It begins with a song. Perhaps it is a track by BTS, Blackpink, Red Velvet, or G-IDLE blaring through headphones, or the defining legacy of icons like Girls’ Generation, BigBang, and 2NE1. The rise of Hallyu – the Korean ‘wave’ – stems from a discerning blend of strategy, creativity, and emotional resonance. The global takeover is complete when a personal connection appeals across borders, transcending language and geography.

This resonance is keenly felt across India, from metropolitan centres to the political sphere. 

During his Bharat Jodo Yatra, Rahul Gandhi was visibly amused, and possibly endeared, to find young female students in Kerala proudly introducing themselves as the “BTS ARMY.” It is not just the band’s synchronised performances that have resonated globally and in India, their coinage and repetition of the phrase “Love yourself, speak yourself” – from the time of their 2018 speech at the UN General Assembly for a UNICEF campaign – has found numerous takers. 

Korea fascinates the world because it blends modernity with tradition, spectacle with sincerity, and discipline with warmth. Yet beneath this surface, a complex tension is unveiled. K-culture is a meticulously engineered global export, aggressively peddling one core concept: perfection. Flawless aesthetics, choreographic hyper precision, and narratives that play it socially safe. Yet, it is this mandated perfection that constitutes its most profound ethical handicap, demanding a continuous, aggressive act of social and political erasure to sustain a profitable fantasy.

Fans of K-pop band BTS wait to enter for the annual 2025 BTS Festa celebrating the BTS’ debut anniversary in Goyang, South Korea, Friday, June 13, 2025. Photo: AP/PTI.

K-culture touches a universal chord precisely because it offers an aspirational, frictionless escape from the chaotic realities of life. We are consuming a fantasy where human messiness has been systematically removed. This appeal is keenly felt in India because our cultures share a similar, devastating crucible.

Korea’s relentless, zero-sum academic scramble for the elite ‘SKY’ universities – Seoul National, Korea, Yonsei – is structurally mirrored in the feverish pursuit of IIT and medical entrance exams in India. The stakes are impossibly high in both countries. For every available seat across India’s premier engineering institutions, the applicant-to-seat ratio in the JEE Main is approximately 11 to 22:1 depending on stage. Similarly, only about 5% of students secure a seat in a government medical college via NEET, according to the National Testing Agency. The total scale of the competition is immense, with 1.23 million applicants for JEE and 24 lakh........

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