From Spanish folklore to Indian bedrooms, a handful of grapes tell a story of desire, imitation as well as the quiet hierarchies that travel with culture.
A week before the new year, grapes begin to appear under tables. Not on fruit platters or as offerings, but as rituals –filmed carefully, captioned with hope, and uploaded in the soft glow of midnight anticipation.
The act itself was harmless. A handful of grapes eaten under a table promised love, luck, or alignment in the coming year. What made it interesting wasn’t the ritual itself, but how quickly it travelled from Spanish folklore to Latin American households, to Indian bedrooms – shedding context and acquiring aesthetics along the way.
I never felt annoyed watching these videos. Mostly, I felt curious. Curious about how effortlessly a tradition could be lifted, reframed, and glamorised. Curious about why certain rituals cross oceans so easily, while others remain stubbornly local, even invisible.
It would be easy to dismiss this as another example of Indians copying the West. But that explanation is both lazy and incomplete. This kind of cultural borrowing is not unique to India. Similar patterns appear elsewhere: Western “soft life” aesthetics dominate South Korean social media; American manifestation rituals travel faster than indigenous spiritual practices in parts of Latin America; Western slang and beauty cues are privileged across African digital spaces. Globalisation flattens culture before it distributes it.
And yet, in India, the imitation often feels more eager and less ironic. And this difference matters. India’s relationship with Western culture is not merely digital; it is historical. For centuries, foreignness was positioned as superiority — in language, education, dress, and etiquette. Over time, these hierarchies stopped being enforced externally and began reproducing themselves internally. Speaking English became associated with intelligence, and western aesthetics with progress. What once arrived as instruction now arrives as aspiration.
So when a ritual travels through Western social media pipelines and lands here, it doesn’t arrive as just another trend. It arrives already polished with prestige. It looks global. It looks modern. It looks worth performing. This is not blind imitation; it is a trained desire – a soft inheritance of power, passed down not through force, but through validation.
This is how influence works now. It does not announce itself as domination. It slips in quietly, wrapped in aesthetics and algorithmic approval. Cultural power precedes political power; it conditions taste, normalises hierarchy, and teaches us what to admire long before it asks us to agree.
That is why a simple act, eating grapes under a table — can feel disproportionately glamorous, while local rituals remain confined to private spaces, stripped of trend value.One is coded as global; the other as ordinary. In a digital economy that rewards visibility, “global” almost always wins.
None of this is an argument against borrowing. Cultures have always travelled, mixed, misbehaved. The unease begins only when speed replaces sense, when rituals arrive fully aestheticised, but hollowed of story.
Perhaps the question, then, is not why young people are eating grapes under tables. It is why certain symbols travel so easily across borders, while others remain unmoved. Why is it that some rituals feel global the moment we encounter them, while others remain local, no matter how old, meaningful, or ours they are. As the new year approaches, maybe what we need is not fewer trends, but better questions — about what we borrow, what we perform, and what we quietly leave behind.