Four things young India is on about this week. Punjab is everywhere at once, from a new Sidhu Moose Wala video to college bhangra stages. Campus kids are surviving exams, JEE and Pujo in the same breath. South and west India’s meme pages are on fire, and the GTA crowd is still streaming the old game while it waits for the new one.
1. Punjabi Wave
The biggest music video on YouTube in India this week is “Kaali Hoodie”, Sidhu Moose Wala with Bohemia, produced by The Kidd. Around it, Punjab’s college youth festival season is filling feeds: SCD College Ludhiana’s bhangra team at the zonal fest, and Panjab University’s youth festival the week before. Add the Punjabi short film series “Nand”, which has now run past 60 episodes, and you get a whole region showing up in music, on campus and in drama at the same time. We wrote the full story: read Punjabi Wave.
2. Campus Core
College life is still the biggest genre, and this week it is mostly pain, played for laughs. In the Hindi belt, a “Motivation mil gyi” short is doing the rounds with the most relatable college energy of the week. In Maharashtra, an IISER Pune tagged “POV: me after today’s maths exam” says everything in one skull emoji. In Bengal, a hostel reel is mourning that Pujo is on and they still have to go to college. And “Life After JEE” is back, the eternal genre of people finding out the entrance exam was not, in fact, the end of the story.
3. Regional Comedy Szn
The meme pages of Tamil Nadu and Telangana are carrying the week. Tamil creators are running “Guess the Meme” challenges, and a Tamil meme built on “Naa Paattukku Sivanennu Dhaan Da Poittu Irundhen” (I was just minding my own business) is doing the rounds too. In Telugu, someone propped up a phone for a beach selfie and the sea took it, and the meme pages have not let it go since. In Marathi, Samruddhi Jagtap’s short about everything that happened “because of the gap in my teeth” is the kind of self-roast that only works in your own language. That is the whole point of this trend, and we told that story already: read Regional Comedy Szn.
4. GTA 6 Waiting Room
Indian GTA YouTube is still running round-the-clock GTA 5 live streams, some going for more than two weeks straight. The GTA VI launch trailer was all over YouTube India just last week, and a few streamers have already started tagging their streams #gta6. Nobody is playing it yet. Everybody is in the lobby.
Also playing
LISA’s “Tarantino” video is one of the most-watched music videos in India this week. Haryana has Dhanda Nyoliwala’s “No Favours”. Telugu Shorts are dancing to “Jim jim tara”. And Free Fire ranked streams are still going strong.
