What a week it’s been on social media. The life of Pujarini Pradhan, or as we know her @lifeofpujaa, was scrutinised and brought under the scanner. Like any influencer’s should, one of her detractors — creator/journalist/ influencer Aishwarya Subramanyam — told us. Pradhan is a married, young woman living with her son and husband in rural Bengal, and she makes videos about what movies she saw, what books she read, and her views on anything cultural and societal. The question was first asked by therapist and influencer Niharika Jain, who questioned Pujarini’s authenticity. “She posts every day, which requires one to consume a lot of social media in the first place. That needs time,” she said in a video that I now can’t access, as Jain has made her profile private.
Jain said that Pujarini’s online persona was a curated image designed to make her relatable. She felt that keeping in mind her village background, fluent English, intellectual commentary, something could be 
“constructed”. Subramanyam, on the other hand, in a three-part video series that was more theatrics than facts, said only one thing, “We should care about how marketing sneaks into our mind so diabolically.” The rest of the elite social media, many of whom are Pujarini’s followers and fans, rallied for Pujaa’s rights for Pujaa’s life.

In a piece published in Sunday mid-day on November 9, 2025, Pradhan told journalist Arpika Bhosale that she started speaking in English so that the people around her village wouldn’t understand what she was saying. She then went on to say, “Realities of women in rural India are different, and it takes time to build a life anywhere, be it a city or village.” That’s what she has done — built a good, and now lucrative, life. She now has 722k followers, and has recently done collaborations with audible.in, and Netflix. As she explained in a video released after the conspiracy theories, she went through different content agencies, some who duped her, to finally work with an agency who gets her vision and is helping her get legit collaborations. Like any influencer would and should.