I’m a B.com dropout in my final year from a support university in the suburbs of Mumbai. I worked as a welding machine (this wasn’t a coincidence. My lowhar caste was always metalworking, and my dad ran a small fabrication shop in Jogeshwari before joining the pop culture content company as a meme maker).
One reason I think I’ve come in is because I understand pop culture references. I knew who Pink Floyd and Metallica were, I knew I could quote Eminem’s lyrics, and I knew the difference between Marvel and DC’s storylines. That exposure does not come from inherited privileges. It came from an English school and had a habit of spending a break with classmates talking about American pop culture. That exposure turned out to be currency, as it was. For ZZ and young millennials in the working class and Bahujan background, this kind of exposure is not just useful, it is fundamental. It is the way they navigate a world that is increasingly implemented with reference, clarification, and cultural access.
Castes do not always announce themselves through slur or last name. 2025, that’s subtle. It lies in the rhythm of the taste. It seems everyone knows. When will you laugh? You instinctively know how to dress down for a client lunch, or casually drop inheritance, quote fleabag, or instinctively know. Important types of exposure are not related to degrees or English. It’s about taste. And if you come from a working class or a buff jan background, then no one will give you that note. You must discover what even that note is for yourself. A quiet, uncomfortable moment at the dinner table, a late-night Wikipedia dive, one nasty laughter at the joke you couldn’t get. Until you click.
Hitesh Pardeshi, 35, a marketing expert and political strategist in Goa, belongs to the Pardeshi Bhamta community, part of the VJNT (Vimukta Jati and Nomadic Tribes) classification of Maharashtra. He remembers the sharp awkwardness of not knowing McDonald’s menu. “Back to junior college, a friend took our group to our birthday. I’ve never been there. I just said ‘Maharajamak’ because someone else said it.
He says that at that moment he taught him how power can hide in peace. Some people know these codes, while others are forced to learn them in real time. This is not a celebration of exposure. It’s provocation.
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If Babasaheb (Dr. Br Ambedkar) built the tools to dismantle the structure, what are we building for the next generation? Babasaheb studied at Columbia University in the United States and later at the London School of Economics in the UK. He wasn’t just looking for education. He built a political toolkit and collected ideas, frameworks and strategies to take home.
He wasn’t just studying. He absorbed it. He sat at John Dewey’s lecture. He read Web du Bois. He began to understand systems, institutions, and architecture of inequality on a global scale. That exposure didn’t change who he was. It amplified what he already knew. It sharpened the vocabulary of rebellion. The power has been calculated. Babasaheb confirmed that he was read, heard and seen in the language of those who sit in power so that he could dismantle their language from within. This was a strategy shaped by exposure. And that exposure is what broadband, Netflix, Reddit and critical theory are for today’s young people in Bahujan.
Ketoki Lohakare, 28, is a queer dalit woman working in advertising, and described how quickly cultural currency moved when she arrived in Mumbai six years ago. “It was all a year away. Songs, memes, references. When people develop friends and international bands, I just nod. You feel small. Not only financially, but emotionally.”
Now she says, she stopped pretending. “If I’ve never seen anything, I’ll say it. And when people explain it, I get them excited and it’s not bothering me. That’s my strength right now.”
Raunak Ramteke, 32, an employee of Dalit, a leading consumer internet company, reads Harry Potter’s books for social survival rather than pleasure. “Everyone else loved it. I forced it to read it so that I could participate in the conversation.” He no longer carries out cultural urgency. “Now I just say, ‘I’m not looking at it.’ But I remember it felt like panic and isolated.
Leica Matthews, 33 years old, business and growth strategist who grew up in one room shawl In Mumbai, I observed her childhood long before she joined. Silence was not passive. That was preparation.
“We played together at first,” Leica says. “When other people laughed and Googled Google under the table. When someone said, ‘Are you not looking at it?”, it was a velvet rope reminder: you weren’t coming from here. But the more I studied their Canon, the more I began writing my own performances.
Fardeen Shayf, 25, who ran a marketing agency and grew up in the slums of Juhu Gali in Mumbai, was educated in pop culture, with charming comics and school library comics (like DC). Amal Chitra Kata). “We didn’t see English content at home. No one spoke any language. I learned about friends and other popular TV shows in college. Then I went home and read their Wikipedia and fandom pages. That was my prep school.”
These are not stories about forgerying it. Let’s be honest. This chase is not mutual. The burden of understanding is always on the Bahujan child. The classroom does not teach his counterparts. The interview panel does not get her references. No one is Googleing her world after the meeting. This is not a two-way bridge. It’s a one-way fuss. You learn their jokes, shows, vocabulary. That’s because it’s the price of entry.
These are the stories of people who keep up with a system that has never been introduced just for small talk. It is about learning, listening and picking up things through context and curiosity.
Babasaheb did not play when he studied Sanskrit. He didn’t pretend to cite Mill or Dewey. He did that and couldn’t dismiss his words. So he was able to step into every room and speak with clarity and presence. That same instinct lives in all young people today.
Force your foot to the door
When working class children do the job of learning, understanding and using cultural references as if they were born, they are pushed into spaces that by default rarely make space for them. That streamlinedness comes from seeing how people talk, picking up context from silence, jumping into Wikipedia, rehearsing the lines in their heads before meetings. Slowly, it becomes more sharper: without reducing the ability to say, “I don’t know this, but I want to.” And just as important is, “I know this, so that’s important.”
That shift from absorption to assertion is where self-esteem began to take root. Hitesh refers to the Internet as a game changer. “I stopped feeling out of place once I got there.”
Leica says she thought the other person’s references were better. Now she is using herself. “I talk about where I came from, the stories I know, and what people hear.” What changed wasn’t the audience. It was her clarity about the value of what she brought.
There is a story sold to the children of Bahujan: “Aspire Higher”. But no one tells them how privilege actually succeeded. Elite children write stories of fake poverty sips to secure Ivy League scholarships. Meanwhile, children in slums and Tier 2 cities remember the dates of the SSC form or prepare for the paramilitary entrance Balti Academy. Same country. Two scripts.
So, what is your job now? It’s not just stimulating your desires. But to teach replication. Don’t crash elite spaces as visitors. But walking as a creator, critic and destroyer. Exposure is not about copying other people’s preferences. It’s about understanding what attracts attention, what holds space in the room, what brings money, and how you want to show up there. Knowing the succession of three seasons often gives you more access than 200 episodes Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmahsimply because those who make decisions are familiar with the former.
There’s a pushback. It’s soft that this focuses on pop culture. That means he’s a capitalist. It is imitation. But Babasaheb was wearing a suit of power, not Polish. He read global thinkers to sharpen local rage. He only mastered the Brahmin tools to dismantle them. This is not imitation. This is learning. Learning begins with exposure.
We often view positive behavior as a university seat or government work. But it is also the ability to read the room. To know what to refer to, when to speak, and how to speak. It’s about not only admission, but access to the joints. Imagine a community program that doesn’t stop at coding and coaching. Also imagine how to break down scenes from White Lotus, protect your beloved songs, and recognize tones in panel discussions. Not as an add-on, but a must-have.
It is training in thinking, listening, speaking and how to belong. It’s a different name for the humanities. And in a world where algorithms determine reach and language determine rooms, this kind of education is not an option. It’s a way we learn to live and, more importantly, a way we learn to listen. To build a more equal world, reservations and scholarships will not cut it down. Access must extend beyond textbooks. Because the next layer of opportunity is already coded with taste, reference and presence.
Exposure becomes even more important as government employment shrinks and public sector pathways become exhausted. For the background of young and workers in Bahujan, cultural literacy and social mobility are no longer an option and essential for those who have long relied on national employment as a ladder from poverty. If more Bahujan kids are successful, exposure should be treated as a legitimate infrastructure rather than as a luxury. A basic basic tool to walk into any room without shrinking.
Balram Vishwakarma is a Mumbai-based ethnographic, marketer and cultural strategist.
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Artist’s Notes
Arts and culture carry memories of promises of resistance and solidarity. When global movements towards caste, racism, occupation, patriarchy and capitalism speak to each other, they do not echo and harmonize. From Dalit/Anti-Caste History Month to Black History Month from Palestine to Sudan, creativity becomes our common language. Build transformational solidarity rather than transactions through shared stories, rhythms and visuals. Art becomes a cross-border bridge, a map of pain and protest, a vision of liberation. In pigments, poetry, performances, we remember, we resist and reconstruct. –Siddhesh Gautam
