Fake Paneer, Fake Influencers, Real Propaganda | Diss-Course with Buffalo Intellectual

ELI5/TLDR

Anurag Verma sits down with Buffalo Intellectual for an 82-minute “Diss-Course” — a roving cultural autopsy of contemporary India. They start with Noida being “the most honest city in India” because it has no pretensions, then ricochet through Dhurandhar and Aditya Dhar’s brand of state-aligned cinema, the fake paneer / fake mustard oil / fake everything economy, the diaspora’s NRI cringe abroad, the Bombay outsider mythology that every successful person now claims, parliament-podcaster Raghav Chadha demanding standardised samosas, and the closing thesis that India has become a car in free-fall where the only sane move is to laugh on the way down.

The Full Story

Noida as ground zero

The opening salvo is a defence of Noida, the satellite city most North Indians treat as a punchline. Buffalo Intellectual’s argument: Noida is the most honest city in India because it has no pretensions. Delhi has colonial-capital baggage. Bengaluru has its tech-city mythology. Gurgaon has its glass towers. Noida has none of it. Roads, Uber, Swiggy, Wendy Burgers, stand-up comedy clubs — the full kit of contemporary urban living is installed and functioning. And yet nobody is having a good time.

His point isn’t that Noida is special. It’s that Noida is the rest of India with the costumes removed. If Noida bores you, what you’re actually saying is that India bores you. There is no cultural moment to fill in the empty hours. The drugs and the drunk-driving aren’t a Noida problem; they’re what people do when a city offers no third place between work and the bedroom.

The frame here is useful — think of it like a control experiment. Strip away brand and legacy from a city, what remains? In Noida’s case, the answer is: highway infrastructure and a strong sense that something is missing. The two hosts seem to agree this absence is the country, not the suburb.

Dhurandhar and the Aditya Dhar problem

The conversation pivots to Aditya Dhar — director of Uri, The Kashmir Files-adjacent 370, and now Dhurandhar. Their reading is sharp. Dhar isn’t an opportunist riding a political wave. He’s a true believer. The evidence cited is from a launch event for 370 where Dhar reportedly said something to the effect of: my film is small, the Ram Mandir has already been delivered after 500 years, this election is already won.

If you’re an opportunist, you don’t say that on a stage. Opportunists hedge.

The hosts then make a more interesting move. They argue that to call Dhar’s films “propaganda” as if propaganda were some special category is to misread cinema. Every film is an expression of its maker’s politics — IPTA-era leftist filmmakers in the fifties were just as ideological. NTR played gods on screen and then in election rallies. Vijay in Tamil Nadu, Pawan Kalyan in Andhra — the line between political branding and film branding has been porous for sixty years.

The real critique, then, isn’t ideological. It’s craftsmanship. Dhar takes himself too seriously. The Yami Gautam cameo in Dhurandhar plays as if the filmmaker thinks he is doing something profound, and the seriousness is what will eventually undo him. They sketch a lineage: RGV’s school of “interesting characters at any cost” produced Anurag Kashyap, then Aditya Dhar, then Vasan Bala — a generation that defends every film by saying don’t look at the politics, look at the craft. The trick stopped working after Kabir Singh and Animal. There’s craft to look at, but it’s craft in service of nothing.

A side joke that lands: Animal was, structurally, a Jat civil war. Both warring families are Jats. Nobody noticed because the film was busy being violent. The newer Telugu film Jaat just made the subtext text.

The Fake Paneer Economy

The middle stretch is the title track. Adulterated paneer. Fake mustard oil. Fake eggs. Fake moong dal. MDH masala recalls. Soya chaap being kneaded with feet in some viral video. Hooch deaths in Haryana. IMFL — Indian Manufactured Foreign Liquor — which is essentially country liquor with whisky-coloured dye, sold for under a thousand rupees, finishing the livers of the working class one EP-M-style bottle at a time.

The observation that hits: people aren’t shocked. They’ve moved past shock. The conversation lands on a darkly funny image — you’d need to hire a separate fake person to get up in the morning and consume all this fake food on your behalf, just to keep up with the volume of adulteration.

Anurag has the line of the episode here. You stop critiquing something at the point you realise you can’t redeem it. After that, you’re just watching the car fall off a cliff in free-fall, with AP Dhillon playing in the background, the doors are coming off, and everyone inside is doing drugs in a banquet-hall-style pub. Stop critiquing. Embrace it.

The “banquet-hall pub” is a Buffalo Intellectual specialty — the observation that Noida’s most upscale bars in Galleria Market all look like wedding venues. Loud, decorated, ugly in the same way, staffed by people who are visibly miserable, music turned up to drown the design out. He frames it as picking-fault aesthetics — the ruling class can’t actually do detail (cinema, design, urbanism, food safety) so they substitute volume. They can’t make the thing; they can only make a louder, bigger version of the thing.

Where do you even go

If India is broken, where do you flee? They run through the options like a checklist.

US: doors closing under Trump, immigration tightening, Indian-American conservatives discovering that loyalty to Trump doesn’t mean Trump is loyal back.

Europe: comprehensively done.

Dubai: full of the same Noida real-estate guys who’ve now relocated their dysfunction to a different climate.

Singapore: gatekept by Chinese language requirements that nobody learns.

Australia and New Zealand: the protests against Indian diaspora behaviour are now regular news. Sikh celebrations being heckled. Garba routines being performed in Burj Khalifa lobbies and on Texas riverbanks. Chhath Puja in Texas rivers. The diaspora got too confident, fed by the Vishwa Guru online narrative, and stopped doing the nineties routine of “keep quiet and assimilate.” Now they’re being read as the local crinj-uncle population in three different continents.

The hosts have a useful frame for this. The migration cohort that left in the nineties knew they were guests. The cohort leaving now believes they are bringing India to the host country. The Bihari samosa cart in London — viral on Instagram, abusing customers in Hindi for the camera — is the new mascot.

The Outsider Industry

A great mid-section riff on the fact that every successful person in Bombay now claims to be an outsider. Veer Das writes a book called Outsider in which the lead anecdote is — I’m not exaggerating — that his grandfather got a Padma Shri and Tom Alter showed up at the celebration party. That’s the outsider story. They list Raghav Chadha doing the same routine in Parliament. The Kapoors are technically outsiders. Tendulkar is technically an outsider. By the operating definition, only old Parsi families in Colaba qualify as insiders.

The hosts call this Old Savarna Self-Mythology. The function of the outsider story is structural, not biographical. To be a person of consequence in modern India, you must claim that your success was earned through “intense labour.” You cannot say “I inherited it.” So everyone — every doctor’s son, every industrialist’s daughter — invents a struggle narrative. The trick stops working as information democratises and the actually-outside people start arriving and outperforming the inheritors.

This is the cleanest piece of social criticism in the episode. The outsider claim isn’t a lie individuals tell. It’s a script the class as a whole has agreed to recite, because the alternative — admitting that the door was already open — would dissolve the legitimacy of their position.

The Sundar Nursery Lament

A short, vicious section on the Hindustan Times-style lament: Sundar Nursery used to be empty and lovely, now there’s traffic, the government must do something. The hosts read this as the cry of a small English-speaking class who built their identity in 2010-2015 on cultural gatekeeping — knowing the cool café before it was cool, knowing the bar before it filled up. As that gatekeeping evaporates, the class has nothing left. They become, in Anurag’s phrase, the most annoying, boring, banal, kind-of-old-uncle type of group — writing op-eds about the death of their personal aesthetic, blaming Bharat for ruining India.

Parliament and Podcast Brain

A short, joyful detour into Raghav Chadha demanding in Parliament that samosa sizes be standardised across India (“Bihar ka bachcha bachcha sab same size of samosa want”), and that toilet flush water pressure be regulated nationally so the commode is properly cleaned. Buffalo Intellectual’s verdict: Chadha has fully internalised the podcaster persona — politics as content, parliament as a stand-up stage.

The Brand Manager Doom Loop

The closing section is the most useful for anyone in the content economy. The hosts identify a feedback loop:

Brand managers are MBAs who think they understand culture and operate in the most uncreative, antiseptic way possible.
They go to content creators who are also timid, terrified of losing the next fifteen brand deals.
The creator agrees to “no swearing, no controversy, three claps and a deal.”
The output is so sanitised that nobody — not the brand, not the creator, not the audience — gets value.
Goto 1.

The fix, they argue, is for creators to push back, educate the brand, and refuse the antiseptic frame. Anurag points out that his own podcast has run five years without brand sponsorship, on memberships and YouTube revenue alone, mostly because the moment you let the brand-manager-creator pact in, the show dies in the way every other Bombay-circuit podcast has died.

Key Takeaways

Noida-as-honest-city is a useful frame for any Indian city — strip the brand and what remains is the real product.
Calling a film “propaganda” is lazy criticism; every film is an expression of its maker’s politics. The real critique of Aditya Dhar is that he takes himself too seriously and the craft is in service of nothing.
The fake-everything economy has passed the threshold where critique works. The civic-minded response isn’t outrage; it’s, in their reading, dark laughter and reduced exposure.
The diaspora’s behaviour abroad has flipped — from nineties-style assimilation to performative Indian-ness in foreign public spaces, and the host countries are starting to push back.
The “outsider in Bombay” claim is a class-wide script, not a personal story. It exists to obscure inheritance.
The brand-manager / content-creator pact produces sanitised content that fails everyone. Push back or operate without it.
A consistent thesis: the Indian ruling class — political, cinematic, urbanist — substitutes volume for craft because it cannot do detail.

Claude’s Take

This is two friends talking, not a structured argument. Some of the riffs are sharp — the outsider mythology section, the brand-manager doom loop, Dhar-as-true-believer rather than opportunist. The Noida frame is genuinely good and worth keeping in your back pocket the next time someone laments a North Indian city.

Some of it is the standard online-left grievance circuit. The diaspora-cringe section is funny but it’s also the kind of thing that gets posted on every Indian Twitter timeline twice a week. The Hindustan Times Sundar Nursery joke is almost exactly the joke Buffalo Intellectual makes on his Substack monthly. The Veer Das Outsider takedown is fair but four years late.

What the episode does well is texture — they keep the same conversation going for 82 minutes without checking notes, which is the whole appeal of the Diss-Course format. What it doesn’t do is reach. There’s no encounter with anything outside their own priors. Every villain is a known villain (Aditya Dhar, NRI uncles, brand managers, English-speaking Delhi liberals), every diagnosis confirms what the host already thinks. If you already share their politics, this is comfort food. If you don’t, it’ll annoy you in fairly predictable ways.

Where it does cut deeper — and this is what saves it — is the closing move on critique itself. The line “you stop critiquing something when you realise you can’t redeem it; after that, you just watch the car fall” is the most honest sentence in the episode. It’s the thing public-intellectual culture in India hasn’t quite been willing to admit. Once you do admit it, the question of what to do next becomes interesting. They don’t answer it. But they do at least name it, which is more than the Sundar Nursery op-ed crowd manages.

A 7. Worth listening to once if you follow Indian cultural commentary, skippable otherwise.