Step aside, brain rot and AI slop. The revenge of the nerds is upon us. From Ahmedabad, Shaili Shah (@Shaili.Naimish) leads her 23K followers on “jewellery journeys”, tracing the origins of jhumkas (Did you know they date back to the 4th century BCE?). She also talks about the diamonds that were mined in the Godavari-Krishna delta region of Andhra Pradesh, and looks at why Sri Lankan and Indian jewellery do not share as many similarities as one would assume.
Social media, we’re only now realising, is perfect for niche obsessions. The short video and post format is great for micro-dosing on subjects we’d never have sought out ourselves. And it offers actual value to being chronically online. “You’re promising viewers a good time, but also making them stop and think,” says Prachi Popat, art, craft and design enthusiast. Meet our favourite online obsessions, and the things they’re obsessed with.
Ria Chopra, @RiaChopsNo trivia is too trivial
For Chopra, doomscrolling isn’t a downtime activity, it’s her job. The 27-year-old writer has been examining how Gen Z has been shaping up. And like other 20-somethings, she loves a good side quest.
Chopra consumes the same memes, Reels, threads, carousels, notes app dumps, reviews, mini essays, newsletters and shitposts you do. Her superpower is that she goes four layers deeper. In her mind, Himesh Reshammiya is just like Sabrina Carpenter (Both leaned into the trolling and made it part of their public persona). She amplified how the viral 2011 breakup song, Emptiness, was based on a lie. Did you catch the phrase “winging it” when you binged People We Meet on Vacation? Chopra has a Reel explaining how it originated in theatre after an actor performed most of his part from prompters waiting in the wings offstage.
She’s always been that nerd. Chopra grew up being part of the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson fandoms. She realised, early on, that she was someone who knew things. She’d ace quizzes and would rattle off the correct answers while watching Kaun Banega Crorepati on TV. By 24, she quit her management consulting job to track content consumption trends for the performance arts platform Kommune in Mumbai. She also freelanced for social media strategy and consumer insights companies. That Gen Z-behaviours book everyone was talking about last year, Never Logged Out? She wrote it.
Chopra has joined enough dots to tell her followers how the system is stacked against them. In one video, about who ends up becoming famous, she points out that it’s typically people who already live some kind of aspiration life – that the have-nothing-from-nowhere successes are outliers. Fans follow her down rabbit holes because she’s holding their hands through the journey, pointing out surprises. One time, when she was booking a ticket on the Indian Railways website, she noticed that the QR code contained an Alice in Wonderland reference (The phrase Twas brillig, from the nonsense poem Jabberwocky). “You have to actively keep an eye out for these hidden nuggets of information,” she says. She certainly does.
Prachi Popat, @PrachiPop.ArtLook! Everything is art
At 25, Popat has already figured out that people are intimidated by art galleries, oblivious to design styles and movements, but delighted by beautiful things. “My goal is to bridge the gap between curator and layperson, as someone who’s not studied it formally myself.”
She does two-minute breakdowns of art shows, sharing a bit about her top three picks. She does makeup and GRWM videos inspired by Indian art styles – stippled effect eye shadow inspired by Jangarh Singh Shyam’s Portrait of a Barasingha (antelope), a yellow and red outfit to match Jagdish Swaminathan’s Bird, Tree and Mountain paintings. Her followers are obsessed: “I love how you open up my horizons about art,” says one commenter under the post.
When Popat visited Japan recently, she noticed that some kimonos had a print similar to bandhani, and looked up the local kanoko shibori tie-dye process. Her Reel talks about how kanoko means fawn-spots in Japanese, because the print looks like the speckled coat of a young deer, but the larger style features more florals and landscapes than our geometrical bandhani.
“I want my Reels to feel like you’re just chatting with a friend who’s very enthusiastic and passionate about art and has these random obsessions,” Popat says. She frames them up sitting on her bed, wired headphones firmly on, excitedly sharing what she learnt and just can’t keep to herself. Her videos use photos, maps, snapshots of a quote she found interesting, film clips, even a timeline if needed.
There are bloopers too, such as the time she almost stepped on an artwork in a Tokyo gallery that looked too much like the entrance to the subway. Fans see her as one of them and open up with recommendations of the artists and new shows. “They’re opinionated, says Popat. “I never have to dumb things down for them.”
Jay Vardhan Singh, @JayVardhanSinghWhat your history textbook missed
Singh, 29, is a history PhD student at Jawaharlal Nehru University. The kinds of things most readers gloss over are exactly the things that excite him: A scholar’s text from 200 AD, an archaeological report that mentions a specific pottery item. And he knows that every new thing we learn today, helps us understand yesterday better. “It’s a bit like being a detective, piercing things together as you go along.”
And he knows just how to squeeze a long chapter into a 10-to-20-minute YouTube video. Did you know that the process of refining cane juice into granulated sugar crystals was developed in India 2,500 years ago? Singh’s video on the subject brings in maps and AI-generated illustrations to suggest that a Greek official in Alexander’s army (who’d never encountered sugarcane before) fully believed that Indians could make honey without bees. He also throws in that Sarkara, the Sanskrit word, is where we get the English word, Sugar.
Singh started his YouTube channel in 2022. “I didn’t just want to tell stories of what happened in the past, but also how historians have different ways of looking at facts,” he says. In a video titled Mauryan Collapse – Can We Really Understand It? he details historians’ differing opinions on how the glorious empire closed out in 185 BCE. Was it Ashoka’s conversion to Buddhism? Or the unstable administrations after his reign, or the taxes that the later rulers introduced? “We can’t tell for sure.” It’s more than regular viewers otherwise knew.
The videos are simple. And Singh is patient. Naturally, the comments are full of curious students with their hands raised. “Can you make a video on the Chalukyas?” “Where does the earliest reference to Nepal appear?” Viewers fact-check him, too. When he’d made a video on the conquest of Gujarat by the Gupta Empire in the 4th century AD, some pointed out that there were new sources that told a different story. So, Singh re-grouped and did a new one three weeks later. “It’s nice to know that viewers are not taking history at face value.”
Pritha Dasmahapatra, @TipToppedPicking at every thread
Dasmahapatra, 46, is a gynaecologist by training and works at a hospital in London, UK. But her heart? It’s probably made of Indian handloom cloth. On her socials, she seems to spend every free moment looking at century-old fabrics in museums, meeting artisans, and poring over catalogues with swatches of cloth that is no longer in production. “I’m always hitting up curators with questions, because there’s so much I want to know about Indian textile history.”
She also has a way of turning a dense subject into an adventure. During a recent visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Dasmahapatra spent the better part of an hour examining a pink brocade that was made in Ahmedabad in 1881-82. Her Insta post detailed the history of Ashavali brocade weaves (named after the city that is now Ahmedabad) and how this 209-cm-long fabric landed up in the hands of an Englishman. “As Indians, we think that colonisers were attracted to our country just for the spices. But a curator at the CSMVS museum in Mumbai told me that Europeans would sell Indian textiles to Indonesia in order to buy their spices too. Textiles are another reason we got colonised, and also why we won our freedom, because of the khadi movement. Handloom is a crucial part of our identity.”
Dasmahapatra’s Reels have eye-catching titles: “How Silk Scarves Helped Win World War II”; “Goats and Insects Made This Carpet 400 Years Ago”; “Fit Check for A Rich Indian Man from the Deccan Region in the 19th Century”. In one video, about a Madurai Sungudi sari dated to 1855-79, she explains how artisans from Saurashtra migrated to the temple town of Madurai in the 16th century, which is why Sungudi tie-dye patterns look similar to the ones done in Gujarat. In another, she points out the motifs in a Sambalpuri sari from Odisha that is more than 105 years old – ducks, mythological beasts, waves, checkerboard patterns. “There’s so much you can tell about a community from a single sari. It’s history, it’s economics, it’s the story of Indian culture.”
Rishabh Wadhwa, @BlessedArchA window to understanding architecture
If you knew that London’s Millennium Bridge was once called the Wibbly Wobbly Bridge or why some buildings in Amsterdam lean forward, you’ve probably been spending too much time on Wadhwa’s Instagram page or YouTube channel. Wadhwa, 30, who’s based in Jaipur, earned his architecture degree at Manipal University and uses his socials to help regular folks make sense of their built environment. “Architects put so much thought into the design and layout of their structures, but they don’t explain that in simple terms to the public.”
Consider a wonky-looking building called The Valley in Amsterdam, with apartments and shopfronts jutting out oddly. “It’s actually been designed to resemble a geological formation, to interrupt the monotony of the buildings around and to create the feeling of a natural environment,” he says. He points out in a video that London’s Scoop office building’s concave “cutout” shape is deliberate – so it doesn’t block a bystander’s view of the adjacent church. “I love it when buildings attempt to do something out of the ordinary. That’s what I want viewers to think about: Why design can be fun, and how to keep an eye out for these architectural marvels.”
Wadhwa uses AI to illustrate before-and-after imagery of a structure or area. Viewers get to see how the drainage system in a city would look if it followed local building styles, or reimagine what his grandparent’s terrace garden looked like in the past. And the audience loves it. In the comments of a Reel explaining the tree-shaped Torres Blancas apartment complex in Madrid, Spain, one commenter said he’d “made a pilgrimage to see it while passing through Madrid”. Under another video of his that talks about the history of Delhi’s Khan market structures, a resident commented, “I walk around this street and didn’t know the history!”
From HT Brunch, May 16, 2026
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