OTT platforms in 2025 did a good job of bringing the Northeast into Indian living rooms with unprecedented frequency, but on the other hand, young people from the region continued to face humiliation, suspicion, and violence in everyday public spaces.
In January 2025, Paatal Lok returned to streaming screens with its much-anticipated Season 2. It integrated local settings, languages (including Nagamese), and actors from the region into its world.
This was a notable shift in mainstream streaming content, compelling viewers to confront a region historically absent or exoticised in popular media.
Two more high-profile, widely watched mainstream shows, The Family Man Season 3 and Delhi Crime Season 3, released in 2025, also located major parts of their narratives in the Northeast.
To understand why these shows mattered, one has to return briefly to 2022 and Anek. The trailer of Anek got me very interested; it looked serious. It looked like finally the Hindi film industry had managed to produce a responsible portrayal of the Northeast. But I was wrong.
The disappointing aspect of Anek was that it discovered the Northeast as a homogeneous idea. Throughout the film, vehicles appeared with number plates beginning with “NE”. To anyone who has lived in or even travelled through the Northeast, this was immediately wrong. There is no single “NE”. There are states with their own distinctive identities. Assam is not Tripura. Manipur is not Nagaland. Mizoram is not Arunachal Pradesh.
This is only one of the many problems of the film. There’s a very old problem dressed up as inclusivity: representation without understanding. This is why the three shows in 2025 felt different. They surely had their shortcomings, but there was a slight attentiveness in their approach that had been missing before.
According to The Great Indian Travel Index 2025 by ixigo, OTT shows contributed to a significant surge in travel demand to northeastern cities, with flight bookings to destinations such as Dimapur, Agartala, Guwahati, Imphal, and Itanagar rising sharply in 2025 compared to the previous year.
At this point, the article could have continued differently. It could have celebrated 2025 as a turning point. It could have been about how mainstream storytelling was finally learning to move away from lazy generalisations. I had material for this argument—plenty of it. It could have ended with cautious optimism.
But it’s a painful punch to the gut that I cannot write that ending.
In December 2025, Anjel Chakma, a young student from Tripura, was attacked in Dehradun. The details, when they emerged, were depressingly familiar—from verbal harassment to racial slurs escalating into physical violence.
Anjel spent days in critical condition. Long enough, perhaps, for hope to flicker. Long enough for the country to look away briefly before looking back too late. His repeated cries of “I am an Indian, not Chinese” did not save him.
This reveals that the street always remembers a different story than the screen. On screen, northeastern identities were beginning to be treated with nuance. On the street, northeastern bodies were still read through suspicion, mockery, and racialised othering.
In the weeks following Anjel Chakma’s death, social media was flooded with grief, anger, and solidarity—candlelight marches, editorials, and countless influencer videos on the “issue”. But we have seen all of this before, and history suggests that such moments do not translate into change in everyday reality.
There is a phrase that returns to me again and again when thinking about this moment: almost. The screen almost learned how to see the Northeast. The nation almost began to listen. Representation almost did its job.
But almost is not enough. Almost does not protect a young man walking down a street. Almost does not stop a crowd from turning cruel. Almost does not change how institutions respond to racial violence.
If the tragedy of Anjel Chakma is to mean anything beyond grief, it must push the conversation beyond representation. I know it is tempting, especially for those invested in cultural production, to believe that better stories will fix this—that if people see the Northeast portrayed with care, empathy will follow naturally. But empathy is not automatic. And representation, no matter how sensitive, has limits.
You can watch your culture be admired on Netflix or Prime Video at night and be laughed at for your accent the next morning. You can see your homeland framed beautifully on screen and still be asked, again and again, where you are “really” from.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor labelled the incident a “national disgrace”. But honestly, when his repeated cries of “I am an Indian, not Chinese” could not save him because his face didn’t fit the idea of who an Indian is supposed to look like, it reveals a failure of a nation’s imagination.