The great premiumisation of everything: When ordinary isn't enough

Biscuits need terroir, detergent needs botanical cred and water needs provenance. Even the mundane must now arrive with an origin story

There was a time when a biscuit had one job: To be eaten. You bought a packet from the neighbourhood kirana, opened it with your teeth, if needed, dunked it into tea and got on with your life. Nobody knew where the wheat came from. Nobody cared about the butter. The only question a biscuit was expected to answer was whether there was another one left in the packet.

 

Now everything has a backstory.

 

A biscuit is no longer a biscuit. It is handcrafted, slow-baked, perhaps even inspired by some grandmother somewhere. The packet is brown, the lettering is tasteful and the quantity inside is just enough to make you wonder whether you have accidentally bought stationery.

 

The same thing has happened to the rest of the kitchen and, increasingly, the bathroom. Detergent has become laundry care. Pickle is a small-batch preserve. Tea is a single-estate experience. Ice cream is slow-churned. Salt has become strangely ambitious. It can be Himalayan, smoked, pink, infused, mineral-rich, and important enough to deserve a place at the table.

 

Water has perhaps had the greatest career transformation. For most of our lives, water was the one thing nobody had to explain. You drank it. You asked for more. Now there is water that sounds like a minor European aristocrat, comes in a glass bottle, is alkaline, and costs enough to make you briefly consider dehydration.

 

I find the detergent particularly revealing. It used to be powder. You measured it badly, threw it into the bucket and hoped for the best. Now the bottle wants to be taken seriously. It talks about fabric care, fragrance notes, botanical ingredients and mysterious technology designed to make your clothes feel loved. All you want is for it to remove the turmeric stain.

 

None of this is entirely absurd. India has changed. There is more money around, more choice and, for many people, more appetite for things that would once have seemed extravagant. The person who grew up treating a restaurant meal as an occasion can now spend a Sunday afternoon buying coffee beans, sourdough and a jar of something fermented.

 

And so coffee is no longer something you drink; it is a ritual. Clothes are curated. Food is an experience. Soap has a philosophy. Even olive oil arrives with enough information about its grove and its pressing to make you feel undereducated in your own kitchen.

 

Our parents had a simpler vocabulary: Good, bad, lasts long, money’s worth. If something worked for 10 years, that was the review. The Tamil kitchen has always been rather good at this. Yesterday’s vegetables became today’s poriyal. Leftover rice became curd rice. Pickle was made in quantities that suggested nobody had heard of “small batch”. There was a large jar in the kitchen and the only question was whether it would last until the next summer.

 

Now those very things are returning to us wearing better packaging. Put a samosa on newspaper and it is a samosa. Put it on a handmade ceramic plate, perch a microgreen on top and call it a “deconstructed spud pastry”, and suddenly it is ₹650. A brass lota becomes heritage décor. A cane chair becomes Japandi. A clay pot becomes artisanal serveware.

 

Somewhere in all this, ordinary has acquired a faint smell of embarrassment.

 

We used to admire things because they were useful, sturdy and affordable. Now everything needs provenance. The tomato needs a farmer’s story. The bedsheet needs a thread count. Even the humble candle, which once existed mainly to help when the electricity went out, now requires a mood, a scent profile and, possibly, a wellness objective.

 

The funniest part is that we remain gloriously Indian about money. We will pay ₹800 for a tiny box of craft chocolate and bargain over ₹10 with the sabziwala. We will discuss the ethics of single-origin coffee and argue with an autorickshaw driver over ₹20. We will order imported sparkling Alpine water in a restaurant and doggybag biryani wrapped in foil.

 

We have not stopped being frugal. We have simply become selective about where we are willing to feel extravagant. Premiumisation, after all, is not really about making everything better. Sometimes it is about taking something perfectly ordinary, giving it a backstory, putting it in a beautiful box, and charging us for the privilege of feeling that we have evolved.

 

Perhaps the real luxury now is the freedom to be ordinary: To drink water without knowing its birthplace, eat a cookie without being briefed on its terroir, and use detergent without caring which botanical miracle has gone into it. A biscuit need not be handcrafted; water does not need a biography; and maavadu pickle certainly does not need a founder’s story, a tasting note or a website explaining its journey from farm to jar. It can sit in its reused Horlicks bottle, tasting exactly as it always has. There is something wonderfully subversive about that now: To make, buy or eat something simply because it is good, without elevating it, curating it or giving it a backstory. Not everything needs to be premium. Some things were perfectly fine before we started fixing them.

 

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