Gauravonomics Blog

As the Yahoo! Fellow at Georgetown University, I’ll spend the next year studying how social media in BRIC countries will be used differently from the first world countries and the implications this will have on how individuals and institutions in these countries engage with social media.

Inspired by Grant McCracken’s post on how trend-hunting is meaningless unless it is rooted in a deeper understanding of the underlying culture –

it is precisely when “culture above” resonates with the “culture below” that things “take,” that innovation has a chance to transform us in substantial ways.

– I realized that to understand how social media in BRIC countries will be used differently from the first world countries, I first need to understand how social dynamics in these countries differ.

So, as a starting point, I asked myself — and my friends on Twitter — if there are any subcultures in India, like this list of subcultures in the West.

I’m searching for someone who has studied Indian urban culture in detail, maybe done a PhD in it (tweet).

I’m also looking for books on Indian culture like Pavan Varma’s ‘The Great Indian Middle Class’ and Rama Bijapurkar’s ‘We Are Like That Only’ (tweet).