Step aside, brain rot and AI sloppiness. The revenge of the fools is upon us. From Ahmedabad, Shaili Shah (@Shaili.Naimish) takes her 23K followers on “jewelry tours” that trace the origins of earrings (did you know they date back to the 4th century BC?). She also talks about diamonds mined in the Godavari-Krishna Delta region of Andhra Pradesh, and looks at why Sri Lankan and Indian jewelery do not have as many similarities as one might assume.
Social media, we are only now realizing, is perfect for specific obsessions. The short video and post format is great for micro-dosing on topics we might never have explored on our own. And it provides real value to being constantly online. “You’re promising the audience a good time, but you’re also making them stop and think,” says Prachi Popat, an art, craft and design enthusiast. Meet our favorite online obsessions and the things they’re passionate about.
Ria Chopra, @RiaChopsno common sense is too trivial
For Chopra, doomscrolling isn’t a downtime activity, it’s his job. The 27-year-old author examines how Gen Z is shaping up. And like other 20-somethings, she loves a good side quest.
Chopra consumes the same memes, reels, threads, carousels, Notes app dumps, reviews, mini essays, newsletters and shitposts. Its superpower is that it goes four layers deep. In his mind, Himesh Reshammiya is exactly like Sabrina Carpenter (both indulged in trolling and made it a part of their public personas). She explained how the 2011 viral breakup song, Emptiness, was based on a lie. Have you heard the phrase “winging it” when you look at people we meet over the holidays? Chopra has a reel describing how it started in theater when an actor performed most of his parts from prompters waiting outside the stage.
She’s always been this stupid. Chopra grew up a fan of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. She realized early on that she was someone who knew things. She used to participate in quizzes and give correct answers while watching Kaun Banega Crorepati on TV. At the age of 24, he left his management consulting job to track content consumption trends for the performance arts platform Kommune in Mumbai. He also freelanced for social media strategy and consumer insight companies. That Gen Z-behavior book everyone was talking about last year, Never Log Out? He wrote it.
Chopra has added enough points to let her followers know how the system is stacked against them. In a video about who gets famous, she explains that it’s usually people who already live some kind of aspirational life – people who have come from nowhere, no matter the successes. Fans are following her down the rabbit hole as she hints at the surprise by holding their hand during the trip. Once, when she was booking a ticket on the Indian Railways website, she noticed that the QR code contained a reference to Alice in Wonderland (the phrase twas brillig, from the nonsense poem Jabberwocky). “You have to actively keep an eye out for these hidden pieces of information,” she says. “She definitely does.”
Prachi Popat, @prachiPop.ArtLook! everything is art
At the age of 25, Popat had already discovered that people were afraid of art galleries, ignorant of design styles and movements, but delighted by beautiful things. “My goal is to bridge the gap between the curator and the layman, because I haven’t formally studied it myself.”
She gives a two-minute description of the art show, sharing a bit about her top three choices. She creates makeup and GRWM videos inspired by Indian art styles – stippled effect eye shadow inspired by Jangarh Singh Shyam’s Barasingha (antelope) portrait, a yellow and red dress to match Jagadish Swaminathan’s Bird, Tree and Mountain painting. Her followers are obsessed: “I love how you open up my horizons about art,” says one commenter beneath the post.
When Popat recently visited Japan, he noticed that some kimono had a Bandhani-like print, and he observed the local Kanoko Shibori tie-dye process. Her reel talks about how Kanoko means fawn-spot in Japanese, as the print resembles the spotted coat of a young deer, but the larger style includes more florals and landscapes than our geometric bandwagon.
“I want my Reels to feel like you’re having a conversation with a friend who is very enthusiastic and passionate about art and has random obsessions,” Popat says. She frames them sitting on her bed, headphones on, enthusiastically sharing what she’s learned and just can’t keep to herself. His videos use photos, maps, snapshots of a quote, film clips, even a timeline when needed.
There are also bloopers, like the time she almost stepped on an artwork in a Tokyo gallery that looked like a subway entrance. Fans see him as one of them and are open about artists and new show recommendations. “They’re temperamental. I never have to ignore things for them,” says Popat.
Jai Vardhan Singh, @JayVardhanSingh What’s missing in your history textbook?
Singh, 29, is a PhD student of history at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The kinds of things most readers ignore are exactly the things that excite him: a scholar’s text from 200 AD, an archaeological report that mentions a specific pottery vessel. And he knows that every new thing we learn today helps us better understand the past. “It’s a bit like being a detective, piecing things together as you go along.”
And he knows how to squeeze a long chapter into a 10 to 20 minute YouTube video. Did you know that the process of refining sugarcane juice into granulated sugar crystals was developed in India over 2,500 years ago? Singh’s video on the topic includes maps and AI-generated images that show how a Greek officer in Alexander’s army (who had never encountered sugarcane before) was confident that Indians could make honey even without bees. He also says that Sarkara is a Sanskrit word from which we get the English word, sugar.
Singh started his YouTube channel in 2022. “I wanted to not just tell stories of what happened in the past, but also show that historians have different ways of looking at the facts,” he says, in a video titled The Mauryan Decline – Can We Really Understand It? He details historians’ differing opinions as to how the Glorious Empire came to an end in 185 BC. Was this Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism? Or the unstable administration that followed his reign, or the taxes imposed by subsequent rulers? “We can’t tell for sure.” This is far more than is otherwise known by regular audiences.
The videos are simple. And Leo is patient. Naturally, the comments are full of curious students with their hands raised. “Can you make a video on Chalukyas?” “Where is the earliest reference to Nepal found?” The audience also fact-checks it. When he made a video on the conquest of Gujarat by the Gupta Empire in the 4th century AD, some people pointed out that there were new sources that tell a different story. So, Singh regrouped and formed a new group three weeks later. “It’s nice to know that audiences aren’t taking history at face value.”
Pritha Dasmahapatra, @TipToppedPicking on every thread
Dasmahapatra, 46, is a gynecologist by training and works at a hospital in London, UK. But his heart? It is probably made of Indian handloom cloth. At her social events, she spends every free moment looking at centuries-old clothing in museums, meeting artisans, and cataloging samples of clothing that is no longer in production. “I’m always asking questions to the curators, because I want to know a lot about Indian textile history.”
He also has a way of turning a deep subject into an adventure. During a recent visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Dasmahapatra spent the better part of an hour inspecting a pink brocade that was made in Ahmedabad in 1881-82. Her Insta post details the history of Ashawali brocade weave (named after the city that is now Ahmedabad) and how this 209 cm long cloth ended up in the hands of an Englishman. “Being Indians, we think that the colonialists were attracted to our country just for the spices. But a curator at the CSMVS museum in Mumbai told me that Europeans used to sell Indian textiles to Indonesia to buy their spices. Textiles are another reason why we were colonized, and we got independence because of the Khadi movement. Handloom is an important part of our identity.”
Dasmahapatra’s reels have catchy titles: “How silk scarves helped win World War II”; “Goats and insects made this carpet 400 years ago”; “Fit check for a wealthy Indian man in the Deccan region in the 19th century”. In a video, about Madurai Sungudi sarees of 1855-79, she explains how artisans from Saurashtra moved to the temple city of Madurai in the 16th century, which is why Sungudi tie-dye patterns look similar to those made in Gujarat. In another, she points to the motifs of Odisha’s Sambalpuri saree which is more than 105 years old – ducks, mythological animals, waves, checkerboard patterns. “You can tell a lot about a community from a sari. It’s history, it’s economics, it’s the story of Indian culture.”
Rishabh Wadhwa, @BlessedArchA Window to Understanding Architecture
If you want to know why London’s Millennium Bridge was once called the Wibbly Wobbly Bridge or why some buildings in Amsterdam are leaning forward, you’ve probably been spending a lot of time on Wadhwa’s Instagram page or YouTube channel. Wadhwa, 30, who lives in Jaipur, earned an architecture degree from Manipal University and uses his social media to help regular people understand their built environment. “Architects put a lot of thought into the design and layout of their structures, but they don’t explain it to the public in simple terms.”
Consider a strange-looking building in Amsterdam called The Valley, which consists of apartments and shop fronts spread out awkwardly. “It’s actually designed to resemble a geological formation, to disrupt the monotony of the surrounding buildings and create a sense of a natural environment,” he says. He explains in a video that the concave “cutout” shape of London’s Scoop office building is intentional – so it doesn’t block the viewer’s view of the adjacent church. “I love when buildings strive to do something out of the ordinary. I want viewers to think about: why design can be fun, and how to keep an eye on these architectural wonders.”
Wadhwa uses AI to draw before and after visualizations of a structure or area. The audience gets to see what the drainage system in a city would look like if it followed local building styles, or imagine what their grandparents’ terrace garden looked like in the past. And the audience loves it. In the comments of the reel explaining the tree-shaped Torres Blancas apartment complex in Madrid, Spain, one commenter said he had “made a pilgrimage to see it while passing through Madrid”. Under another of his videos that talks about the history of Delhi’s Khan Market structures, a resident commented, “I walk on this road and don’t know the history!”
From HT Brunch, May 16, 2026
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