11 Things That Indians Don’t Appreciate About UPI Pay

There was a time when money had a face, a texture, and a smell faintly reminiscent of paan and human contact. You handed over a note, made eye contact, said “keep the change,” and felt momentarily generous before regretting it. Then came UPI. Now, India’s social fabric runs on QR codes. You could survive an entire day without uttering a word, just pointing your phone at glowing squares like some techno-priest offering digital prayers. It’s fast, efficient, and faintly depressing. What’s funny—and deeply human—is how little we appreciate what UPI has quietly done to us. It has erased guilt, sterilized gratitude, and mechanized kindness. It has also turned us into obsessive accountants of our own daily lives, refresh-button addicts who equate beeps with belonging. UPI didn’t just revolutionize payments; it rewired Indian psychology. And it’s time we acknowledge what we’ve lost between the pings.

How to Look Gastronomically Educated When You Don’t Know How to Use Chopsticks in a Dumpling House

You’ve agreed to have dim sum with friends. You thought you were in for steamed comfort, not a public coordination test. But now you’re seated in a candlelit dumpling house, surrounded by sleek bamboo décor, and the table is laid out like an exam. No forks in sight. Only chopsticks. Your confidence evaporates faster than the soup inside a xiaolongbao. The others around you—of course—are naturals. They twirl, lift, and gently tap their dumplings into soy sauce with the elegance of a string quartet. You, on the other hand, are performing surgery with broom handles. Every drop of chili oil feels like an audience spotlight. Somewhere, your ancestors sigh into their butter knives. But fear not. You are not alone in this silent humiliation. Millions before you have walked this porcelain-tiled battlefield, fumbling, dropping, and pretending they weren’t hungry anyway. The good news? Looking gastronomically educated is 80% performance, 20% damage control. The trick is to understand the anthropology of the utensil, the psychology of the diner, and the art of surviving with your dignity (and dumplings) intact.

A Germophobic, You Used Bathroom Towels By Mistake – How to Redeem Your Sanitization Now?

You step out of the shower, steam curling around your ears, skin freshly scrubbed and dripping clean. The towel rack hangs nearby, and without thinking, you grab what you assume is your fresh towel. Seconds later, your body stiffens. That wasn’t your towel. That was the one used by someone else, maybe after they washed their face, maybe after they dried their hands from the bathroom sink. A flush of panic spreads. For most people, this might earn a shrug. For someone with germophobia, it sets off alarms as if the sanctity of their entire body has been violated. This is not a trivial overreaction. Germophobia—or contamination-related OCD—rewires the mind to interpret harmless accidents as catastrophic breaches of safety. A towel is no longer fabric; it is a carrier of unseen armies of microbes, imagined threats multiplying in seconds. The question becomes desperate: how do I cleanse myself now? But to understand how to redeem such “contamination” requires more than sanitizer. It requires insight into the psychology of fear, the science of germs, and humanity’s long history of purification rituals. Only then can one calm both skin and psyche.

Have You Seen Dog Meat Market Videos – Why Do These Dogs Usually Look So Docile?

Scroll through social media long enough and you may stumble upon one of the most unsettling sights: dogs crammed into cages in an open-air meat market, their eyes vacant, their bodies strangely still. What startles many viewers is not the expected chaos of barking and biting, but the eerie calm—the dogs look docile, even passive, as if resigned to their fate. It is an image that confuses as much as it horrifies. Why, in the face of imminent violence, do these animals not rebel, not snarl, not scratch? The answer lies less in the idea of “docility” and more in psychology—animal and human alike. What looks like calm is often the silence of collapse, the physiology of fear, and the conditioned hopelessness of captivity. Add to this the cultural lens through which different societies interpret dogs—companion in one, livestock in another—and the unsettling picture becomes layered. This is not just about dogs in faraway markets. It is about the biology of fear, the psychology of trauma, the cultural politics of empathy, and the ethical double standards by which we decide which suffering counts and which suffering we ignore.

Why Do Some Indians Often Talk About OTT Content Being 'Too Black' for Their Comfort?

On a late evening in Delhi, a group of friends browses Netflix, searching for something new to watch. Titles roll by: Dear White People, Top Boy, Supacell, Queen Sono. Someone frowns. “It looks too Black,” they remark casually. The room shifts—others nod, half-embarrassed, half-honest. No one intends harm, but the sentiment lingers in the air. What does “too Black” even mean? For many Indian audiences, it signals a discomfort with representation they are not accustomed to seeing: casts dominated by Black actors, stories centered on Black life, narratives unconcerned with catering to white or Asian gaze. This reaction, though awkward, isn’t rare. Across WhatsApp groups, office banter, and even Bollywood gossip, some Indians express unease with international OTT series led predominantly by Black actors. They may dismiss them as “not relatable,” “too gritty,” or “too much.” Yet behind these offhand remarks lies a tangle of history, psychology, and cultural conditioning: India’s long entanglement with colonial colorism, Bollywood’s obsession with fair-skinned beauty, and the cognitive shock of encountering global diversity unfiltered. Streaming platforms like Netflix and Prime Video are reshaping global entertainment. They amplify Black voices long sidelined by Hollywood. But in doing so, they also confront Indian viewers with their own inherited biases. To understand why some Indians talk about OTT content being “too Black,” we need to trace the interplay of history, cinema, and psychology—where personal discomfort meets global representation.

7 Things People Trying to Understand Anxiety Symptoms Should Know

Anxiety has become one of those words people use casually, almost like a throwaway line in a WhatsApp chat. “I have such anxiety about this meeting,” someone says, when what they mean is nervousness. “That traffic jam gave me anxiety,” another remarks, when what they felt was irritation. In popular language, anxiety has blurred into an all-purpose synonym for stress, tension, or nerves. But clinical and lived anxiety disorders are far more layered, often misunderstood not just by those who experience them but also by family, friends, colleagues, and society at large. Unlike a fever or a fractured limb, anxiety doesn’t present itself as an obvious, singular symptom. It can surface hours after an event has passed. It can mimic stomach upset, headaches, or dizziness before it ever announces itself as mental unease. It can hide beneath culturally coded words like ghabrahat in India, taijin kyofusho in Japan, or “burnout” in the West. Sometimes it appears to be avoidance, rituals, over-preparation, or irritability—behaviors often mistaken for quirks rather than distress signals.

7 Tips for an Anxious Traveler Stuck in a Claustrophobic Hotel Room

Business trips in Gurgaon, pilgrimages in Haridwar, capsule hotels in Tokyo, layovers in Dubai: for modern travelers, the hotel room is often the midpoint between motion and arrival. Yet for some, that midpoint becomes a mental trap. An unfamiliar ceiling, the low thrum of an AC vent, curtains that hide a city you don’t know—suddenly, the mind begins its spiral. Claustrophobia does not always announce itself with dramatic panic attacks. Sometimes it’s subtler: a quickened breath, a racing thought that “the air feels stale,” a sudden itch to throw open a window that doesn’t open. For the anxious traveler, small rooms magnify unease. And if you’ve crossed time zones, battled jet lag, or carry a predisposition for anxiety, the box begins to feel like a cell. The problem is ancient. Vedic hymns praise the dawn sky as liberation; Biblical stories equate wilderness with freedom; Buddhist imagery paints boundless space as enlightenment itself. By contrast, confinement has always symbolized punishment—from medieval dungeons to solitary asylums. To find yourself in a modern business hotel and feel trapped is not weakness—it is a human inheritance. But humans have also always fought back with ritual, imagination, and rhythm. Below are seven expansive, culturally resonant, scientifically informed tips to help any anxious traveler manage the tight squeeze of a claustrophobic hotel room.

Between Tradition and Tease: Why South Indian Films Celebrate the Navel—and Delhi Notices

Air-conditioned traffic pauses at a Delhi signal. Behind the windshield, a music video streams on a phone: a Telugu song sequence where the camera lingers on a heroine’s midriff, a tradition so familiar to southern audiences that it hardly registers as scandal. A friend leans over. “South movies are obsessed with the navel,” he jokes. It is a remark many North Indians share—half-teasing, half marveling—at a style they associate with Hyderabad or Chennai, not Mumbai. But the idea that southern cinema invented or uniquely celebrates the female navel ignores a much older Indian vocabulary of art, dance, and myth. To understand why a director like K. Raghavendra Rao once made entire hit songs around a heroine’s waist, we need to look well beyond film—to temple sculpture, classical dance, colonial law, and the psychology of the cinematic gaze.

Are They Helpless or Hustling? The Uncomfortable Truth of Urban Begging in India

 

Air-conditioned air holds differently at a red light. From behind tempered glass, the city appears in slow motion: a child with a box of tissues; a man with a gauze-wrapped stump; a woman carrying a sleeping toddler whose head lolls with a suspicious stillness you don’t want to believe; a knock on the window—polite first, then insistent. You look ahead, counting down the signal, bargaining with your conscience. Maybe this person is gaming you. Maybe there’s a “racket.” Maybe it’s safer to do nothing. Yet the hand on the glass is a mirror; it reflects the unease of a country where modern prosperity idles inches from profound precarity. This essay traces the fault line that runs between the driver’s doubt and the beggar’s plea: the law that criminalised and then partly decriminalised begging; the religious traditions that sanctified alms; the economics of India’s informal city; and the psychology that makes strangers’ suffering feel negotiable. What emerges is neither a defense of every outstretched palm nor a condemnation of every refusal, but an attempt to look squarely at how a society chooses to see—or not see—its poor.

Do inherently vengeful, judgmental & hateful people make good psychiatrists, counselors, or psychologists?

Psychiatry, counseling, and psychology are professions built on trust, listening, and empathy. They demand neutrality, patience, and the capacity to hold another person’s pain without judgment. Yet history and real life tell us that the people who step into these professions are not saints; they carry their own flaws, biases, and sometimes even darker traits. This raises an unsettling question: what happens when someone inherently vengeful, judgmental, or hateful chooses to become a healer of minds? Is their practice doomed by temperament, or can the scaffolding of training, ethics, and professional codes create a safe container in which flawed humans still do meaningful work? To answer this, we must look to history, psychology, ethics, and culture — tracing how temperament and morality intersect with the vocation of healing minds.