Why trivial matters, reveals Santosh Desai's in his 'Memes For Mummyji: Making Sense of Post-Smartphone India'

TWENTY years ago, within a few months of joining Delhi University as a student of literature, I chanced upon a Monday column in a national daily titled ‘City City Bang Bang’. The name recalled the classic 1968 American-British musical fantasy film ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’, that depicted the adventures of a magical car across different terrains, with the whole production carrying an unmistakable whimsicality and joie de vivre.

Like the film, the column seized my attention for its consistent warmth and enviable versatility that emanated out of a remarkably astute understanding of contemporary Indian life. More than any other thinker on the country, it was Santosh Desai, the man behind the column, whose work I started looking forward to most avidly. And soon enough, his writings became both a touchstone and an anchor to orient my own engagement with India and the world at large.

The CEO of Futurebrands and founder of Think9 Consumer Technologies, Desai’s columns have led to two essay collections on India: ‘Mother Pious Lady: Making Sense of Everyday India’(2010) and the recently released ‘Memes for Mummyji: Making Sense of Post-Smartphone India’ (2025). I found it both surprising and illuminating that Desai’s entrenchment in the commercial circle has gone hand-in-hand with his critical eye and sensitive spirit.

Unlike many other figures sharing his sphere of work, Desai’s commitment to the ordinary and the everyday is refreshing to the point of being truly moving. Curiously, he links this empathy to his beginnings in advertising, that taught him “to look at people as they were instead of what one might want them to be”.

While Desai hasn’t shied away from commenting on the politics of the day, including offering nuanced and multifarious perspectives on the politics of gender and hierarchy, it is the realm of the trivial that has repeatedly attracted his attention. “The trivial is simply the truth that we have got too used to seeing (and, therefore, ignoring),” he says, adding that it is often in the sphere of things and gestures that we reveal our inclinations and identity.

His topics effortlessly shuffle between exploring the joys of khichdi and the functions of the naada (drawstring), the hegemony of the OTPs (one-time passwords) and the plurality of influencers, the changing notions of work and the transforming avatars of money, the frictions of development and the fluidity of language, the multiple pleasures of nature and architecture and the new expressions of freedom and recreation.

Hardly any of his book essays range beyond three pages. His gentle but judicious humour colouring many of them has earned him the parallel of “our RK Laxman in prose”. I have frequently relished his one-liners littered throughout his work. Thus, if with Maggi noodles, “taste got compressed into time” for the first time, then with the selfie, “the mirror transformed into a camera” again for the first time. Further, “if liberalisation created a version of modernity, then the smartphone created a version of tradition”. This telling observation also defines the link between his two books. As he quips, if “his earlier book tried to understand India through the lens of tradition adapting to modernity, then ‘Memes for Mummyji’ explores what happens when that very modernity becomes tradition”.

It turns out then that the contemporary moment is necessarily a paradoxical one, something that has been successfully amplified by the inauguration of the smartphone. “Ostensibly, technology doesn’t contain any cultural thrust or ideological direction,” says Desai, “but therein lies its power too, for it cleverly reframes and fundamentally changes our identity.”

While every generation has a tendency to overemphasise its difference from the previous one, a paradigm shift certainly underlines today’s reality from all others, again owing to technology. “I don’t think we acknowledge enough how, for the first time in human history, the whole world is our audience, because never before in history has such a vast majority of people had opinion-divulging platforms at their disposal (from smartphone to social media),” discerns Desai. He recalls his own childhood and adolescence from the 1960s-80s, when the most you could interact in a public platform (like a newspaper) was in the form of “two to three letters to the editor”. The other medium was of course the radio, where you felt elated to simply have your name announced and your song request (“farmaaish”) granted.

The writer, however, resists the attempt to provide any grand theory for the Indian condition. What he does settle on is a metaphor of “flow and sediment”. The sediment is the “hidden grammar of Indian society”: intricate mechanisms that keep things in place even when we try to contrive continuity and change. The most powerful instinct working in India is the “yearning to adapt the new as a version of the old, and the present as an expression of the past”. Along with sediment, we do have “flow” as well, that many contemporary institutions like politics, judiciary, media, bureaucracy, and education try to bring about. Ironically, however, these forces of flow also “silt up”. Even technology, with its promises of major change, only cuts through at a shallow, individual level. Ours is a “progress without change”.

The writer Mukul Kesavan labels Desai as “the prose laureate of India’s hybrid modernity”. Having been his reader for two decades, I cannot agree more. But what humbles me the most is to hear this prose laureate acknowledge an essential confusion (notwithstanding his sagacity) at the heart of contemporary India. Says Desai, “If the forces of flow, including technology, get sedimented so easily with all the negativity gripping the country, where (and how) does real change actually come about?” In this sense, then, he agrees being a kind of a “realistic pessimist” about our zeitgeist. To wade through such pessimism, and to build a healthier iteration of the “new” is surely among our biggest challenges and collective responsibilities.

— The writer is a historian, cultural critic and artist from Shimla