The Coolgirl Was Never Real

Notes from a failed anthropological study

I was convinced that all of the world’s coolgirls had a secret code and they gate-kept it from the rest of us. A sucker for secrets, and the idea of girls who could appear cool, I dedicated a large part of my time and brainspace to meticulously studying her.

I had just been transplanted from my hometown. There, I was the nerdy class-monitor child who duly told on the wrongdoings of the backbenchers to a teacher who I thought sincerely loved me. I was now in Trivandrum, which felt like a very big city to me then. It felt important to break out of my small-town self, and become a new, and maybe even cool, person.

I quickly learnt that the coolgirl was also one who was controversial in school. There was much glory, but it came with an equal amount of brickbats. She would be pulled up during the morning assembly for wearing her skirt short, but also be picked first to stand all pretty and shiny on stage to give bouquets to the chief guest during Annual Day. She always had boy problems, which were subject to deep dissection by her girl gang during school after-hours. She was also the first to make casual hang outs with friends a thing.

The rest of us tried many tricks to be like her. I, for one, tried to pretend like I had “problems” where there really was none.

Then there were also trivial things like having hairless legs. This, I could achieve, I thought. I remember the evening I tactically led my mother to the cosmetic aisle of our local grocery store. Only it was barely an aisle at the Margin-Free Supermarket in Trivandrum.

It was clear that some space had to be made for the face-washes and the talcum powders. They were stacked at the section which was earlier solely dedicated to toilet cleaning concoctions and equipment. The supermarket seemed to be in a perpetual state of transition: not quite a palacharak kada (kirana store), but also not a super organised functional store. Either way, I was thankful for its existence. The act of buying myself waxing cream was unthinkable even a year ago—I would have had to get it from Sarah’s Collections, a ‘fancy store’ in my hometown, and subject myself to many questions and stares.

I knew the aisle had what I needed. A hair removal cream that came in a small beige box with a heavily airbrushed image of Kareena Kapoor’s face on it. Anne French, the label read. MRP ₹33. I had been eyeing it for a few weeks and this time I was determined to get it. So I quickly grabbed a pack and said, “Amma, I need this.”

Amma belonged to a generation of women who worked tirelessly to make their day jobs—and not their home selves—define their identities. She wore crisp cotton sarees, starched and ironed well in advance. Perhaps she believed that external embellishments would distract the world from seeing her for who she really was.

She had no clue what it was that I was asking her that day but she accepted. I had caught her on a day when she was too tired for a fight.

Crouched on my bathroom floor that night, I eagerly open the package. Inside it is a glass bottle and a flimsy S-shaped spatula. The cream inside is the most disgusting thing I had ever smelled, but I have no choice but to slather it on my legs. I wait for five long minutes, and see the hair on my leg go from straight line to zig-zag. I then use the spatula to take off the unpleasant goop consisting of the cream plus now-removed hair and—ta-da! I have hairless legs.

I marvelled at how smooth my ankles looked when I wore my new denim capri pants to my mathematics tuition class. A breeze hit me, and I felt the pores on my legs: they were terribly light and ticklish. The feeling lasted for a total of two days till ingrown hair made the skin on my legs all prickly again. Disappointment.

I knew the pursuit to decode the coolgirl was not an honourable one. Because if you were the real deal, you wouldn’t have to try no? For this reason it was important to be sneaky. To the uncool small towner, TV seemed like the logical conduit for this detective game.

My favourite was a show on MTV called GTalk. I don’t think it was too popular at the time. Most shows had fanbases and whispers online. This wasn’t that. It featured two Delhi girls Anmol Singh and Shambhavi Sharma, who had just made a move to Bombay after their debut in the reality show Roadies. They looked alien-like and beautiful, with their horse-face, straight hair and delicate shoulders.

GTalk was supposedly part of a rebranding exercise MTV did at the time, with ‘six new shows and four new VJs.’ This was an era where cable TV had become less aspirational and more accessible, and channels suddenly came face-to-face with young people. Young people not just from metro cities, but young people also from towns like mine who were beginning to taste small capitalistic joys. This presented a specific kind of gap that movie stars couldn’t fill, for they led lives that were too obscure and unreachable. There needed to be icons to keep the youth hooked, and there came the VJs. A large part of the dictum for the ‘young and cool’ came from them. I don’t think it is a coincidence then, that some of the coolgirls in my school were also VJs in some Malayalam music TV channels. As the resident first-bencher, I never understood why one of them, despite getting only average grades in school, was “allowed” to leave class half an hour early twice a week since she had to rush for her shoot. Must be a thing cool people do, I thought.

She was different from the GTalk girlies in that she brushed under the carpet all the terrible things she was accused of—bad grades, dalliances with senior boys, not adhering to dress codes—with her angelic smile and perfect face. The GTalk girlies, however, took the same terrible traits and amped it up. While Anmol was loudmouthed and outright kaleshi, Shambhavi was the quiet, judgemental kind. Every single thing they did or said was to invoke a sense of ‘how dare they.’ But I happily took it all in, at the peril of my fragile teenage self-image. A lot of their conversation was in a kind of Hindi that I just couldn’t make sense of back then. And yet, I persevered. The code won’t let me do otherwise.

The show was shot inside a colourful and manicured home space that was supposedly their apartment. It was essentially a podcast of today set in reality TV format. Each episode was an unhinged conversation between the two flatmates as they went about their day.

When I have a daughter na, main toh uski sixth standard mein waxing and everything I’ll get done, says Anmol, in an episode audaciously titled ‘Girls take apart hairy people!’

Those were times when women had to be not correct if they had to make it in TV. Before the forces of capital began banking on #girlsgirl and sisterhood as popular tropes, women had to exhibit ‘cat fights’ and throw shade at each other to grab screen time. Now, this has been replaced by a cloying nice-ness that pervades all kinds of content you see out there.

Internet girls Urfi Javed and Apoorva Makhija (@the.rebel.kid) present themselves as an antithesis to this path—the interest they have generated is for this reason. Urfi has pivoted from her earlier tactic of treating the road like her runway and making a performance out of her fashion choices back to reality TV where she perfectly fits the mould. Apoorva, on the other hand, has borne the brunt for what it means to be truly loudmouthed in this country. These girls constantly reinvent the wheel to stay in the game. It’s always a hit-and-miss if you don’t stick to the script. More misses than hits, in fact.

But one thing’s for sure. For women, scope of performance has expanded. And a performance of sisterhood is the easiest, most convenient route. The coolgirl, who was once unreachable and intimidating, now has to be relatable.

The code keeps mutating, you see? No memo, nothing. Through my early twenties, I took many decisions guided by this need to crack the code. I did supposedly scandalous things like kissing boys, tasting alcohol and showing off my legs in my Facebook display picture. In the process, I also moved from small town to big city to bigger city and made real efforts to grow roots. And somewhere along the way, the quest for the code lay forgotten.

But I can still recognise a coolgirl when I see one. My current favourite ones being influencers Sakshi Shivdasani (a Bombay girl—from Mira Road and not SoBo, as she often reiterates) and Naina Bhan (a Delhi girl who moved to Bombay for work), who host the Moment of Silence podcast together. A show where two girlfriends yap about love, life and dating in the city—what’s not to like about it?

I find Sakshi’s signature drawl endearing, and Naina’s millennial angst often relatable. The experience of listening to MoS, for me, is the same as eating set thali meals at a restaurant. Regular and predictable, the spice tempered to an optimum level, with some crunch on the side.

The conversations straddle the thin line between stream of consciousness rants and actual brain-rot content. But you wait for glimmers of vulnerability and if you manage to catch them, you’re lucky. I have listened to every single episode they have put out and seen the podcast grow over the last two years. I will admit that I’ve found the experience of listening to some of these conversations cathartic. It’s helped me find lightness and even language to make sense of certain life situations I have found myself in.

I remember this episode where Sakshi explains to Naina the difference between having a boyfriend and getting what she calls the boyfriend experience. If one day you’re picking out cutlery with a boy, and the next day he disappears—he isn’t ghosting you, he probably only intended to stay in your life for a short while giving you the boyfriend experience. Not that this makes the hurt and anger any better, but you have been presented with words to talk about what you just went through.

I always think if I make a podcast with my crew of female friends, it would sound exactly like this—but way better. And I know every girl who is listening to the pod is thinking this. (But none of us can, and we most likely won’t.)

These relatability hooks, whether conscious or otherwise, are the reason why people keep coming back for more. Unlike the GTalk girls whose brief was to be their most jarring selves on TV, Sakshi and Naina have an entirely different task at hand: to convince you that they’re just like you.

They are just like you, but also NOT. And in that sliver of a gap between you and them comes an important factor that this whole podcasting enterprise hinges on. Selling.

I know a lot of us are immune to this kind of hybrid content where ads are woven into a show or a film. But I cannot but feel a sense of distrust when the sponsored content juts out from the rest of the conversation. I don’t want to listen to a whole episode about being a single girl during wedding season only to be slyly sold Pond’s Super Light Gel at the end. You know for a moment I thought we were sisters, but poof, there goes.

What happened to the good old days of clean ad breaks, when things didn’t have to be watered down to fit in the interests of the sponsors. In GTalk, for instance, other than stray sightings of a carton of Kellog’s Cornflakes and two-litre bottles of Pepsi, the most explicit way of product endorsements happened via a ticker at the bottom of the screen. This was mostly restricted to in-house merchandise, like linens which were from the product line Laid by MTV. Of course there is no comparison between a big media conglomerate like Viacom 18 (MTV India’s parent company) and a small enterprise like MoS pod, but no one stopped Anmol and Shambhavi from dropping two lines about the bed linen in between their little gossip sessions.

One needs to dangle the carrot of relatability to be able to sell. After all, as the MoS girls keep admitting to the world, they are nothing but small business owners. The podcast, all the yapping included, is their IP. However, when I say “selling,” I am not just talking about the paid partnerships that they carefully plug into their episodes. It is also about certain ways of living, loving and being that they endorse and normalise through their conversations.

“You know my favourite thing ever is when some stupid NRI comes back and they’re like ‘Oh no, I don’t have XYZ.’ And I’m like, why are we freaking out? Let’s Blinkit it…And they don’t believe you when you say it’ll be there in eight minutes. But the boys at Blinkit never disappoint.”

This unhinged take on the ten-minute delivery app invited a lot of criticism, of course, but I believe it made the cut because it is an unfiltered yet safe take. You could even count it as the girls being real. Most of us living in big cities can’t possibly call out the girls for this take—the number of Blinkit brown paper bags that we accumulate in our garbage cans is proof of our reliance on these quick commerce apps to “save” us on the daily. These moments of vulnerability that they exhibit is the currency they pay to earn your trust. They need it to influence.

But there have also been times when the relatability scale has gone way off, where audiences have duly called them out. In an episode where influencer Meghna Kaur came in as a guest, for instance, the conversations were about the feeling of walking into a Dior showroom for the first time, pilates sessions in LA and getting matcha—blueprint of the TikTok “That Girl.” This was padded with life stories that portrayed a kind of rehearsed vulnerability, which to me felt disingenuous at best. People in the comments went berserk.

Most comments critiquing the episode in the YouTube comments section follow a tone that is a lot like this one. It is not that of hate but of sincere grievance. I get @shagufaimtiyaz925, who I imagine is probably chasing their own coolgirl, who has exactly two minutes to do a fit check before she hops on to a local train to get to work, a girlboss navigating a fresh new life in a fresh new city. The kind of girl I briefly was, while working a journalism job on a measly salary and trying to find my feet in Delhi.

“If fursat was a city, it’s Delhi. We actually do slow living there,” says influencer Kusha Kapila, who appeared in a guest episode on the show. Even as she said this in comparison to Bombay, it can’t not sound bizarre for someone from an actual slow-town, aka me. It’s always city-girl talking to city-girl, with barely any imagination of a world beyond. If I know one thing about the secret architects of the coolgirl code, it is that they sit in the big city. The archetype originates from there, and then trickles down to become their own watered down versions that fit into the constraints of the small-town moulds.

I see this when a baby cousin from back home looks at the city life that I have built for myself with my friends—the beautiful dinner plates, winter flowers, the many Instagram thirst traps and countless October diwali parties—and deems me a *cool* older sister. (No one needs to know that this shiny life also entails dealing with seelan issues and mold during monsoon and that I don’t always leave my balcony door open for fear of monkey attacks.)

On MoS, around six out of the twenty female guests who have been on the show are from smaller towns (as of the time of this writing). These women from the “beyond,” now successfully assimilated to city life, engage with their pasts in different ways on the show. For Urfi who is from Lucknow, her past is associated with conservatism and conflict with her father. For creator Dolly Singh, Nainital becomes the source of cutesy tales about simpler times. And most interestingly for Apoorva (we don’t know where she’s really from, though she says that her parents now live in Jalandhar), it’s almost as if she has had no past.

Her social media persona—replete with freak accidents, glossy travel photos and tales from tarot card readings—has been built on a kind of no-contextness where any kind of personal history seems misplaced. She is devoid of signification beyond what she is saying at that exact moment, and the brand she is endorsing. So, when she puts out videos of her getting lip fillers, it is almost as if you expect it from her.

Apoorva, to me, is a ghost of the coolgirls past. (Not Urfi, because there is some undeniable vulnerability—and in turn, relatability—to her even when she is at her most absurd.) The MoS episode with her felt quite surreal to me, because it felt like some sort of eerie convergence between coolgirls past and present. We see her become visibly uncomfortable when asked about her growing up years. The dissonance between questions and answers were stark, and of course the listeners picked up on it.

What would it take for a small town girl to completely own up to her roots in a space like this? The good, the bad, the mess of it all.

I also can’t help but think about how Apoorva would have been a cracker of a guest on GTalk. The fireworks, the swear words masked by beeps. But what definitely wouldn’t change is the hate that she and the girls would receive. The GTalk girlies amassed a lot of hate during their time, as much as one could garner in the age of the early internet.

Among the top allegations against them was that they were “fake.” Why, of course they were! You knew the mess they were sorting out in the house during the episode was carefully created beforehand. You knew that their “apartment” was a set, the bright yellow bean bags, red bar stools and the open kitchen which had a gigantic red and white polka dotted coffee mug the size of a salad bowl. MoS episodes, on the other hand, play out inside a set infested with pops of candy-floss pink everywhere. There are also constant shout-outs to a team member responsible for set design: keeper of MoS’ signature “Pookie” energy.

It is obvious that everything about GTalk was manufactured. And yet, there is something about the old MTV show that feels deeply sincere. They were honest in their dishonesty, and hated unironically. This has become an impossible feat in today’s times where dank memes and post-ironic irony dictate our “takes” on life. They also did not have stringent social media algorithms or attention spans to bow down to, unlike the MoS girlies.

A GTalk episode is less than thirty minutes long at most, while MoS episodes are always over an hour long. Yet it never feels like long-form content. The episodes are carefully tailored to become easily consumable fragments for social media. This, if you listen to an episode carefully, manifests itself as ebbs and breaks in flow. Your content may be a few thousand seconds long but nothing matters if you don’t juice enough fifteen-second reels from it.

This act of extracting automatically means you’re taking something out of its larger context. The farther it can go, the more virality you achieve. I am guilty of doing this myself. Every time I have to adapt something I’ve written to make an Instagram carousel, I edit them to make sure each slide can stand on its own. In this process, some sort of concealment is inevitable. From a complete concealment of history and place like the GTalk girls, to a strategic (and perhaps deliberate and cynical) concealment that the girls at MoS practice.

But when you shave words, sentences and video clips off their heft, aren’t you asking the world to not be taken seriously? What’s cool about that?

PS: This is part of a larger body of work on how small town Indian women play with their online and offline identities as they journey into the big city.