India’s most perceptive cultural critic, Santosh Desai, returns with a sharp, witty and deeply human portrait of how smartphones have silently rewritten the script of everyday life. His new book, Memes for Mummyji, releasing on 27 November, examines how the device in our pockets has become the centre of our universe—and what that says about us as a society.

A Book About Us—Not About Technology

Selfies, WhatsApp forwards, family groups, protest hashtags, online shopping lists, Tinder heartbreaks—the book connects these everyday acts to the tectonic cultural shifts happening beneath the surface. With Desai’s trademark blend of humour and insight, Memes for Mummyji reveals how the mobile phone has become the pressure cooker of modern India: ordinary, indispensable, and quietly revolutionary.

This is an exploration of the “invisible software” that shapes how Indians today love, argue, parent, pray, protest and dream. Drawn from over a decade of Desai’s writing and observations, the book reads like a warm, sharply observant letter to an India caught mid-transition—between comfort and chaos, tradition and disruption.

Early Praise

• “Memes for Mummyji is required reading for anyone trying to get a handle on Hindustan.” — Mukul Kesavan
• “Santosh Desai provides penetrating insights into our sense of self.” — Pratap Bhanu Mehta

What the Book Explores

• How selfies changed the way we perform our identities
• Why WhatsApp memes reveal more about family, politics and social anxieties than we think
• The evolution of modern love in the era of endless scrolling
• How the phone has democratized expression, yet deepened certain fractures
• The quiet revolutions inside homes, workplaces and relationships
• The emergence of a new political vocabulary shaped by screens

About the Author

Santosh Desai—social commentator, author of Mother Pious Lady and columnist behind City City Bang Bang—has long chronicled the everyday theatre of Indian life. With decades of experience in advertising, brand strategy and cultural analysis, he brings a rare combination of clarity, empathy and humour to understanding modern India. A graduate of Economics and an alumnus of IIM Ahmedabad, he is also a founder at Think9 Consumer Technologies.