Some places enter our imagination long before we ever travel to them. Not dramatically, but gradually—through conversations, shared meals, passing references, photographs, music, and now, increasingly, through Instagram reels that appear between the routines of everyday scrolling.
For me, the Northeast was never entirely unfamiliar. Growing up in West Bengal, there was always a quiet presence of the region around us, even if we did not consciously recognise it. In school, I spent many lunch breaks with my friends Sharon Lyngdoh and Samantha Elwin from Meghalaya.
What began as ordinary conversations gradually became windows into another world. There were stories about Shillong’s rains, church choirs in the hills, music cafés, family gatherings during Christmas, and foods cooked with bamboo shoot and smoked meat that somehow felt both new and strangely familiar.
At that age, I did not realise that those conversations were shaping my understanding of the Northeast in ways textbooks never could. The region ceased to be a distant corner on a map and became something human and lived—something with which I could form an emotional connection.
That familiarity was perhaps also historically rooted. For decades, Kolkata functioned as an educational and cultural hub for students from across Northeast India. Young people from the region came to the city for education, music, medicine, and trade.
Their presence shaped Kolkata’s social and cultural fabric in subtle yet meaningful ways. Shared spaces—classrooms, hostels, cafés, churches, and college festivals—fostered everyday relationships that made the Northeast feel familiar rather than distant.
Over time, however, these older cultural connections began to weaken. As Kolkata gradually ceded its place to cities such as Bengaluru, Delhi, Pune, and Hyderabad as major educational destinations, the everyday interactions that once connected Bengal and the Northeast became less common.
For many younger Bengalis today, the Northeast feels geographically close yet socially distant—encountered more through digital screens than through everyday relationships.
Perhaps that is why Instagram reels have become such a powerful cultural force.
Today, in the age of digital media, a few seconds of scrolling can transport viewers into the hills of Meghalaya, the cafés of Shillong, the festivals of Mizoram, the vibrant celebrations of Nagaland’s Hornbill Festival, the monasteries of Arunachal Pradesh, the lakes of Manipur, the streets of Tripura, or the tea gardens of Assam.
Influencers have undeniably made the Northeast more visible to mainstream India than it has been in decades.
This visibility matters. For years, Northeast India remained underrepresented in national tourism narratives despite its immense ecological and cultural richness.
Social media has challenged that invisibility by making people curious about the region. It has encouraged travel beyond predictable circuits and drawn attention to places often overlooked by conventional tourism campaigns.
Yet this new visibility also warrants scrutiny.
What kind of Northeast are these reels presenting to us?
Too often, the region is packaged through familiar digital clichés—“hidden paradise”, “untouched landscapes”, or “offbeat escapes”. While these descriptions may appear celebratory, they quietly exoticise the region by presenting it as a spectacle to be discovered rather than as a complex, lived social world.
In the process, mountains become visual aesthetics, and communities risk being reduced to consumable content for the travelling gaze.
As I watch these reels, I often find myself caught between attraction and discomfort. Attraction, because they awaken the same curiosity I once felt while listening to my friends speak about their homes. Discomfort, because social media frequently transforms places into spectacles rather than spaces with layered histories, political realities, and everyday lives.
The Northeast should not have to exist as India’s “exotic frontier” to deserve attention.
Travel to the region must emerge more organically—from cultural curiosity, historical ties, shared food traditions, music, education, and human interaction. In many ways, the cultural similarities between Bengal and the Northeast already challenge the idea of distance.
Rice-based meals, smoked and fermented flavours, fish curries, mustard-based cooking, and community-centred dining traditions are reminders that eastern and northeastern India have always shared deeper continuities than mainstream narratives often acknowledge.
At the same time, influencer-driven tourism is changing the nature of travel itself. Increasingly, destinations are approached not as places to engage with but as content to capture and monetise.
The logic of the reel rewards spectacle, immediacy, and visual consumption. Yet regions such as the Northeast—with fragile ecologies and layered ethnic histories—cannot simply become viral aesthetics without consequences.
The challenge, therefore, is not visibility itself. Northeast India deserves visibility, investment, and meaningful engagement. The real challenge is ensuring that visibility does not become commodification.
Perhaps that is also what these reels have made me realise personally. The more I watch them, the more I feel the need to step away from the screen and encounter the region differently—not through drone shots or curated itineraries, but through conversations, shared meals, local stories, and unhurried travel.
In many ways, I feel I owe that journey to the memories that first introduced me to the Northeast—not to algorithms, but to friendship.
And perhaps that is the deeper question social media leaves us with: can these reels become gateways to genuine understanding, or will they merely encourage us to consume places visually before moving on to the next destination in our feeds?
For me, at least, the answer lies in eventually travelling there myself—not to “discover” the Northeast, but to see with my own eyes the places that first entered my imagination years ago during ordinary lunch breaks at school.
Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s stance on this or any other issue. The author is a social historian and Assistant Professor of Historical Studies in the Department of Liberal Arts, School of Social Sciences, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru.
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