Stela Dey is Senior Assistant Editor, Opinion and Ground Reports, at ThePrint. She joined the organisation in 2025 and is part of the Opinion and Ground Reports team. Stela can be reached at stela.dey@theprint.in
The internet has turned making “deep” points into a full-blown industry. It’s reached a point where journalists and commentators basically treat every local influencer drama as raw material to show off how smart they are. They just plug in whatever buzzwords are trendin….class, politics, whatever, and use it to “flex and justify” their intellectual credibility.
The actual incident doesn’t even matter; it’s just a convenient hook for arguments they already wanted to make. This “forced aura” in this article is pretty easily seen. People aren’t really talking about Pujarini; they’re using her as a prop to talk about themselves and their own ideas because she checks the right boxes.
It’s a weird cycle: the more trivial the original post is, the harder these “experts” have to work to make it sound significant. Eventually, you have a village girl’s Instagram carrying the weight of the country’s entire social history.
We’ve lost all common sense. Most influencer beef is just petty and unremarkable. Not every minor squabble is some massive sociological event. The gap between what actually happened and the over-analysis piled on top of it is huge—it tells you everything about the people writing the commentary and almost nothing about reality.
The internet has turned making “deep” points into a full-blown industry. It’s reached a point where journalists and commentators basically treat every local influencer drama as raw material to show off how smart they are. They just plug in whatever buzzwords are trendin….class, politics, whatever, and use it to “flex and justify” their intellectual credibility.
The actual incident doesn’t even matter; it’s just a convenient hook for arguments they already wanted to make. This “forced aura” in this article is pretty easily seen. People aren’t really talking about Pujarini; they’re using her as a prop to talk about themselves and their own ideas because she checks the right boxes.
It’s a weird cycle: the more trivial the original post is, the harder these “experts” have to work to make it sound significant. Eventually, you have a village girl’s Instagram carrying the weight of the country’s entire social history.
We’ve lost all common sense. Most influencer beef is just petty and unremarkable. Not every minor squabble is some massive sociological event. The gap between what actually happened and the over-analysis piled on top of it is huge—it tells you everything about the people writing the commentary and almost nothing about reality.