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

Is Covid19 back? Yes, but not in the same way. Stay with us for a super fast primer in the next two paragraphs, before we get to the real programming.

Every virus adapts to its circumstances and mutates. The mutated form of the original virus is called a variant. Variants differ from the original virus in their transmissibility – the mutation, after all, adapts such that the virus can evade collective immunity through vaccines or previous infections. That means new variants spread faster. Does that make them deadlier? Not really.

The Omicron variant of Covid19 was the dominant variant towards the end of the pandemic. It's the variants of Omicron (NB.1.8.1 and LF.7) that are responsible for the uptick of Covid19 cases in India at the moment. They spread faster, and the World Health Organization has classified them both as Variants Under Monitoring (VUM). But experts across the world note that these variants do not lead to severe illness as compared to previous variants. In other words, Covid19 in 2025 is a milder disease.

The real cause for concern, however, has less to do with the severity of Covid19 and more to do with public healthcare and lessons learnt from the past. Do people have access to booster shots of the Covid19 vaccine? What’s up with the vaccine research anyway? What about the research on long-Covid? Questions that, for now, remain less relevant than –

– Sari-gate! Or Alia Bhatt’s “sari-inspired dress,” which Gucci simply called a “dress,” much to the chagrin of the South Asian community. Random side-note: remember when Gwen Stefani called herself Japanese, and how upset we all were? It feels silly now. So does the sari debate dominating algorithms for nearly a week while everything else is going on.

But it’s also uninteresting to keep complaining that things happen while other things are happening. So what now? Maybe this is a result of not having settled some debates – such as the debate on cultural appropriation, the debate on celebrity culture during wars, the debate on South Asian representation at international forums. We keep talking about these things without landing anywhere particularly revelatory. This is probably the fate of a post-media world – a term that we just coined, thank you – where everything is cyclical, nothing is really “news” so much as it is a dinner party topic, a little thing exists on the same plane of relevance as a bigger thing, and everything is a brand.

Which is to say that maybe, in this confused shitshow of meaningless slop of hyper-individualized, hyper-personalized, hyper-branded content, you only matter if you can turn your opinions, your thoughts, your intellect, your style, your humour, your sensibility, and your self of self into a brand for consumption. Hence the deluge of opinion pieces on Alia Bhatt’s sari and the takes about saris as a garment of anti-colonial resistance or a symbol of generational inheritance; hence the personal essays on somebody’s mother’s or grandmother’s sari being a poignant memory; hence the me-ificication of everything that ever happens in the world.

Moving on to the rest of the recap: Sandeep Reddy Vanga is in the news, crying once again as a Twitter user aptly noted. What about? An unnamed person’s fake feminism of course. Except the unnamed person is allegedly Deepika Padukone, who reportedly was replaced in his next movie due to high fees and an 8-hour work schedule. She is right of course, and he is wrong. That was never in debate. The real question is what Deepika Padukone was doing, associated with a Sandeep Reddy Vanga movie, in the first place. Is this the future of cinema?

Also, it seems like Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, took a light punch to the face from a mysterious arm clad in red, allegedly his wife Brigitte Macron’s. A different and figurative punch – to the gut – was to Swifties, who are upset that Taylor Swift did not attend the American Music Awards, nor did she win any award. Everybody speculated that she would announce the re-released Reputation album there, and social media was full of easter eggs and clues (the number “26” everywhere) pointing to this hypothesis that sadly proved untrue. Instead, Billie Elish won everything. What’s going on? Is a conspiracy afoot? Find out in the next Taylor Swift website clue located at exactly a 13-degree angle from the S-shaped snake insignia on the vinyl record secretly on sale on 8th June, which happens to be Kanye West’s birthday.

Two more things for the week: ANI issued a copyright strike, and now a defamation suit, against the YouTuber Mohak Mangal for using a few seconds of their footage in his videos. ANI is a wire service, which means it owns pictures and videos that it sells to news organizations, who are subscribed to be able to syndicate this material. YouTube’s “fair use” principle allows for using copyrighted material for informational or educational purposes, but this is a tricky legal situation. Comedian Kunal Kamra and fact-checker Mohammed Zubair are included as defendants in the suit, for sharing the implicated video on their X handles.

Copyright, apparently, is more protected today than free speech. As in the case of a 19-year-old engineering student who was arrested by the Maharashtra Police because she shared a post that was critical of Operation Sindoor. Though the Bombay High Court has ordered her immediate release, the student has now been rusticated from her college. The police booked her under Sections 152, 196, 197, 299, 352, and 353 of Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita, 2023. You should check them out. These are the sections pertaining to, in order: acts endangering the sovereignty and integrity of India, promoting enmity between different groups, imputations prejudicial to national integration, deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage religious feelings, intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace, and statements conducing to public mischief.

Yup, that’s where we’re at now!