Present Tense is The Swaddle Team's stream of consciousness response to the world's madness.

Zayn Malik just made a song hinting at the racism he faced while he was in One Direction, and is this really a surprise to anybody? Racism against South Asians never really went away, it was only pushed into corporatized DEI-speak about whether or not White people can listen and learn and wear bindis or make dosas. But now the masks are off: we are back to the glory days of stupid, cartoon, Apu-from-The-Simpsons levels of racism. On Instagram, Indian-American content creators suddenly have a deluge of hate in the comments (“ignore the positive comments <3”). Earlier this year on X, the “smell doctor” – Dr. Ally Louks – got briefly cancelled for calling out a Black woman for saying that Indians smell.

Today's racism is so crazy that it almost makes us feel bad for the brown people we don't even like. Earlier this year, a conservative influencer named Laura Loomer, who accompanied Trump on some campaign stops, said this about Vivek Ramaswmay’s position on H1 visas: "We are substituting a third world migrant invasion for a third world tech invasion. Same shit… Except this invasion won't be done by rapist foreigners who look and smell like garbage. It will be done by career leftist tech billionaires who hate Trump deep down inside."

Despite brown people having done their very best to assimilate into a coterie of raceless xenophobic Avengers – see Rishi Sunak, Priti Patel, et al. – all of it was in vain. They, like the rest of us, continue to get the same comments about smell, appearance; the commenters in question continue to be incentivized to keep being openly racist. Like when they re-hired the DOGE official who posted “normalize Indian hate.” American Vice President JD Vance supported the DOGE guy’s re-hiring, despite his own wife, Usha Vance, being of Indian descent. (“Will there be a cow in the White House soon?” an X user wondered as they pondered the meaning of an Indian-origin, Hindu Second Lady.) Elon Musk agreed with a British MP who didn’t like that the London tube had a sign in Bengali. People got mad about Burger King ads in Punjabi on Canadian TV.

The sad thing about all this is that this racism is not even sophisticated. It’s not the kind one could make horror films like Get Out about. It’s so dumb that it’s more confusing than hurtful. It’s the kind of blatant racism that leans into 19th century race-science tropes. Even getting into this debate is a lost cause. Only Grok is defending Indians from racism now, but now the AI chatbot is under scrutiny for also becoming racist in a different way.

Speaking of AI, IIT-KGP announced a two-pronged plan to address poor mental health on campus: AI tools and "campus mothers." It's exactly what it sounds like. Just when you might have thought gender stereotypes are a tired conversation, the genders have never been stereotyped harder. Exhibit B: muscles are back. Ranveer Singh is going to be in a movie called Dhurandar and it's not clear what it's about. Nothing is in fact clear, except for his imposing physique. Why are all the men looking like this these days? The Chad-ification of masculinity – comically ripped and a somewhat masochistic incel fantasy – is well underway in India. We should have seen the writing on the wall when they gave SRK this body in Pathan, or when Ranbir Kapoor's character strutted around naked in a body-builder-like way in Animal. Vicky Kaushal in Chhava was mostly screaming and flexing his biceps. And just like that we've resurrected another cartoon character: Johnny Bravo!

For news from the world of femininity, look no further than the Kardashians. Butts are out – they all got rid of their BBLs. Boobs and facelifts are in – they're finally dishing all the deets about their docs. In summary: try and draw stick figures of the aspirational man and woman today; they'll both have enhancements in their upper torsos and nowhere else. In the aughts, we used to call this plastic in a derogatory way. But that's not cool anymore because all of us are full of plastic anyway, thanks to microplastics in the food, water, air, soil, plasma, dark matter, god particles, etc.

In conclusion: body standards are looking pretty bleak right now. But here is a last gasp at finding meaning this Friday. In the top position for the new body standard, may we present: Moo Deng. She turns one today! Happy birthday to the last celebrity untouched by racism and Ozempic.