The most famous person on the Indian internet right now is a content creator referred to as Chaddi Aunty or Chaddi Lady. Kamalini, as she is named on her account, has gone viral with her canny Instagram reels, where she addresses men with various chaddi related questions. “Batao na, kaunse colour ki chaddi pehneho?” “Agar pyar hi nahin karte toh bina chaddi ke photo kyon bheji?” The last time we said the word chaddi in public so much was during the Pink Chaddi campaign against right wing moral policing. This is different but also not.

What makes Chaddi Lady so popular? The answer lies in her absolute aesthetic control of a genre I like to call Hot Romantic: the framing of her videos where she fills up the screen, demurely dressed, the throaty timbre of her bedroom voice, eye-contact, and the way she merges shayrana huskiness with direct sexuality, so chaddi questions sound like Urdu couplets. Pagal kar diya ki deewana bana diya? No one can say maybe because they are speechless.