‘The Great Indian Brainrot’: These vivid portraits of internet culture bypass analytical frameworks

There is a particular kind of book that arrives not from the academy or the newsroom but from the feed itself, authored by someone who has lived inside the machine they now attempt to dissect. Anurag Minus Verma’s The Great Indian Brain Rot is precisely such a work: a collection of nine essays by a content creator, podcaster, and video essayist who turned his own entanglement with digital India into a subject of cultural commentary. The result is uneven, occasionally brilliant, frequently frustrating, and, perhaps most interestingly for those of us concerned with structures of inequality, quietly revelatory about caste, class, and the digital reproduction of social hierarchies.

From the neurological to the sociological

Verma’s central question is deceptively simple: what is “brain rot”? The term, crowned by Oxford University Press as the 2024 word of the year, has become a catch-all for the cognitive fog produced by compulsive short-form content consumption. But Verma refuses to treat it as a novelty. Drawing on Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler, he situates the contemporary doomscrolling epidemic within a longer media history, from the Doordarshan-era entertainment deficit through satellite television’s channel-surfing to the infinite scroll of Instagram Reels. In his telling, “brain rot” is not a disease but “a pact we make with ourselves that thinking less is easier than facing the gloom around us.” This is a shrewd formulation, one that shifts the analytical lens from individual pathology to collective condition, from the neurological to the sociological.

The book’s nine essays range across the Indian internet’s menagerie: the coaching class gurus, the so-called “cringe” creators of TikTok, the celebrity ecosystem of Cannes-going influencers, the phenomenon of Dolly Chaiwala, the anonymity of Omegle, and the political machinery of algorithmic propaganda. Verma writes with a conversational wit; his comparison of coaching icons to cricketers (Ojha as Sehwag, Divyakarti as Tendulkar) is characteristic, and a willingness to take seriously what metropolitan India routinely dismisses.

For a sociologist of inequalities, the most compelling passages are those where Verma turns his gaze on the caste and class structures that undergird India’s digital landscape. This is where his position, as a Dalit man who once worked in call centres under the Anglicised alias “Ron,” stripped of his name and accent to service Western consumers, becomes not merely biographical texture but analytical leverage. His defence of “cringe” content is, at its core, a class and caste argument.

When he writes, “To be cringe is to be unafraid,” he is describing not an aesthetic preference but a sociological act of defiance. The TikTok creators mocked by Instagram’s curated elite are overwhelmingly from marginalised communities, Dalits, OBCs, small-town youth whose bodies, accents, and aesthetics do not conform to the savarna gaze that dominates India’s digital tastemaking.

His observation that entire pages exist to ridicule those who do not fit the aesthetic (“Reptiles of Kurla”) while no equivalent satire targets the expensive mediocrity that thrives behind filters and borrowed accents in South Bombay is sociologically precise. It echoes what Pierre Bourdieu articulated decades ago about the class function of aesthetic judgement: taste is never innocent; it is always a mechanism of distinction and exclusion.

His account of Dolly Chaiwala is similarly incisive. A chai seller becomes worthy of Bollywood selfies and media adulation only after Bill Gates, the ultimate embodiment of Western, white, techno-capitalist legitimacy, consecrates him with a video. The savarna gaze, ever servile to the white man’s culture, discovers in a working-class entrepreneur not an autonomous agent but a novelty validated by external approval. This is a textbook illustration of what postcolonial scholars would recognise as a double bind of recognition: marginalised subjects become visible only when the dominant gaze, whether upper-caste or Western, deigns to look.

More striking still is Verma’s noting of a Dalit counterculture movement online, one that “doesn’t mimic the violence of the dominant castes… but does something more subversive, it ignores their approval entirely.” This gestures toward a digital subaltern public sphere, a space where recognition is not sought from above but constructed laterally, among equals. It deserves an entire book of its own. And yet, for all these flashes of structural insight, the book too often retreats into description.

The viral and the vital

Verma frequently mistakes the viral for the vital, the real for the reel. His method, personal essay crossed with podcast-adjacent observation, produces vivid portraits but rarely builds sustained analytical frameworks. The coaching class industry, for instance, is not simply about charismatic teachers; it is about the wholesale privatisation of education, the collapse of public institutions, and the desperation of a youth bulge confronting a labour market that cannot absorb it. The “brain rot” of compulsive scrolling is intimately connected to precarious employment, the gig economy, and the particular anomie of a generation told to “hustle” while the structural conditions for stable livelihoods erode. Verma gestures toward these connections but seldom follows through.

His observation that brain rot has “built a small industry that promises to fix your focus” – courses, apps, binaural beats, and articles about the therapeutic properties of the veena – is wonderfully ironic. But it also points to something the book does not fully reckon with: the way inequalities structure not just who is most harmed by digital excess but who can afford to escape it.

Digital detox retreats and mindfulness subscriptions are solutions available to the middle and upper classes. For the delivery driver scrolling between orders, the data-entry worker numbing themselves after a 12-hour shift, or the unemployed graduate for whom the phone is the only affordable entertainment, “reclaiming your brain” is not a lifestyle choice but a luxury. Brain rot, like so many public health phenomena, is experienced across classes but is most damaging and least escapable for those at the bottom. The book’s failure to develop this class dimension fully is its most significant omission.

The Great Indian Brain Rot is best understood not as a definitive account but as an opening statement, a first-person dispatch from inside the machine, authored by someone with enough structural awareness to see the hierarchies encoded in the feed but not always the inclination to trace them to their roots. It is at its strongest when it reads the internet as a caste document, when it insists that the digital is never separate from the material inequalities that precede and shape it. It is at its weakest when it treats digital phenomena as self-contained cultural episodes rather than as expressions of deeper political-economic arrangements.

For scholars of inequality, the book’s value lies less in its conclusions than in its provocations. It raises questions it does not always answer: how does caste travel through the algorithm? Who bears the cognitive costs of the attention economy, and who profits? Can digital countercultures genuinely disrupt hierarchies, or do they merely create parallel spaces that leave structures intact? These are the questions that the next book must take up. For now, Verma’s work is a necessary, if incomplete, map of a landscape that changes faster than anyone can chart it. It reminds us, at the very least, that the infinite scroll is not infinite for everyone in the same way, and that the rot, like everything else in India, is unevenly distributed.

Also watch

Scroll Adda: Anurag Minus Verma on India's Internet culture

The Great Indian Brain Rot: Love, Lies and Algorithms in Digital India, Anurag Minus Verma, Bloomsbury India.