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His book opens in Mizoram, where he charts the ascension of Korean culture. Rajshekhar, a journalist, recently compiled his on-the-ground reporting from various states into a book Despite The State. This seepage of Hallyu came in initially from the North-East which had begun to look Eastwards for representation. With more than 50% of India’s population under the age of 25, India has offered itself as a demand producing machine for Korean culture. In India specifically, the uptake among the young has accelerated over the past decade. Korea, specifically post the 1997-98 Financial Crisis, had taken the quantum leap to export culture as a product to counter the balance of payment, and emerged as the most translatable, aspirational, and thus most popular of the lot. Fatima Bhutto in her book New Kings Of The World noted how that vacuum was being filled by Turkish Dizi, K-pop, and Bollywood. Globally, the United States was receding from its cultural monopoly. Additionally, a younger population was coming into their own, searching for drama that was both relatable yet aspirational, kitsch yet climactic, bizarre yet beautiful. While some of those who grew up watching these shows graduated, aesthetically and narratively, to a more coherent kind of entertainment, the yearning for exaggeration remained. But then, there was suddenly a cultural swerve. All wildly successful, drunk in the limitless possibilities of drama, including death, rebirth, kidnapping, face-lifts, and hidden twins, they coincided with the penetration of television into interior India. In the mid-aughts in India, “K-drama” would be used to describe Ekta Kapoor’s K-serial empire - Kasautii Zindagii Kay, Kahaani Ghar Ghar Ki, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, Kaahin Kissii Roz, Kahiin to Hoga. They saw the early signs of success with I Am Not A Robot and Two Cops, and accelerated their pipeline, partnering with Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS) and Korean Broadcasting System (KBS) to get the licensing of K-dramas to then translate, dub, and finalize a product that is injected like drip-feed, every week, into the veins of streaming circulation. This has been a project in the making for a while, bolstered by MX Player’s initial experiments with dubbed K-drama two years ago. It’s a program where every week they put out international shows - Korean, Japanese, Ukranian, Turkish, French, Spanish - dubbed into Hindi, Tamil, and Telugu. In March this year, MX Player, India’s largest streaming platform, 47% of whose audience comes from the Hindi belt, launched V-Desi. In August last year, Dish TV, in an industry-first initiative, launched ‘Korean Drama Active’, where users could have access to Korean drama content dubbed in Hindi, at ₹1.3 per day. But this is by no means a prestige-Netflix phenomenon.