2025 was a year when activism, cinema and conversations around music quietly—but decisively—shaped what truly mattered. At The Daily Eye, the stories that trended weren’t the ones chasing virality. They stayed with us because they carried depth, resistance, empathy, and cultural consequence.

Across the year, The Daily Eye’s Trending stories captured India’s cultural pulse through cinema, memory, music, and theatre. Together, they traced shifting power equations, reclaimed buried histories, and showed how culture itself often becomes a form of resistance.

That movement of power away from the centre found one of its most humane expressions in Humra Quraishi’s deeply reported People Who Make a Difference. Her portrait of ANHAD, founded by Shabnam Hashmi, took readers into rural Kashmir, where change happens patiently and persistently—through women finding financial independence via crewel embroidery, young people gaining access to education, and communities rebuilding trust through dialogue. The #MereGharAaKeToDekho campaign stood out as one of the year’s most quietly radical gestures, pushing back against decades of polarisation simply by inviting people to see, listen, and engage.

From grassroots activism, the lens then shifted to history—especially the women history has consistently sidelined. In Scandal That Shook the World, Khalid Mohamed revisited the painful and largely forgotten story of Sonali Dasgupta and her relationship with Roberto Rossellini. This was not about resurrecting scandal for shock value. It was about cultural correction—restoring dignity to a woman long overshadowed, and exposing how patriarchal genius often consumes women’s lives while history celebrates the man.

Visibility And Identity Were Tested

Mohamed’s interrogation of power continued in Pride Combats Prejudice, a wide-ranging assessment of queer cinema in 2025. Moving from Shawn Gupta’s tentative short films to Anmol Sidhu’s devastating Jaggi, from Varun Grover’s razor-sharp satire The Kiss to the documentary series In Transit by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti, the essay mapped a cinematic landscape still struggling to move beyond tokenism. Visibility, Mohamed argued, isn’t the same as victory—but it’s an important place to begin.

Music and memory came together in Saluting Kashmir’s Rule-Bending Singer Raj Begum. In conversation with Danish Renzu, Mohamed reflected on Songs of Paradise and its quiet reverence for Raj Begum’s voice and legacy. In a region so often reduced to conflict narratives, the film—and the writing around it—became an act of cultural preservation. Here, art didn’t function as protest so much as repair.

Another form of repair shaped Dharmendra – Sentimentally Yours Forever. Mohamed’s moving tribute resisted mythology, choosing instead to focus on solitude, poetry, loyalty, and the silences Dharmendra carefully protected. Stardom, the piece suggested, isn’t always about spectacle. Sometimes, it’s about endurance—and knowing when to step away.

Questions of craft, discipline, and the future came into focus with Ekjute’s Annual Acting Workshop, led by Nadira Zaheer Babbar. This wasn’t lifestyle reporting. It read as cultural ecology—an acknowledgement that theatre remains one of the few spaces where mentorship, rigour, and training still matter deeply, especially in an industry increasingly shaped by speed, algorithms, and instant visibility.

The Body Was Reimagined

The conversation around the body took a sharper, more uncomfortable turn in Sohaila Kapur’s Beauty Lies in Botox Within. Reporting from Dubai—now a global hub for aesthetic intervention—Kapur examined the cosmetic industry without easy judgement. Her approach was sociological, almost forensic, tracing how post-pandemic anxiety, Zoom-facing professional life, ageing, marriage, migration, and economic insecurity converge on the face and skin. In her telling, beauty became transactional, strategic, and deeply political. What often appears as choice, she suggested, can just as easily be compulsion dressed up as empowerment. The power of the piece lay in its refusal to let the reader settle comfortably on either side of the debate.

From the altered body, attention shifted to the remembered body—held in music, longing, and fleeting emotion. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri’s lyrical A Spring Song State of Mind slowed the pace entirely. Through Hindi film songs—and a luminous Bengali coda—spring emerged not as a season but as a feeling: transient, seductive, and unreliable. Referencing Sahir Ludhianvi, Jaidev, Ravi, Lata Mangeshkar, and Mohammad Rafi, the essay gently argued for slowness, for emotional recall, and for art that lingers beyond its moment. In a year dominated by urgency and outrage, it reminded us that remembering itself can be a political act.

Cinema And Dissent Were Reasserted

Cinema returned repeatedly in 2025 as something more than entertainment—as cultural infrastructure. This was most rigorously articulated in filmmaker and author V.K. Cherian’s conversation with Monojit Lahiri on his book Noon Films: Magical Renaissance of Malayalam Cinema. By revisiting the era of “noon films”—dismissed by exhibitors but embraced by discerning audiences—Cherian reclaimed a crucial chapter in Indian film history. Filmmakers such as Adoor Gopalakrishnan, G. Aravindan, and John Abraham emerged as cultural disruptors who reshaped form, language, and audience expectations. The interview reinforced a recurring editorial concern at The Daily Eye: serious art often survives despite systems, not because of them.

That idea carried forward into Vinta Nanda’s engagement with contemporary cinema. Her review of Kuch Sapney Apne, directed by Sridhar Rangayan and Saagar Gupta, refused the language of tokenism often applied to LGBTQ+ narratives. Instead, she focused on emotional truth—on restraint, performance, music, and unresolved tension—positioning empathy as a cinematic ethic rather than a slogan.

Nanda extended this sensibility in Timeless Light and Living Memories, where photographs by Debolina Mazumdar and Monobina Roy became meditations on grace, discipline, and a disappearing cultural world. Accompanied by Joy Bimal Roy, the essay collapsed private memory into public history. In an age obsessed with excess visibility, it quietly argued for attentiveness, patience, and craft.

A different kind of contemporary questioning came from Yashika Begwani, whose essay on Saiyaara and My Oxford Year examined romance in the age of AI. By placing Bollywood melodrama alongside a Netflix literary romance, she asked whether algorithms could ever replicate emotional truth. Her answer was clear and hopeful: flawed, deeply human stories still resonate more powerfully than polished, machine-assisted ones.

And finally, Sharad Raj’s writing cut through the year with uncompromising clarity. Across Complexity, Nuance, Political Correctness & Sham and The Villain India Never Got, he challenged cultural complacency—questioning caste narratives, cinematic canonisation, and the comfort of surface-level progressiveness. His insistence was clear: without aesthetic rigour and intellectual honesty, inclusivity risks becoming just another marketing tool.

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