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

Scroll | March 7, 2026 5:41 PM CST

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...