“What is Ghibli doing here?” I asked myself as I searched about searches this week. The Japanese animation studio emerged as an unlikely element in the list of top searches in India in 2025 on Google’s annual country-wise list of what people looked up online. For the uninitiated, ‘Ghiblification’ refers to an AI-generated image that creates a dreamy hand-drawn aesthetic after the signature style of Japan’s Oscar-winning animation studio, Ghibli.
Being old-fashioned, I am inclined to see Ghibli’s art as a visual equivalent of the haiku, the spare, traditional Japanese poetry form. As I checked for similarities, to my pleasant surprise, I found a clear link. The studio’s stylistic experiments and its fans’ imagination result in what a Marxist or Hegelian philosopher might call a creative dialectic. Fans often pair Ghibli stills with original haiku to capture the movies’ vivid imagery centred on themes such as family and ecology.
Haiku poetry consists of three phrases in a 5-7-5 syllable pattern. These poems typically use evocative imagery to capture a fleeting moment in nature or daily life—and that is where we find an excellent match between Ghibli and haikus. They share a tendency to share human experience in condensed imagery. After all, Japan is the land of Zen, though the term is a derivation from the Indian dhyana. Just as well that Ghibli popped up among search favourites in the land where Buddhism was born.
An online search and then a search within the results seem to meet what one might call haiku Ghibli-ism. Such an enchanting philosophical diversion aside, India’s search favourites in both 2024 and 2025 by and large reveal a banal pattern—fitting into what marketers called the ABCD formula in India’s internet economics: astrology, Bollywood, cricket and devotion. If ‘you are what you search’ is to be defined for Indians, the acronym is perfect.
Predictably, IPL led the sweepstakes in 2025 alongside other cricket themes. But I would doff my hat at the searches for Jemimah Rodrigues, who gave a welcome gender twist to India’s favourite sport. As if war games seek winning highs, Operation Sindoor joined the list. The year’s devotional high came from the Maha Kumbh Mela. Users hunted for trip bargains and updates to draw up itineraries for arguably the planet’s biggest religious congregation, blessed by gods and tourists alike.
Searches related to the demise of Bollywood star Dharmendra showed that nostalgia is not entirely out of fashion for Gen Z. The tragic death of Assamese musician Zubeen Garg showed that regional heroes can become national ones when they spark rage and evoke curiosity over a mysterious tragedy.
Search trends for 2024, too, confirmed the ABCD obsession, with the T20 World Cup scoring high. The Olympic Games stood out. Interest in gender-based topics is understandably growing as women make it big everywhere to loud online cheers. If Jemimah was this year’s darling, the feisty Vinesh Phogat, whose Olympic wrestling matched her domestic bouts against sexual harassment, was the female sporting hero of 2024.
You could say elections are India’s most popular spectator sport after cricket. And in the election year of 2024, the BJP was clearly a search favourite, followed by the Congress. One standout interest of the year was industrialist icon Ratan Tata, whose passing sparked a wider curiosity. The Tata patriarch, like Dharmendra, showed that the popularity of those who blaze a combination of style, achievement and character cut across generations and demographic categories.
But the new hero this year, it seems, is not a person—it is technology. This was clearly the year of AI, towering over the ABCD trendline. Google’s Gemini led searches in the tech category, alongside China’s DeepSeek, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and X’s Grok. Google’s new 3D image engine, Nano Banana, is on the hotlist alongside Ghibli, reflecting a world that loves creative imagery.
Talking of searches, as 2025 draws to an end, I am wondering if 2026 might see the biggest challenger yet to Google’s monopoly. Perplexity, a challenger to Gemini and ChatGPT, was among the top tech searches this year. What’s more, it launched its own Comet browser, combining Perplexity’s reasonable generative and narrative power to make vanilla searches less attractive. If Comet does challenge Google’s supremacy in search, it would be quite a reverse swing. ‘AI prompt’ may well replace ‘search string’ as the go-to lookup term.
Madurai-born Google CEO Sundar Pichai is among the big guns keenly watching Perplexity, whose Chennai-born CEO Aravind Srinivas was only four years old when Google was launched. Fortunes can change fast in the volatile world of high tech.
As tongues wag and markets rise in anticipation of AI disruptions, fallen brands like Yahoo, Nokia, and Vodafone remind us that technological shifts resemble high ocean tides. They bring poignant moments that make us contemplate the ephemerality of it all. Perhaps one should write a haiku on that, with matching Ghiblified imagery.
Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami may well muse in his next surreal novel about tech-tonic shifts. I am told both Ghibli and Murakami draw inspiration from Japanese folklore. Some things just don’t change.
Madhavan Narayanan
Reverse Swing
Senior journalist
(Views are personal)
(On X @madversity)