spent doing things while doing other things. The squishy liquidy time when we are watching a show while scrolling, and munching on something.

Soft time has its own distinctive grammar. By its nature, it cannot deal with complexity. It fears ambivalence or nuance. It cannot turn feeling into considered response, but is very good at generating reactions.

Outrage is made for soft time. It is entertainment and stimulation compressed into micro-time. It is immensely scrollable, and even more easily forgettable.

The story of outrage is not only a story about technology. It is a story of how attention works in the digital age. A world that has less and less hard time, time when we do only one thing, give only one thing our full attention, and more and more soft time. And outrage is what makes soft time feel most substantial.

The other thing about outrage is that it is professed far more than it is experienced. It is above all, a performance.

If it were really an emotion, it would show the characteristics of emotion. Something that rises in people and demands to be expressed. There would be a sense of depletion after its expression. There would be a gap before that emotion could be summoned again. There would be some relationship between the nature of the cause and the intensity of the response.

None of these things are consistently true.

And now we have arrived at the logical endpoint of that trajectory. Artificial intelligence can produce outrage content at scale, with no human affect behind it whatsoever. Not performed feeling. No feeling at all. The complete separation of the genre from any originating human experience. When we worried about outrage as performance we were still assuming a performer. That assumption is no longer safe. In a world with infinite content and finite attention, outrage is the easiest answer. And it doesn’t moderate in an AI world. It becomes more necessary as a differentiator.

Outrage exists because it has its uses. It broadcasts to the world who we are. We are who we hate. It is the strongest negative currency in existence: what you don’t like, who you don’t believe in, whose every word is anathema. This is the most articulate signal of identity. Know me by what I spit on.

So outrage plays several roles. Of underlining presence. Of placing oneself within a preferred collective. Of producing the ripple that reassures us that we can cause a reaction. Of declaring identity.

In that sense, outrage is not a malfunction. It is an extraordinarily efficient solution to several simultaneous problems.

What outrage is not focused on is the one thing that would actually matter. Change. The outrage game requires two sides, both suspended in a never-changing web of their own incompleteness. It is a game that must continue unresolved, for that is when it is most productive for the purposes for which it exists.

But outrage is not a harmless way of blowing off steam. It creates a larger pattern, affecting the nature of democracy as a system.

We live today in what I would call a hot democracy. A system constructed to transfer heat more than light. One where response is immediate, emotion is public, reaction is continuous, issues are symbolic and pressure is applied in real time. The business of governance operates under the hood, while on the surface all we see is the transfer of heat from one side to another.

You could argue that this sounds like more democracy. More voices. More urgency. More participation. But that is a misreading of what democracy always was.

Representative democracy recognised that everyone could not have a voice in everything. We elected representatives once every five years who spoke for us, not on every issue that engaged us, but on a few that were deemed important.

Representative democracy was fundamentally a cooling system. You elected someone. You transferred your emotional heat to them. The system acted as a circuit-breaker between emotion and policy. It sought to weed out surplus emotion in order to focus on the substantive.

The hot democracy works on the opposite premise. Emotion is the primary animating force. The system reacts constantly and operates on primal instincts. Which is why we see the rise of populist authoritarian democratically elected governments in so many parts of the world. Hot democracies produce a type of power that focuses on emotive issues and revels in creating faultlines. Along the axes of race, culture, nationality, religion, caste, gender, sexuality.

So many of the burning issues of the day are symbolic. The demand that a scene be removed from a film. The insistence on an apology for the wrong word used years ago. The campaign to remove someone from a position because of a view they once held. So much of the outrage today involves symbolic issues. Who said what. Did a film offend a community by using the wrong word. We have seen this in the examples of Tanishq and Lenskart.

And here, outrage often wins. The ad is taken off air. The film scene is censored. An apology is issued. But this is all theatre because nothing of consequence changes. Because nothing of consequence was at stake in the first place. The outrage was a flex. It was a way of saying the group I am part of is powerful.

The question of where society goes from here is not separate from the question of where this profession goes. They are the same question operating at different scales.

Two possible directions.

The first is that this is a phase. Technology has always moved faster than culture. The printing press created a century of religious strife before equilibrium returned. The internet and the smartphone have set in motion something whose consequences we are still inside. But culture has absorbed disruptive technology before. Equilibrium has been reached before. More than once.

But history, encouraging as it is, is no guarantee.

The second direction has no equilibrium built into it. We become more primal as we become more connected. Even as we embrace more modern tools, our tribal hardware reasserts. We boil over with primitive passions. Strength asserts itself nakedly, and seeks to dominate. Remember, the liberal project and the rules-based international order are an aberration in history and not the rule. We could go back to being what we always were.

The age of outrage will not resolve itself from the outside. AI will not fix it. It will just make outrage easier. It will either be reversed from the inside, by people and institutions choosing, against the grain of every incentive the current system offers, to do the harder thing. To replace the posture with the truth. The reaction with the thought. The outward ripple with the inner meaning.

Or it will become the culture. The temperature at which everything simply runs. The air we breathe without noticing anymore.

That choice exists at every scale. In governments. In institutions. In individuals.

And in advertising.

Now let’s talk about this room.

Because advertising has not been an innocent bystander in all this. In many significant ways it has helped construct this world.

The age of outrage did not suddenly arrive. Advertising helped create the enabling conditions for it and it is worth being honest about that.

That is not to say that this was done deliberately. It was certainly not malicious. But it happened systematically. Over decades. In the normal course of doing its job extremely well.

Consider what advertising actually taught the world.

It taught the world to understand itself through tribes. From a certain point in the twentieth century, the logic of advertising shifted. It moved from saying this product has these qualities to saying this product is for people like you. The Pepsi Generation. The BMW driver. The Patagonia buyer. The woman who knows her own mind. Advertising invented the idea of identity consumption. The idea that what you choose, what you buy, what you wear, what you drive, where you eat, is a signal of who you are.

That same grammar is now the grammar of outrage. I am defined by what I like and what I reject. Know me by what I cannot tolerate. My opinion defines who I am. The tribes are no longer defined by products alone. But the logic that our choices are the primary signal of who we are, that came from here.

Advertising also taught the world to live in a state of escalating but managed dissatisfaction. To manufacture a gap, between what you have and what you could have, between who you are and who you might be, and then offer to close it.

Do this at industrial scale long enough and the result is a population programmed for dissatisfaction. A constant feeling of inadequacy and insufficiency. A nagging sense of incompleteness.

Outrage is that dissatisfaction with one unique advantage. It cannot be resolved. It can only feed more outrage. It can ebb but it never disappears.

That is the condition that the outrage economy now exploits with perfect efficiency.

Outrage ate advertising’s lunch using advertising’s own tools.

Advertising was, for most of its history, a hard time medium. It was the price people paid for being interested in something else. You wanted to see the cricket match. The film. The article. The advertisement was the cost of entry. You couldn’t refuse, it was embedded into the experience. No skip button. No fast forward.

Advertising’s golden age was built, in significant part, on a structural compulsion.

And interestingly, the profession’s response to that compulsion was creativity. Coming from an acknowledgment, implicit but real, that holding someone’s attention without their consent created an obligation. That there needed to be a reward for the viewer, to make the imposition feel worthwhile.

Creativity was the sweetener. It made the interruption tolerable. At its best, genuinely pleasurable. Sometimes the advertisement became the thing people remembered more than the programme itself. Advertising was a legitimate part of popular culture. It was part of the memoryscape of the times. It was part of public conversation. Did you see that ad? Remember that one? Eras were marked by ads, taglines were cultural material. Live Life Kingsize. Taste the Thunder. Dhoondte reh jaaoge? Bhala uski kameez. Har Ghar Kuchch Kehta hai. Yeh Dil Maange Mor. Thanda Matlab Coca Cola.

When digital technology arrived, the entire power equation turned on its head. The captive audience was liberated. Advertising was no longer a compulsion. And advertising found itself in a soft time world, trying to use hard time tools on audiences who had moved on and would never return.

The crisis that followed is usually described in economic and technological terms. Fragmented attention. Ad aversion. Programmatic buying. The death of the thirty second spot. Performance advertising over brand building. But these are symptoms. The underlying condition is simpler and more severe.

In a soft time world, the instinctive reaction to anything that appears as advertising is rejection. The moment the audience identifies what it is, their defences go up. Not because the creativity got worse, although it has. But because the audience gets to choose what to watch. And advertising just doesn’t cut it.

In a soft time world hard time activities become very expensive. Unless they add real value, they are shunned. That’s the challenge cinema in theatres faces, for instance.

But here is what I find genuinely puzzling.

We now have a medium designed precisely for short form storytelling. The exact form this profession has practised for decades. The cornerstone of advertising was the thirty second spot, the ultimate compression of storytelling. And now we have a media format entirely dedicated to this mode. With no constraints. No clients. No safe briefs. No committees to pass through.

And where is advertising in all this? Nowhere.

It is the seventeen year old from Moradabad who has killed it. Without a budget. Without any training. Without any title proclaiming special creative ability. Without the elaborate structure that storytelling hides inside in advertising.

How do we explain this?

It is not the absence of talent. Advertising has always been full of talented people. The problem is that advertising took the power of raw storytelling and buried it inside a process. An ecosystem so dense that over time the storytelling became almost incidental to the machinery around it. The brief. The creative review. The iterative approval system. The production house. The fetishised shoot. The astronomical budget. Successively advertising protected itself from the immediacy of human connection.

And then the profession built a reward system that has nothing to do with its professed intention. To tell stories that move people and make them act in a certain way.

The award.

I am acutely aware that this is being said at an awards function. I will leave you to decide whether that makes it more relevant or less.

The award itself is not the issue. It is the primacy accorded to it that is. It has given the profession a reward system that has nothing to do with the market or the audience. It has turned the profession inwards. Unmindful of the fact that the world outside does not care, has stopped caring years ago. At a time when advertising as a form is facing an existential crisis, this devotion to self-congratulation feels staggeringly tone deaf.

There are no Lions for creators making reels. That is their greatest strength.

So when the profession is absent from the one space where its claimed expertise should be most visible, it is no surprise.

Which raises a more fundamental question. Why is advertising a profession at all?

Isn’t it simply a genre?

Horror is a genre. Romance is a genre. The folk song is a genre. Anyone can work in them. Nobody owns them. They have no fee structure, no agency model, no creative brief, no strategic planning department.

Why not advertising?

This is not speculation. The signals are already visible. Creators make their own versions of ads. And they do it every day. And Unilever’s move to recruit thousands of influencers is not a media buying decision. It is a momentous structural shift. The institution is being disaggregated. The form, the persuasive short form narrative, is still highly relevant, perhaps even more relevant than ever. The profession as this room has known it, however, may not be.

Here is what I find hardest to accept.

The world has never been more hospitable to what this profession knows how to do.

Think about what the age of outrage actually runs on. Narrative construction. Identity performance. The framing of reality. Presenting the self to maximum effect. The manufacturing of desire and grievance. The compression of complex feeling into transmissible form.

These are not new skills that appeared from nowhere. This profession invented them. Refined them. Deployed them at scale for decades. Advertising was the original master of every technique the attention economy now runs on.

And then consider the short form narrative. The thirty second spot. The profession’s proudest claim. The ultimate compression of storytelling. Emotion, character, conflict, resolution, in less time than it takes to pour a cup of tea. The creator economy is built entirely on that form. It is the dominant cultural form of our time. Hundreds of millions of people watch it, share it, build their identities around it.

Not one significant creator came from advertising. Not one.

This should have been advertising’s moment. The world finally speaking the language this profession spent a century building.

This was the time for the profession to prove that it did not work because it could force people to watch ads, or because of the aggregation of audiences that media used to provide. That when it came to the crunch, its storytelling prowess was enough.

This was the time when the profession could have become a factory for creators. It could have invested in startups, taking sweat equity in exchange for strategic and creative input, building stakes in the new world rather than mourning the old one. It had the talent. It had the relationships. It had the understanding of what moves people that nobody else in the room possessed.

But that would have meant letting go of the set way of doing things. The elaborate approval structures. The fetishised production process. The awards that told the profession it was excellent regardless of whether anyone outside this room agreed.

The profession clung to the form, not the meaning.

It found itself frozen. Bleating about lost relevance. Watching a seventeen year old from Moradabad do in three minutes on a phone what the profession spent fifty years and a thousand award entries claiming only it could do.

The story that could only have come from a human being. Told with genuine craft and genuine obligation. To a person who chose to receive it.

The Age of Outrage could have been The Age of Advertising. It still can be

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