A year-end reflection on The Daily Eye’s Thought Factory, where writers interrogated art, power, cinema, gender, labour, media, and love—asserting that thinking, when done honestly, remains one of the most radical acts of our time.

The Daily Eye’s Thought Factory Year-End 2025 brings together essays by Vinta Nanda, Sharad Raj, Monojit Lahiri, Khalid Mohamed, Sohaila Kapur, Yashika Begwani, Satyabrata Ghosh, Ashis Ghatak, Deepa Bhalerao, and Gokul Krishnamoorthy. Spanning cinema, culture, censorship, feminism, celebrity, labour, memory, and media ethics, this retrospective maps India’s cultural conscience in a year defined by noise, spectacle, and the urgent need for thoughtful resistance.

If there is one unmissable truth about the Thought Factory section at The Daily Eye in 2025, it is this: these essays were never meant to decorate the discourse. They were meant to interrupt it.

At a time when commentary has become performative and outrage has replaced inquiry, Thought Factory functioned as a deliberate slowdown—an insistence that ideas deserve time, contradictions deserve space, and culture must be examined rather than consumed. Across cinema, politics, mythology, media, memory, and personal relationships, the writers kept returning to a shared anxiety: what happens to meaning when speed, spectacle, and power decide everything?

The answer, offered not as consensus but as conversation, is that thinking itself must become an act of resistance.

Returning To the Roots of Creation

At the philosophical centre of this conversation is Vinta Nanda, whose writing threads through the year like a continuous interrogation of conscience. In The Eternal Search of the Artist, Nanda returns to Aram Nagar—not as a site of nostalgia, but as a living metaphor for creative struggle. Her encounter with Mahesh Bhatt, now stripped of industry bravado and immersed in introspection, becomes a meditation on reinvention, humility, and survival. Alongside him stands Nadira Babbar, unwavering in her belief that discipline, theatre, and ethical grounding are not optional accessories to art.

This piece quietly argues that the collapse of storytelling is not due to lack of talent but excess of noise—OTT glut, algorithmic validation, and hollow metrics. The solution, Nanda suggests, lies not in innovation alone but in returning to fundamentals.

That argument finds youthful urgency in A Revolution Brewing in the Burbs, where Nanda documents Mumbai’s Micro Theatre movement at Mukti Manch. Led by Jahaan Singh and Rayaan Khatib, ten-minute plays tackle alienation, sexuality, politics, and despair with startling precision. This is not theatre as nostalgia—it is theatre as resistance. The industry’s favourite question—“Where is the talent?”—is exposed as lazy. The talent is present, working without privilege, visibility, or safety nets.

In Creation Begins Where Opinion Ends, Nanda sharpens the blade further. She questions the growing authority of commentators who create nothing yet dominate discourse. Creation, she insists, demands vulnerability and surrender; opinion often demands only certainty. In a decentralised media world, she argues, this imbalance cannot hold forever.

Fame, Validation, and the Fear of Disappearance

If Nanda interrogates creation, Yashika Begwani interrogates fame. In Validation Comes With Expiry, Begwani draws a chilling line between classic cinematic stardom and influencer culture by placing The Substance beside Nayak. The mediums differ, the technologies evolve—but the anxiety remains unchanged. Stardom is always conditional. Attention always moves on.

Begwani’s writing resists moral panic. Instead, it dissects the psychological cost of living under permanent visibility, where applause has been replaced by metrics and selfhood becomes performance.

She continues this excavation in 30 Years of DDLJ & Still Running, a nuanced cultural reading of Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Rather than treating the film as kitsch nostalgia, Begwani reads it as social glue—bridging diaspora and homeland, rebellion and compliance, modernity and ritual. The film’s endurance, she suggests, lies not in romance alone but in its ability to absorb contradictions without breaking.

Compassion, Feminism, and Moral Listening

In The Man Who Listens to Dogs, Nanda shifts register entirely. Her conversation with Ramesh Narayan about Missy’s Musings begins with Indie dogs but expands into a meditation on dignity, colonial hierarchies, and care. The Indie dog—dismissed, neglected, unwanted—becomes a metaphor for lives deemed disposable. Compassion, the piece insists, is not sentimental; it is political.

That politics sharpens in Censorship, Cinema, and the Cost of Conscience, where Nanda speaks to Anna MM Vetticad. Censorship here is not an abstract policy—it is lived reality. Films gutted, voices muted, journalists pressured. The conversation dismantles the myth of neutrality, insisting that silence is itself a position.

Feminist reclamation takes a mythic turn in Reclaiming Shoorpanakha, Rewriting Epic Silence, where theatre artist Parshathy J Nath reclaims a vilified woman from the Ramayana. Shoorpanakha emerges not as caricature but as wound, rage, and resistance. The essay by Nanda reminds us that feminism does not always roar; sometimes it excavates patiently.

Power, Politics, and the Refusal of Easy Memory

If Nanda interrogates ethics, Sharad Raj interrogates power. In Legacy, Vision, Art, and Nation, Sharad revisits Jawaharlal Nehru not as iconography but as cultural strategist. Drawing on his FTII years, Sharad arrives at an uncomfortable conclusion: Nehru’s insistence on centralised cultural institutions stemmed from a sober understanding of India’s social fragmentation.

That sobriety turns bleak in Stardom & Spectacle in Naya Bharat, where Sharad traces how Hindi cinema’s crisis is not economic but ideological. Films like Animal and Kabir Singh are read as symptoms of an industry increasingly aligned with aggression, spectacle, and power. Actors such as Ranbir Kapoor and Vicky Kaushal are contextualised, not condemned.

In Eulogies in the Post-Truth Era, Sharad resists instant sanctification while reflecting on Shyam Benegal and Manmohan Singh. Memory, he argues, must be balanced—or it becomes propaganda.  

Silence, Media, and the Politics of Speech 

Sohaila Kapur listens for what has disappeared. A Silence That Shouts is one of the most quietly radical essays of the year because it refuses spectacle altogether. Beginning with something as banal—and unsettling—as a Toronto call-centre scam, Kapur slowly peels back layers of modern existence to reveal how speech itself has been commodified. In a world where everything must be articulated, uploaded, justified, and monetised, silence has become not only rare but suspicious.

Kapur’s essay moves fluidly between lived experience, philosophy, cinema, and spiritual thought to arrive at a disturbing insight: we no longer trust quiet. Silence, once associated with contemplation, grief, prayer, or dignity, is now read as evasion or weakness. In this hyper-verbal economy, talk becomes currency and noise becomes proof of existence. Against this backdrop, Kapur proposes something deeply subversive—that silence may be one of the last remaining spaces of autonomy. The essay lingers because it does not announce its conclusions; it lets them surface gradually, asking the reader to sit with discomfort rather than escape it.

That meditation on silence finds a resonant counterpoint in Vinta Nanda’s In Memory of Humra Quraishi. Here, silence is not chosen—it is imposed, resisted, and ultimately broken through memory. Humra Quraishi emerges not simply as a journalist but as a moral witness who insisted on writing about what the nation repeatedly tried to look away from: Kashmir, communal violence, missing women, the cost of majoritarian silence.

Nanda’s tribute refuses hagiography. Instead, it positions Quraishi as part of a lineage of truth-tellers for whom journalism was not a career but a responsibility. The essay makes a powerful case that memory itself is political work—that remembering honestly, without sanitisation or convenience, is an act of resistance in times that reward forgetting. Read alongside Kapur, the two pieces form a compelling dialectic: one examines the violence of enforced speech, the other the violence of enforced silence.

Who Gets Seen, Who Gets Erased

If earlier Thought Factory essays interrogate power and silence, Monojit Lahiri persistently interrogates value—who is valued, who is tolerated, and who is quietly erased. In Real Actors Don’t Fit Bollywood, Monojit confronts the industry’s long-standing unease with authenticity. Drawing on the words and career of Naseeruddin Shah, he argues that actors trained in emotional truth, theatre discipline, and lived observation fundamentally disrupt a system designed around glamour, compliance, and market-tested personas.

The essay goes beyond lament. It exposes a contradiction at the heart of mainstream cinema: real acting is celebrated rhetorically but penalised structurally. Performers who bring unpredictability, depth, and interiority are often pushed to the margins because they resist easy branding. Authenticity, Monojit suggests, is not merely undervalued—it is inconvenient.

That argument widens in Who Deserves Real Recognition?, where Monojit steps outside cinema to examine celebrity culture itself. By placing figures like Virat Kohli and Shah Rukh Khan alongside unnamed social reformers and grassroots workers, the essay avoids moral grandstanding and instead poses an unsettling question: when visibility becomes the sole measure of worth, what happens to invisible labour? Recognition, Monojit argues, has shifted from contribution to amplification.

In Films. Audiences. Film Critics., Monojit turns the lens inward. Drawing on Pauline Kael and Satyajit Ray, he revisits criticism not as verdict-giving but as cultural mediation. At a time when reviews compete for virality and “takes” replace engagement, Monojit argues that criticism has lost trust because it has abandoned responsibility. The critic’s task, he insists, is not to perform cleverness but to build bridges between work and audience.

Emotion, too, is reclaimed in Rona Mana Hai!!, where Monojit challenges India’s growing obsession with imported stoicism. Through cultural memory—Rudalis, poetry, communal mourning—he reminds readers that grief was once shared, ritualised, and dignified. Today, crying is considered uncool, inefficient, even embarrassing. Yet, Monojit argues, emotion cannot be legislated away. It will always return, especially in moments of genuine loss.

Cinema, Cities, and Disappearing Worlds

The survival of cinema itself becomes central to Satyabrata Ghosh’s Why Cinema Still Matters. Anchored in Arjunn Dutta’s Deep Fridge, the essay is neither nostalgic nor defeatist. Instead, it asks what kind of commitment—creative, economic, emotional—is required to keep cinema alive as a shared experience rather than a disposable product.

Ghosh argues that small, sincere films do not require pity or patronage; they require presence. Showing up to theatres, paying attention, and engaging seriously become political acts in a landscape where convenience has replaced community. The essay gently but firmly reminds readers that cinema’s decline is not inevitable—it is a consequence of collective withdrawal.

Urban disappearance takes on visceral urgency in Sharad Raj’s Bombay in the Arms of the Night 2.0. Part memoir, part elegy, the piece walks through a Mumbai that once thrived after dark—dance bars, mill workers, street vendors, women earning invisible livelihoods. As redevelopment sanitises the city, Sharad asks a devastating question: was poverty addressed, or merely hidden? The essay exposes how cities erase their working-class histories in the name of progress.

Memory, Magic, and Moral Reckoning

Questions of endurance and cultural memory culminate in Ashis Ghatak’s Once Upon a Timeless Tale, written on the fiftieth anniversary of Sholay. Ghatak refuses nostalgia as sentimentality. Instead, he argues that Sholay survives because it dissolved chronology—it exists simultaneously in dialogue, music, myth, and everyday speech. We do not revisit it; we re-enter it.

Media ethics return forcefully in Deepa Bhalerao’s Media Shapes Minds and Memories. Recalling Hum Log, Bhalerao demonstrates how entertainment once consciously blended storytelling with social responsibility. In a content-saturated world, she argues, credibility is cultural capital, and ethical storytelling shapes collective memory far more than algorithms ever will.

Digital chaos is confronted head-on in Gokul Krishnamoorthy’s Movie Magic Defeats Online Noise. Using Rajinikanth’s Coolie, Gokul dismantles the illusion that online outrage dictates audience behaviour. Manufactured negativity, fake reviews, and influencer pile-ons ultimately fail because audiences still trust instinct, pleasure, and experience over curated outrage.

The year’s most searing moral intervention comes from Khalid Mohamed in Death of the Working-Class Hero. Tracing the disappearance of labouring lives from Hindi cinema, Khalid exposes a brutal hierarchy where stories are made only for those who can afford tickets. From delivery workers earning a pittance to the erasure of films like Do Bigha Zameen, the essay asks a question cinema has long avoided: if the working class no longer appears in our stories, have they ceased to matter?

Finally, intimacy itself comes under scrutiny in Monojit Lahiri’s Why Marriage Scares Young Lovers. Beneath its conversational tone lies a sharp sociological insight: commitment has been hollowed out by consumer logic, performance anxiety, and fear of emotional stagnation. Love, like everything else, is expected to deliver returns.

Why Thinking Still Matters

Taken together, the Thought Factory archive of 2025 is not commentary—it is conscience. It insists that silence can speak, memory can resist, art can interrogate power, and thinking—done slowly and honestly—remains one of the most radical acts available to us.

Because even now—especially now—stories still shape who we are.

You can read all the articles here.