I remember back in 2008, when Himesh Reshammiya announced his new film Karzzzz, I joked to my friends that all those extra Zs were metaphors for how sleepy you’re going to be in cinema halls. Nevertheless I wanted to watch the film very badly. But it was nearly impossible to find anyone willing to go. The attendance sheet in our engineering college was sacred paper, and one couldn’t afford to bunk many classes. Eventually, I found one friend who had no great hope in life to join me. It was clear that the ritual of going to theatre and watching the film was not done for any fandom of Himesh but for performing irony that one could be so nonsensical and fully submit to a euphoria of breaking a taboo.

That you could waste time, money, and dignity, just to mock the idea of taste. The same ritual was performed for another cinematic grenade released in the same year (2008): Deshdrohi by Kamal R Khan.

These were pre-social media times where sincerity had some social capital. Orkut was around, yes but it wasn’t the nerve centre of culture. Taste still lived offline, and Himesh’s music was seen as a guilty pleasure at best, and cultural pollution at worst. A certain class dismissed this music as something enjoyed by “those people” who typed lyk dis.

This was also the golden age of musical elitism. If you weren’t listening to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, System of a Down, or Aerosmith, you were probably a disgrace. Enrique Iglesias was the last acceptable step before the fall. Himesh’s music genre wasn’t rock but he did repeat an Indic phrase he himself invented: Jai Mata Di, Let’s rock.

In that cultural climate, openly liking someone as massy as Himesh was looked down upon. In fact, if you said it out loud in certain circles that you like Himesh’s songs then the reaction was similar to how the internet now looks at Kanwariyas: with disdain and disgust. The only difference is, Himesh fans danced to the beat. Kanwariyas today dance and beat.

Which is why it’s mildly surreal to now see people attending Himesh’s concerts and writing on social media, “Reliving my nostalgia.”

This was the same music that once came with social penalties. Hence my

point is that it isn’t a beautiful nostalgia but a stigmatised nostalgia, reluctantly allowed to become memory. The kind that carries a faint trace of guilt, like remembering a love you once denied having.

Maybe that’s what this is: a repressed nostalgia finally finding its moment because now the cultural wave has changed and what was disgusting has become cool. But how did this happen?

I grew up in Rajasthan and growing up in the small towns of this part of the world meant you didn’t choose your soundtrack: it chose you. There was no curated playlist of the Spotify era. Just Nadeem-Shravan’s jhankaar beats giving way to Himesh Reshammiya’s nasal melancholy. The songs poured out of autos, state sponsored buses, on radios of kachori sellers, at salons, and through the cracked earphones of bank PO aspirants looking out of the window in a lonely rented room.

For a particular class, these songs weren’t guilty pleasures, they were in fact emotional infrastructure.

Their hope, love, longing, sadness and dance were tied to the emotional frequency of these songs. This music might have been cringe to some, catharsis to others.

But as I said, it was limited to these pockets and class of people and a certain urban population never liked this music. With the arrival of the internet, something curious happened. Irony became a lens through which reality, fiction, performance, and sincerity all collapsed into one chaotic tunnel.

One of the early examples of this shift was Pretentious Movie Reviews by comedians Biswa and Kanan Gill. They reviewed bad films, performed their failure, turning films such as Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon into a grand comedic event under labels like “Most Acting Ever”.

In hindsight, this marked one of the first major reorientations in Indian internet culture where “cringe” became content which can be enjoyed.

Among the wreckage rose Gunda, a film that mutated from VHS trash to ironic treasure. Fan blogs dissected its absurdities. Meme pages later canonised lines like “Bulla rakhta hoon khula”. Kanti Shah became, ironically of course, the auteur of B-movie maximalism as India’s Oliver Stone of pulp.

From 2008 to 2010, IMDb saw a flood of ironic 10/10 ratings, not because people believed it was a great film, but because it was part of a collective joke. By then, nobody was sure if they actually liked Gunda or if the liking was just an extended performance. Which, in the post-ironic internet, might be the same thing.

As internet culture evolved, it began mass-producing ironic fandoms and these were fandoms that didn’t need sincerity to survive. Emraan Hashmi, whose identity was a pun on serial killer, was reborn online as Lord Imraan. The same audiences that once mocked his films and felt disgust now elevated him through meme pages and ironic reels, performing nostalgia for a cultural phase they never admitted liking the first time around.

Bobby Deol followed a similar trajectory. A once-forgotten actor who struggled to find much success in Bollywood later rebranded as Lord Bobby. Which is interesting for someone like me who has a soft corner for underdogs as here the internet turned failure into a style.

The revival of Himesh Reshammiya as an icon of ironic devotion began with pages like Surrogasm (a cheeky mix of Suroor and orgasm) that reintroduced him to Gen Z and other audiences not as a relic, but as a riddle. The page captured the cultural hesitation: are we allowed to love this? Is it cringe or camp or something more transcendent? By dissecting the aesthetic excess and accidental genius of Himesh’s music, they carved out a legitimate space for ironic fandom.

Later, accounts like Himesh Doing Things took it further, turning his routine moments into surreal, looping theatre. And thus, Himesh became not just a man with a cap and a mic, but a lowercase god of post-ironic worship: Lord Himesh.In fact, the whole idea of calling someone “Lord” is just ironic surrender. The same tag was handed to Puneet Superstar, who became one of the internet’s many accidental icons. At one point, he was anointed Lord Puneet, and the internet fully entered a trance: posting, worshipping, meme-ing.

Puneetism became a brief religion.

Today, Puneet has over 10 million followers. His stunts have escalated from drinking water from a dirty Noida drain to dipping bread into a pothole and eating it on camera. But gradually, he slipped out of the internet’s meme spotlight. Most of his Lord-followers have moved on and perhaps rightly so. That’s the shelf life of ironic affection: intense, viral, and fundamentally disposable.

But this is also where internet irony becomes both beautiful and disturbing. The fact that it demands no real attachment is part of its appeal and on a smaller level also part of the problem.

Being a fan once meant emotional labour. If I liked a band, I had to find every track, listen closely, and understand their sound. If I admired a writer, I wanted to know how she thought, what she believed, and whether I’d ever meet her. That question, Will I ever meet my idol? became a quiet obsession. And if you did meet them, you might shiver, shake, even cry. Because that’s what years of silent loyalty look like

when they finally find a form.

Take it to the extreme and you’ll find stories from the South, where fans have died when their favourite stars passed away, or got injured in stampedes at movie launches.

Hence the charm of ironic fandom is that it asks for nothing in return from fans. We are free of our duties as fans. No loyalty, no backstory, no emotional labour.It’s quite relaxing. It’s like your leg shaking unconsciously at a bar when a generic house music plays. You’re not really listening, but your body responds anyway. You don’t need to know the lyrics, or track the instruments. You’re free. Detached, but

moving.

But irony, too, is complicated. It demands a kind of delusion; a necessary defence mechanism to keep living. Even the hope that “everything will be alright” carries a hint of irony now. You don’t really believe it, but you perform that belief just enough to stay functional. So irony, followed by post-irony, becomes essential for survival. Especially in a time like ours, where meaning, logic, and coherence seem to be in

permanent breakdown. Irony, in that sense, is also a form of ideology where it allows us to say everything while believing nothing.

Or perhaps Irony is our collective placebo. We know it’s fake, we know it doesn’t heal but without it, the pain might become visible.

Hence, what irony really needs is visible enthusiasm and fake passion. A performance of joy. You don’t just consume ironically but you need to signal it, stage it, and convert it into the content cycle to vibe with your fellow irony enjoyers.

When we went to watch Himesh’s new film Badass Ravi Kumar, obviously out of irony, the joke started wearing thin by the 45-minute mark. The shamanic trance never arrived which we were expecting from the movie. But as I said on the internet, irony operates differently. It’s not about feeling but about performing the idea of feeling. Hence post interval we started dancing. Not out of joy, but to maintain the illusion of joy. We performed pleasure so well that we could scroll back later and rewatch ourselves enjoying it. We didn’t love the film but we loved the footage of our own ironic surrender.

In that sense, this is no longer irony. Not even post-irony. This is a recursive cultural loop, a kind of post-ironic inception, where pretending to pretend becomes indistinguishable from belief. And maybe that’s what the internet truly offers, which is not the sincere experience but the perfectly memeable shadow of an enjoyable experience.

This is a kind of internet spirituality which is also a parody of religion that works exactly like the real thing: through repetition, ritual, and the suppression of doubt.

But irony, which is very enjoyable, may also have some side effects. Over time, it gets harder to tell where the performance ends and you begin. The difference between what was done for the timeline and what was actually felt becomes blurry. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe this cheerful numbness is just another acceptable mood now. A kind of low-resolution sadness that photographs well.

Perhaps cheerful numbness isn’t emptiness at all, but a mood native to the digital age. An e-feeling which is flattened, part of trend, and designed for circulation. This e-feeling is less about inner experience and more about staying in the loop. A compulsive desire to participate, to post, to not miss out. It is joy restructured as a pre-emptive strike against FOMO.

Even if we’ve long forgotten whether the performance of joy began as a joke.

As the poem in Udaan movie puts it:

“Nange pair chalte chalte hum itni door aa gaye ki ab bhool gaye ki joote kahaan utaare the.”

(We kept walking barefoot for so long, we’ve forgotten where we took our shoes off.)

This piece was first published on theculturecafe.in. 

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