Memes For Mummyji: Making Sense of Post-Smartphone India

by Santosh Desai

A portrait of India in mid-sentence - caught between tradition and transformation, noise and nuance.


From selfies and what they mean to the travails of modern love and the new vocabulary of politics, Santosh Desai returns to chronicle the invisible revolutions of Indian life with his signature wit and insight. In Memes for Mummyji, he explores how the mobile phone - now as common as the pressure cooker - has quietly reshaped how we shop, flirt, pray, protest, and parent.

This is not a book about technology. It's about us. Our habits, our contradictions, our new-found freedoms - and the deep cultural software that still runs underneath. Warm, keenly perceptive and deeply human, this book, with essays drawn from over a decade of observation, is a love letter to the everyday theatre of Indian life in the digital age.

482 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 27, 2025

About the author

Santosh Desai is a columnist with several prominent publications. He writes extensively on media, popular culture, consumer markets and everyday life.

Reviews

[Mamunuru Shankar · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading his first book, “Mother Pious Lady”, a collection of essays that tried to make sense of everyday India, I was looking for a similar book of essays from him. For those who miss his column “City City Bang Bang” in the Times of India, this book offers his take on a range of Indian subjects. In his earlier book, Mr. Desai tried to understand how Indian tradition adapts to modernity. The essays in the present book, “Memes for Mummyji,” however, are set in a different time, when we are modern even without knowing it. Being online on a smartphone is a default condition. These essays try to explore what happens when we are caught between the entrenched glories of the past and the onrushing future that is full of unfathomable technological possibilities. In this age of the internet and digital media, we have gained unhindered access to the world. Well-connected, we are constantly in the present but strangely forlorn. We are glued to our screens and experience the world at a very personal level - the distance between desire and experience increasingly diminishing. We lost the capability to express ourselves, having outsourced emotions to emojis and thinking to ChatGPT. Smartphone provides a sense of individualism that enables us to define ourselves with our own biases. The agency it creates is something that was never experienced in a society where the individual is an extension of the collective. An all-pervasive technology enabled social media and other devices and Apps that track, locate, and identify our person - we have no place to hide. We stay surrounded by these services for convenience to start with, and find ourselves entangled in a web that hardly allows an escape. In a world of instant communication surrounded by screens, there is a compulsive necessity to project ourselves. The evidence of your existence is your continuous presence on social media, and the moment you stop, you recede into oblivion. In short, to stop is to vanish, and constant presence is the modern-day proof of life. We are slowly consumed by a mild sense of narcissism, and the smartphone confers on us an illusion that we are the Centre of the world, and it is awaiting breathlessly every chore of ours to be transmitted instantly to watch and emulate. There is a skewed sense of reality when there is a mismatch between what we see and what the GPS tells, we tend to believe that it is reality that is making a mistake! Though these days, we appear to be detached in the sense that we hardly find time to interact with others as we are glued to our screens, oblivious of our surroundings, this detachment is anything but spiritual. In this, we are the Centre of the universe, and the world dances to our whims. The virtual friendships leave us with a strange sense of loneliness, persuading us to look for ideologies that define us.

Mr. Desai has a great sense of observation. In these essays, he has left no aspect of the modern Indian middle-class life untouched or unobserved. He is not judgmental as his sharp eye scans the idiosyncrasies of middle-class life, their values, vulnerabilities, and their fantasies circumscribed by their limitations. He analyses the mundane with a subtle sense of humor and slowly, towards the end of the essay, elevates it to a meta level, giving us great insights into human nature and psychology.

A great read. As it is a book of essays, one can pick any piece at random without missing any thread. Many essays are worth re-reading. His prose is excellent, and the turn of phrase delights. He, without a doubt, is one of the best social commentators of the modern Indian middle class.

[Riti · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memes for Mummyji is a social commentary on post smartphone India compiled by TOI columnist Santosh Desai. In this compilation of observations and trends, he covers almost all the socio graphic influences on consumers in India and the changing landscape and scope of time and space One can, in a sense, expand and extend one’s time by just browsing and scrolling through the smart phone while being present with family and friends and watching TV at the same time. We are, in fact in many places at once because we can and are simultaneously texting with several people in our phone as well as speaking on the phone while having coffee with a friend.

The format of content consumption has changed and projection of self is rampant. Selfies, forwards, reels are the order of the day and occupy our share of mind. Even the way we make our purchases have changed. As the author says, the sweetness of putting one’s heart into a purchase decision- a thing I believe profusely in as well, has changed and probably people have become jaded about purchasing as well

What I felt

I loved the mention of family disco where the family books a discotheque so the girls and woke of the house could have fun within the safety net of the family. Similarly, bhai friends offer safety and assurance of no hanky panky for the girls and therefore give a bit of freedom to them in this unexpected world of today.

The chapters are short and in easy to digest format and can be read quickly without feeling lectured on each topic.

Exclaiming profusely in a digital world was my favourite chapter which talked about the way language has ways of enabling us to express but we prefer to use multiple exclamations or grawlix instead.

The most evocative chapter was the one on the glamorising of khichdi. I could almost taste it and words cannot describe the dose of nostalgia that the section gave me.

The commentary on demonetisation was a short but powerful reminder of how crippled the nation was during that period because we had still not reached the peak of digital payments. The previous generation didn’t trust online mode of payments and many still prefer cash. For many women, their hidden savings were exposed to all giving a harsh blow to their life work. Today, even the cart owner on the street has a QR code displayed proudly but that day was the day the nation was held hostage.

The author speaks about the changed landscape of work. The lure of government job was the currency of power that came with it and the security that it provided. Today the landscape has changed. There is more flexibility, different types of careers that one would have never thought as possible, the attraction of entrepreneurship that gives control and freedom to operate, and above all, the seeing of work life balance.
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[Gairka Nunni · Rating 5 out of 5]

I did this using the "read aloud" feature in Google Play books. Funny how Google play defaulted to a Gujarati accent - perhaps because AI figured the author's name is Desai and decided I might like a touch of a Kathiawari lilt or something. - it was even pronouncing the words all wrong e.g. the table in "comfortable" sounded like the table in, say, dining table and not the clipped "comfortuhble" which, some might consider, is the correct way to say it. (I said it as "come for table" myself for the longest time, until an anglo-indian room mate corrected me this one time, but there are more people (in India) inviting you to dinner like that than aren't, when saying that word!)

Anyway, this is a superlative collection of essays! It is convoluted but nevertheless exquisite prose that Santosh Desai writes! I have been following his columns ever since he started writing them, diligently cutting them out of the TOI Monday papers and sticking them into my scrap book. But newspaper - affixed with cheap glue - doesn't keep very well. Also, despite this devotion to collecting the material, I can't say I have read them all. Like I said, the prose is kinda difficult for the average reader and requires you to pay attention - and it's difficult even for a home keeper to take the time out on a Monday morning (say 10 minutes, if you are reading carefully whilst making notes and looking things up for context - but even that kind of time is hard to come by!) Mostly, the reluctance to read it immediately comes from saving it for later, when I can give it my undue attention and that, of course, famously (not just for me, but for every procrastinator!) is something we can never get around to! sigh! what will you do! ... except maybe get 'em in book form like this and do at least some of them - conveniently arranged by theme - in the two books Mr. Desai has put out this far - all at one go!

Later in January 2026, the audiobook version read by Santosh Desai will drop and I hope to do a second iteration then!

Fascinating stuff! Highly recommend! This second book took a long time coming, and one hopes they'll release more of these going ahead! Can't wait for the next one!