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

There's something odd going on with the hype around Saiyaara, YRF's latest that's being touted as the end of Bollywood's dry spell. The film itself doesn't seem to be as relevant as the story being told around it. The two leads are conspicuously absent from interviews and high-visibility promotions. Instead, the marketing strategy revolves around telling us that GenZ is crying a lot over this movie.

Low-key is the new high-key. Chances are that the only thing you've heard about this movie is the fact that this movie is a thing. Like culturally. Many are claiming that it is the grand return of sweeping romantic tragedies. Several A-list celebrities have invested precious social media real estate in posts with lengthy captions about the birth of new stars. Nevermind that the copy is almost certainly ChatGPT ("it's not just a film—it's a moment").

The discourse primarily boils down to this: a longing for stardom and aura in our celebrities. Everybody knows it's missing from the zeitgeist and that the culture industry is suffering as a result. So it's important to establish its return, because there's no story more romantic than a comeback story. The fact that (seemingly) the best thing to have happened to Hindi cinema in years is a nostalgia vehicle positioned as GenZ's [insert defining boomer/GenX/millennial genre film] means that we're still where we've been stuck for a while: in a place lacking inspiration or fresh insight about the world we're in right now. Granted, nostalgia has been the primary ingredient in everything that's a cultural success in 2025. But did we really need another tortured-man-innocent-muse storyline? It's giving beauty and the beast. It's giving BookTok tropes.

In other news: Harry Styles is making sex toys and Sydney Sweeney is selling American Eagle jeans. You could say they're celeb-brand-cousins: one is positioned as the feminist, sex-positive man written by a woman; the other is positioned as the pin-up poster sexy woman written by a man. One consistently performs for the "female gaze" (whose existence is debatable), the other for the male gaze (so they say). But can a person actively embody the male gaze and train it on themselves, or are we just saying that about anybody who's conventionally sexy these days? All we know is that Sydney Sweeney's campaign drove up American Eagle's share price. And this comes after she allowed a soap company to make soap from her bathwater (which sold out). She is frequently the subject of heated debates about women selling out and endorsing their own objectification. It might be tempting to give into the debate on who is or isn't objectifying themselves – until we remember that all celebrities are objects of our visual and cultural consumption and there's perhaps no such thing as objectifying your own self.

Finally, Trump recently revelled in the fact that Paramount cancelled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Colbert, a vocal critic of Trump, has insinuated that the show's cancellation comes in the wake of his joke that the network was bribing the government. Everybody is freaking out and calling this fascist. Someone made a poster that said "Colbert stays, Trump must go!" For all his merits as an anti-establishment voice, neither he nor most people who are currently outraged about his show's cancellation have said anything about the genocide in Gaza for close to two years. The images from there went from bombed children to starving children. In the end, Colbert too is a brand manufacturing the idea of speaking truth to power. Only, the kind of power being spoken to is not the one that's wiping a population off the face of the Earth.

In short, everything is manufactured authenticity – from PR about a movie, to branding, to political commentary. But perhaps the question is whether it is our complacency that is being manufactured. Because, like, where is the South Park episode on Gaza?