The internet is a strange space, always in flux. In India, it is marked by Jio’s 1.5 GB-a-day data revolution, the rise and ban of TikTok, and the ascent of Facebook before Instagram took over. Cheap and accessible internet fundamentally transformed how India came online.
Few have observed this transformation as closely as podcaster and writer Anurag Minus Verma. Over the years, he has built a loyal audience by documenting internet oddities with humour while probing the social, cultural and political forces beneath them. His debut book, The Great Indian Brain Rot, a collection of nonfiction essays attempting to make sense of the digital chaos, is both timely and immensely entertaining. Verma writes, “There is a quiet epidemic of FOMO. Not the fear of missing out on content, but the fear of missing out on becoming content. Of never pointing a camera at your nonsense.” This captures the anxieties of the many who hope to cash in on the internet economy.
In Mumbai, for instance, one often hears some strugglers mockingly say that those who missed out on becoming online stars, “cared too much about shame to dance on the internet; otherwise, we wouldn’t have to struggle this much.” Beyond that shame or guilt, to do anything on the internet is known as “cringe”.
Cringe, in fact, has become a fascinatingly common term online. Alongside it came the casteist slur “chapri”, used to mock lower-income creators. Verma unpacks the caste and class politics embedded in these labels, examining how caste pride shapes audiences, how upper-class and lower-class internets function differently, and how the internet economy responds to these divides.
Verma considers cringe “an almost philosophical and spiritual exercise,” “a surrender of the ego, an act of self-abandonment. One that ‘kills’ the self and gives birth to a new digital self, which will be scrutinised, remixed, broken into memes, templated and laughed at (and maybe even laughed with).” This has given us creators like Deepak Kalal, who embodies the idea of cringe. Kalal has repeatedly shifted from an effeminate persona to an unruly roaster eager to be roasted, and at times even presenting himself as a reflective thinker. Then there is Puneet Superstar, for whom “the boundaries of fact and fiction blur.” He performs the most unthinkable acts online: smearing toothpaste on his face, eating cow dung, and yelling in the middle of the road. “The world of influencers is built on visibility, but it is powered by validation,” writes Verma, “And validation, unlike fame, has no half-life.” When a life is built entirely around validation, it becomes “nothing less than hell.”
Moving between memes and social commentary, Verma occasionally leans too heavily on dense philosophical ideas, but they rarely overshadow the sharpness of his observations. In essence, the book is an attempt to understand what the internet has done to the Indian imagination, treating its content not as disposable entertainment but as cultural artefacts worthy of serious attention.