On September 22, 2008, Kunal Nayyar and Jim Parsons had a simple exchange on the sitcom The Big Bang Theory where both actors misidentified actress Ameesha Patel as Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. An innocuous enough exchange, if not for one tiny problem. The early 2000’s were a golden era for comedy, not just in the States, but also in India. Problematic comments and jokes were not just swept under the rug but also laughed at shamelessly. So much so, that until recently, Linus Sebastian (of Linus Tech Tips and Linus Media Group) thought that the “hard R” refers to the ableist slur r*tard. But just like back in the golden 2000’s and 2010’s, Bollywood actors and actresses from the Baby Boomer generation are way out of touch with humour, and their own inflated ego prevents them from seeing that nobody cares about their opinions online. Unfortunately for the vast majority of Indians living in India nowadays, a very large percentage of Gen X and even millennial adults share the same conservative views as Jaya Bachchan, wife of Shri Amitabh Bachchan, and mother-in-law of Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, and this time Netflix is caught in the crossfire.

To give a bit of context, we need to go back in time to 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was still looming, and the ultra-conservative Narendra Modi-led BJP government was using the prevailing Sinophobic sentiment in India to not just milk votes, but also to go on a “digital strike” on China, a dick-measuring competition as silly as Sneako’s (mostly one-sided) beef with Charles White Jr. This “digital strike”, among other things, included a ban on Chinese apps like PUBG Mobile and TikTok. Though PUBG Mobile was replaced first by a mediocre Indian clone called FAU-G, that was almost universally hated, and then by Battlegrounds Mobile India, a PUBG clone by Krafton Inc. that does not include the Tencent branding. A similar, though less drastic thing happened with TikTok, as apps like MX TakaTak (now known as Moj) hilariously tried replicating the success of TikTok by appealing to cringy and in general unfunny content creators that made the TikTok ban in India seem like a blessing in disguise. Meta, Instagram’s parent company also capitalized on this by pushing Reels as the next big thing, first in India, and then worldwide, leading to an unfortunate domino effect, where in 2023, short-form content is booming, and seems to have led to many small-time creators finding success, but also leading to many content creators struggling to fit their thoughts into 60–90 seconds of short-form audiovisual content, a trend that seems to have been copied — for better or for worse — by Spotify AB. And while the US seems to be following India’s suit in banning TikTok, it still very much has a sizeable presence in the European Union and European Economic Area.

So what does all of this have to do with piracy? Well, unfortunately, India has a reputation for banning things that do not fit a certain conservative narrative, or otherwise hurt the sentiments of the snowflakey sex-negative right wing conservatives in any way. It’s why, to this date, PG-13 Marvel movies continue to be censored in India for their theatrical release. From the boycott campaigns on Twitter, to hateful trolls completely ruining the domestic box office collection of movies from once-beloved movie stars like Aamir Khan, India is slowly but steadily becoming the next China. Combined with an aggressive resistance to decentralized finance, along with absurdly high shipping fees for foreign physical media (including manga and comic books as well) to the country, Indians cannot help but pirate, due to the poor Purchasing Power Parity of the populace. And the latest lawsuit against Netflix is the latest of atrocities to further add fuel to the flames of “ban-chod” India.

The ban on public tracker Nyaa Torrents in 2020, then, for example, did absolutely nothing to stop any of this. Anime piracy, for instance, continues to thrive in the country via DDL communities, and shady streaming sites like 9anime and AniMixPlay. A similar thing is happening with live-action content (including but not limited to Asian content such as J-Drama or K-Drama), where illicit streams and direct downloads are being shared quite cavalierly on messaging apps like Telegram and WhatsApp Messenger, despite the latter of these not being encrypted end-to-end, and the former quite aggressively cracking down on piracy. Even with the VPN ban, many Indians find increasingly creative ways to circumvent the government’s best efforts to thwart their piracy, for example by simply changing their DNS, even with the Indian government’s directive to order all VPN providers to keep logs of their customers, effectively banning most reputable VPN providers from providing services to Indian customers, on the simple grounds that they refuse to keep logs of their customers as per company policy. And because the government’s peculiar approach to try and stop piracy (India’s copyright law is hilariously lax and prone to abuse, not to mention highly ineffective) does about as much as hitting a slab of pumice with a feather, Indians are shamelessly (though a bit less openly) committing acts of severe copyright infringement routinely. Though many private trackers (henceforth referred to as PTs) expressly prohibit certain countries’ members from joining (including those from India), a fair percentage have no such qualms, and allow Indians to join, so long as they are able to maintain an acceptable ratio and not hit and run like most of their “curry” peers are wont to do. As a matter of fact, there are quite a few homegrown Indian PTs that host Bollywood and other Indian content. This access to private trackers via the invite system, applications and interviews gives a lot of urban Indian netizens a sense of superiority and belonging, and combined with the general lack of content on streaming services in India, as well as an expensive streaming and gaming market by Indian standards (even with regional pricing) it means that Indians will not stop pirating anytime soon, especially not the “private tracker elite”. Even with an outright ban on VPNs, The Onion Router or DNS changing apps, the shrewd Indian will no doubt find a way to access content illicitly without paying a single dime. And until legitimate, legal content providers make it easier and way less taxing both mentally and financially, to access their content — unchanged, uncensored, and with acceptable bitrate and dynamic range — in the country, piracy shall continue to reign supreme in India.