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This article explores how public outrage shaped India’s cultural and political conversations in 2025, using a series of flashpoints — from comedy censorship and influencer backlash to cultural appropriation, AI-altered cinema, tech labour ethics, feminist debates, and institutional misogyny — to examine how anger circulates online. It looks at how the internet has become both a stage for moral policing and a site where meaning is actively contested, drawing on ideas from cultural theory to argue that these debates, however messy or performative they may seem, still force negotiations around power, caste, gender, labour, authorship, and resistance
We have a complicated relationship with rage in this country. Be it the intolerance that creates communal tensions or our age old obsession with the alleged ‘threat’ to Indian traditions and values, everyone is mad about something. From books, films, clothes, and food habits, to love, faith, language, and the economy the anger travels from the left to the right over the shrinking space for expression and censorship to moral policing. Sometimes this also spills into vandalism and violence. Anger has always been part of how power operates here, and also how resistance expresses itself. And with the advent of the internet, all of this suddenly found itself presented with a stage.
2025 was so eventful in terms of public outrage that we can trace the entire year using things we were mad about and all the conversations that drove us into. In February, Samay Raina's comedy show, 'India’s Got Latent', was taken off YouTube following a government order when Podcaster Ranveer Allahabadia asked a contestant if he'd rather watch their parents have sex every day for the rest of their life, or participate once to make it stop forever. The question was lifted almost verbatim from an Australian comedy show called 'Truth or Drink' by OG Crew. But in India it didn't quite get the same response. People found it disturbing and inappropriate, and most importantly — not funny. At its core was the casual import of shock humour without forethought on cultural context vs the censorship of artistic forms like comedy.
However, Ranveer’s online persona as BeerBiceps had long been tied to a network of guests and commentators who lean right politically — people who talk about nationalism, cultural identity, and conservative values. His podcast has featured politicians like Nitin Gadkari alongside mainstream celebrities, and his audience often overlaps with communities that defend traditionalist positions. So when the backlash hit, and it came with police complaints and judicial censure, many observers pointed out the irony: the culture of intolerance and moral policing that his podcast had inadvertently cultivated had now come back to bite him in the ass.
In June, we saw Prada land in the middle of an online storm after images of its latest footwear line began circulating, showing sandals that looked unmistakably like Kolhapuri chappals. The resemblance wasn’t subtle. Designers, craft practitioners, and artisans started sharing side-by-side images, pointing out the shape, the leather work, and the construction were all details that belong to a footwear tradition rooted in Maharashtra and Karnataka, one that's been sustained by generations of craftspeople. All of this was done without any acknowledgement whatsoever on the part of the brand.
As the conversation picked up, we were called out on our own hypocrisy. People began asking why outrage around craft surfaces so loudly only when a global brand is involved. Several posts pointed out how Dalit and Bahujan craft traditions are routinely copied, diluted, and sold within India itself, often without credit or fair pay, and rarely provoke the same level of anger. The discussion moved into uncomfortable territory around caste, value, and selective cultural pride, and how easily heritage becomes a talking point only when it is validated from the outside. It showed us our blind spots when it comes to cultural appropriation.
In July, 'Raanjhanaa' suddenly popped back up in people’s feeds, with news about an alternate ending of the film that had been created using AI, where Murli lives. People who remembered the film well talked about how that ending worked because of its retribution and whether it was the right message to have this new version not thematically punish the toxic masculinity Murli represented in the film. When we found out that the director was against the change, the conversation shifted toward creative autonomy and control. Is it the director, whose vision shaped the work, or the studio that owns a film? Add AI into that mix, which was used to change the ending and the unease only grew with the idea that technology could be used to override creative intent.
In the same month, Soham Parekh emerged as the con-man of the tech bro universe after founders and startup employees started posting threads accusing him of moonlighting across multiple tech companies at the same time. It began as a call-out but turned into a larger argument about work culture in tech. Some people were furious, framing it as deception and breach of trust. Others pushed back, pointing out how normalised overwork has become, how unstable early-stage jobs are, and how little security employees actually have. Was this about ethics, or about a system that expects people to give everything while offering very little in return? The anger split along those lines. Threads filled with personal stories from people juggling contracts, side gigs, and unpaid labour just to stay afloat, while others argued that transparency still matters regardless of pressure. The conversation was a merry-go-round of hustle culture, loyalty, professional misconduct and power.
When IIT Kharagpur announced the Campus Mothers initiative, it felt like a joke to most of us. We had already been shaming men’s emotional illiteracy that often stems from being mommied too much, and here was another case in point. Emerging as a supposed response to student suicides and mental health concerns, the plan positioned women, especially older female faculty and staff, as emotional supports for students dealing with stress and isolation. Very quickly, women began pointing out the misogyny in this. Emotional labour has long been treated as something women are expected to provide, without pay, training, or clear boundaries. Many posts questioned why trained counsellors and professional mental health services were still missing, while women were being asked to step into a nurturing role by default. Others wrote about how the language of “mothers” was disrespectful to their professional identities and reduced their presence on campus to care work alone.
The burden of labour and accountability that is thrust on women for the shortcomings and violence of men took another shape in the infamous 'R-word' campaign by Divija Bhasin. When the content creator spoke about reclaiming the r-word and encouraged young women to be proud of it, we saw the problem with this supposedly empowering move. The word carries a long history tied to sex work, violence, and exploitation, especially for women from marginalised and lower-caste communities who have lived with its consequences. So an upper-caste, privileged influencer stepping in to reclaim it without fully accounting for what it has meant to the people most affected by it was naive, as many pointed out. But then came the rebuttal:
Why did so much of the anger stay fixed on the woman who spoke (although misguidedly) about the word, while the men who abused her in the first place slipped past all this outrage?
The patriarchy alongside all other systems of power have a way of manipulating us into a false sense of security. They keep us busy running after these red herrings to give us the satisfaction of defiance without risking any real threat to their authority.
The internet has kind of become a space for chasing tails in the same way. We spend hours debating language, intent, and individual missteps, while the structures that produce those harms stay comfortably out of reach. This is very close to what Guy Debord gets at in his book, 'The Society of the Spectacle' — the idea that representation often starts to replace participation. We are invited to react and perform our politics publicly, and mistake that feeling for any real activism. The argument itself becomes the event. It gives us the satisfaction of doing something without demanding the risk, patience, or organisation that real resistance usually requires.
But that doesn't mean it's a complete shitshow. These online spaces also force conversations that would otherwise never take place. In his essay, 'Encoding/Decoding', Stuart Hall, one of the central figures in British cultural studies, talks about how messages are produced with certain meanings built into them, but those meanings are never guaranteed to land the same way. When we talk about things, we negotiate this meaning.
Culture isn't something people consume. They interpret it, push back on it, and sometimes read against it altogether. He calls these dominant, negotiated, and oppositional readings. That back-and-forth — the struggle over meaning — is how culture actually gets made. And that struggle is everywhere online. We see dominant ideas challenged, reframed, sometimes rejected outright. We argue about caste because something like the Prada controversy forces it into public view through cultural appropriation. We revisit intersectionality in feminism because the R-word campaign raises concerns. We talk about labour because figures like Soham Parekh make people renegotiate what work, ethics, and survival mean. These debates don’t always end cleanly, but they do shift how ideas circulate.
We have a habit of discrediting these conversations entirely because they happen on the internet. The moment something gains momentum through an ‘influencer’, or reels, tweets, and comment sections, we’re quick to assume that it has no substance. Because such a large part of the internet is slop and brainrot today, it becomes easy to dismiss it as noise. And in doing so, we forget that the internet is only a medium with real people (at least to an extent, barring all the AI bots that have become fairly ubiquitous).
It’s messy and often exhausting, but it’s also a place where people find language, build solidarity, challenge authority, and sometimes even organise and mobilise movements that don’t stay confined to the screen. It's easy to attach ourselves to manufactured online narratives, but questioning them is also a choice we can make and a practice we can cultivate. We've done it throughout the year and it's something I hope to see more of in 2026.
Being dulled into indifference just because anger is uncomfortable will be our downfall. Instead of being a passive consumer, use memes, dance trends, GRWMs or whatever template that intrigues you, to engage in conversations that affect your social and political life but do so with your own critical thinking skills and preferably no ChatGPT. Don't run away or deactivate accounts simply on the fear that “the internet will ruin your life”; curate your own feed and be intentional.
Take it easy, but take it all in.
