Why is referring to all folks from southern India as ‘Madraasi’ still unacceptable — despite the growing wave of resentment down under

There’s a stubborn economy of labels in India — cheap linguistic shortcuts that promise quick geographic naming but deliver a lifetime of flattening. “Madraasi” (or “Madrasi”) is one of those shortcuts: easy to say, gratifyingly dismissive, and cruelly reductive. To call a person from Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra, Telangana, or Tamil Nadu “Madraasi” is to smudge a living, complicated identity with a single blunt brush. The term’s etymology is not mysterious: it hearkens to the Madras Presidency, the sprawling British administrative unit whose borders conveniently blurred linguistic, caste, and cultural distinctions for colonial governance. But the harm isn’t merely historical or etymological — it’s social, symbolic, and present. The slur functions as a shorthand that links darker skin tones, non-Hindi accents, non-Sanskritic rituals, and perceived provinciality into an umbrella of denigration; it is a small word with wide violence.

7 Ways in Which Therapy for People with a ‘has-been’ & ‘never-flourished’ Mindset is Different

There’s a subtler sort of suffering that doesn’t arrive with broken bones or panic attacks; it arrives with old yearbooks and classmate timelines, with birthday messages you delete and the quiet clicks of sliding-scale promotions on LinkedIn that feel like doors closing on you again and again. Clients with a has-been or never-flourished mindset do not always come in asking to be “fixed.” They come in asking to have a polite argument with a future that never showed up. Their grief is not always loud; it is domestic and relentless — a long habit of waking up to the tension between an “actual self” and an “ideal self” that never arrived. This category of clinical work sits in the intersection of regret research, existential therapy, narrative repair, and life-review techniques: it borrows from Viktor Frankl’s search for meaning when meaning has been deferred, from Yalom’s existential matrix when the givens of life — freedom, death, responsibility, meaning — look like accusations, and from cognitive science research about counterfactual thinking and self-discrepancy that explain why some people are haunted by “if only.”

Why Do Some People Hug the Edge While Others Own the Middle? The Psychology of Driving Alignment

The Unspoken Geometry of the Indian Road: Every country has its own dialect of chaos. Ours speaks through horns, swerves, and that mystical choreography only Indian drivers understand. Watch any road long enough, and you’ll notice two kinds of people: those who clutch the edge like their tires are afraid of oxygen, and those who drive like they’ve been granted diplomatic immunity from lanes altogether. The former tremble at the sight of oncoming headlights; the latter treat the road as a chessboard where everyone else is just a pawn. What we call “driving style” is really psychological cartography—an emotional GPS that maps our fears, egos, and neuroses onto asphalt. Whether you hug the side or straddle the center isn’t random. It’s habit, yes, but also personality, trauma, status, and sometimes, just the ghost of your driving instructor whispering, “Beta, left mein hi rakhna.” And while the West has its orderly lanes and 40-minute debates about “lane discipline,” in India, the lane is a philosophical suggestion—optional, flexible, and often existential.

7 Bathroom Horror Niche Movies You Can Avoid [or Try The Horror of Hygiene]

No one really expects to die in the bathroom. It’s the one space left on earth where you’re meant to be alone, unphotographed, unjudged, and fully human. You lock the door not to hide evil, but to keep the world out while you exorcise yesterday’s regrets. Yet somehow, horror filmmakers—those visionaries of the grotesque—looked at the flush handle and thought, “Yes, this could kill someone.” The bathroom, in cinematic logic, is a microcosm of vulnerability: naked bodies, fogged mirrors, dripping taps. If Freud had ever worked in set design, he would have loved the genre. The bathroom is where cleanliness meets carnality, where purity is exposed as illusion, and where plumbing noises become metaphors for dread. Unfortunately, most filmmakers who attempt “bathroom horror” have no Freud in them—only a plunger and poor judgment. Over the decades, this sub-genre has given birth to some of the most unintentionally hilarious, nausea-inducing, and existentially pointless horror ever put on a screen. What follows isn’t a recommendation list. It’s a public service announcement—a disinfectant for your watchlist. These seven films prove that not every horror needs a mirror, not every tub needs blood, and not every toilet deserves a backstory.

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.