Add a little fancy English to the description, and it will be in an arts biennale before you can say, bhaiya Malad jaoge?

Illustration/Uday Mohite

The other day, I watched a video where a young woman had installed a sound console in an auto rickshaw and was driving around DJing in it (no prizes for guessing it was a jugni song). These stock items of hipster slumming are the opposite of exuberance. You pretend you have created something new just because a person of your class or gender is doing it for the first time—while other people have been doing it casually all along. Add a little fancy English to the description, and it will be in an arts biennale before you can say, bhaiya Malad jaoge?

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Every 1990s autorickshaw was already its own disco station. Stacked speakers with flashing lights turned interiors a radioactive green or........

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