This week, the biggest tea party on Indian Instagram was spawned by a Varun Dhawan song.
It started with a video of a young man, Shaurya Mishra, dancing for his girlfriend to the song ‘Palat’ in a movie theatre during a rerun of Dhawan’s Main Tera Hero (2014), of all films. As declarations of love go, this was a big one — arms stretched, down-on-the-knees variety — in front of a young woman. Many on Instagram went “awwww”.
“God I see what you are doing with other people,” read the yellow text on the first reel from the scene, posted by @panktipvtt. She wanted a boyfriend like Mishra, too.
A sea of videos soon flooded Instagram, each from a different angle and a different part of what looked like an elaborate dance routine. The women in the comments had found a real hero, a true green flag. Mishra had raised the bar for their potential partners. For the men, the boy needed lessons in masculinity: some posted elaborate workout tips, while other enlightened individuals stuck to slurs used against gay men.
And then the teapot opened.
After Mishra’s videos went viral, an anonymous account, @audacityofmen_, began posting reels of Instagram DMs and Hinge screenshots, offering them as proof that the young man had been sending less-than-innocent — at times, relentless — texts to other women until at least a few weeks ago. It opened the floodgates to other videos, where Mishra was seen serenading various young women with his dance moves.
“Never trust men” was the chorus in the comments. The perfect boyfriend everyone was gushing about just had a standard routine, and he was using that on many women. He went from Main Tera Hero to Kalank in a matter of hours.
In the Viral Spiral of Instagram’s callout culture, ‘fame’ comes with the counterweight of downfall. Most microcelebs get at least a week in the sun. Unluckily for Mishra, his downfall came within days of the first taste of virality. The content creator, who now has a brand manager, posted two videos on Monday responding to the backlash.
“That moment, it’s kind of our first date,” Mishra said in a video, clarifying that he wasn’t technically cheating. He’s just a man of grand gestures (and mediocre dance moves).
In his videos, Mishra consistently referred to @audacityofmen_ as “didi”, and said all was well with his new girlfriend. She knows about all the girls, “all 10, 20, 50 of them,” he added.
In the second reel, he addressed the anonymous @audacityofmen_, presumably a woman he had been texting on Hinge or Instagram. “When I was texting you, you weren’t replying. Now I have fame, you want to expose me,” he said in another reel.
Don’t be surprised if you find him on Splitsvilla next season — provided his management wings this right. That’s how 15-minutes-of-fame works in the social media era. You need to keep refreshing the window if you want to remain relevant.
A tale from Indian academia
In a different corner of the app, another downfall was underway. Professor Prerna Subramanian — better known as @doctorofpopculture, the latest sensation in Instagram’s progressive Left circles — was called out by author Rhea for deleting comments critical of Subramanian and her partner, Akshay Chandra Madhav (@rumbutan.here).
Rhea alleged that Subramanian was using AI to generate her popular reels. (As someone who loved the latter’s content for its academic sheen, you can imagine my heartbreak.) Rhea also found Madhav’s take on veganism to be lacking nuance. More importantly, she was angry that Subramanian and Madhav kept deleting her comments. When someone flagged a legitimate problem with a reel, the entire video would end up in the trash folder. Where was the accountability?
Subramanian has since posted a vague apology, accepting some of the charges against her while rejecting others. Which ones, we are not privileged to know.
“I don’t want this to become a tea thing. I take this very seriously,” she wrote in the caption.
In response to criticism about her inability to handle critique, the pop culture doctor has turned off comments on all her posts. That’s Indian academia for you.
Also read: Indians are confused about who counts as poor. Is it someone who owns an iPhone 13?
Gremlin pleasure
What does this tale of two downfalls say about the cycle of virality? First, don’t walk into a single reel with skeletons in your closet. They will be found.
Second, while Mishra’s downfall was just another scandal, Subramanian’s was about more than an e-lafda between two influencers. Yet, they had more than one commonality.
Both cases saw a callout of a callout of a callout. A man posted a reel threatening to reveal the secrets of @audacityofmen_, following which a woman posted a video threatening to expose him. After Rhea’s callout of Subramanian, influencer Aiman called Rhea a “criminal (’s accomplice)” who was backing the new kids on the block into a corner.
You can dismiss the bottomless teapot as a symptom of the meme economy. Everything is content, and everyone wants their share of the pie. But it comes from a (slightly) deeper place.
There is pleasure in a callout, writer Jaya Sharma had said at the Rainbow Lit Fest in December 2025. Yours truly was in attendance and dutifully wrote it down.
Yes, the callout is a way to extract some of the power from the wrongdoer to the wronged. And it’s not a clean exchange. But it also comes from the gremlin pleasure of watching the guilty and the morally impure be punished for their sins. It gives us the subconscious reassurance that we are better than these fallen beings. “I would’ve handled it so much better,” we all tell ourselves.
It suddenly makes sense why 18th-century Britishers made a carnival out of public executions.
Luckily, nothing as permanent has happened with Mishra or Subramanian. The former has opted for the route of “deny everything, defame your opponents”. The latter is holding herself semi-accountable. Both will go a long way on Instagram.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)