Politics of Everyday Consumption

Not through protests or bans, but through small, everyday choices, consumers in India and China are rewriting the rules of globalization—and unsettling the West's cultural script

- MOUSUMI ROY

There was a time when queuing outside a fast-food outlet meant queuing up for a slice of modern life. Today, the same neon lights flicker over emptier counters, and the silence feels political. The world's most powerful brands are discovering that the most radical rebellions may begin not with riots, but with appetites that quietly turn away. A quiet rebellion is unfolding across the streets of Shanghai and New Delhi. The golden arches of McDonald's, once shorthand for aspiration and global belonging, are no longer as invincible as they seemed. Where queues once snaked outside for Big Macs and McFlurries, a new mood is emerging. It is not a fiery uprising or a state-sanctioned embargo, but something subtler and, in some ways, more powerful: consumers quietly choosing to turn away. The message is unmistakable: we no longer need your burgers to feel modern.

Echoes of Tagore and Swadeshi This moment carries a haunting literary resonance. In Ghare Baire (The Home and the World), Rabindranath Tagore wrestled with the emotional dilemmas of the Swadeshi movement, when rejecting foreign cloth was as much about identity as economics. Tagore's characters demonstrate that boycotts are never merely transactional; they permeate friendships, strain families, and blur the line between national pride and personal cost. Today's unease with McDonald's in India is not far removed from that century-old tension. Then it was Manchester cloth; now it is the burger. Both become symbols onto which more profound anxieties are projected: sovereignty, dignity, and the right to define one's modernity.