Harpreet's Talk

She got there forty minutes before class, as instructed, and found not just Amrit but Harpreet already waiting, sitting cross-legged on the low stage with two cups of chai and the particular unhurried patience of someone who had clearly been told this was going to take a little time.

"Show us," Amrit said, gesturing at Sam's phone, no judgment in her voice at all, just an open hand.

Sam scrolled to the comments and passed the phone over, and watched Harpreet read them with her reading glasses pushed low on her nose, nodding occasionally, the way you might nod reading something you'd read a hundred times before under different usernames.

"This one," Harpreet said, tapping the screen, "find your own culture to appropriate — I want you to sit with something before we talk about whether it's fair. Do you know the difference between a guest and a tourist?"

"I don't think I do, no."

"A tourist," Harpreet said, handing the phone back, "takes a photo of the temple and leaves. Doesn't ask what the carving means, doesn't come back, doesn't learn a single word of the language, just wants the backdrop. A guest studies. A guest asks before they act, credits the people who taught them, comes back not because it photographs well but because they actually love the place they've been let into. Nobody who has ever met you, in nine months of Saturdays, would call you a tourist. You ask more questions than anyone in this room, including some of the people who were born into it."

Sam felt something unclench slightly. "That's — actually that helps more than you'd think. Last night I kept trying to answer one question: am I a fraud doing harm, or am I completely fine. Two options, nothing in between, and I couldn't make myself land on either one. Guest and tourist is a third thing I hadn't let myself consider."

"Most true things are a third thing," Harpreet said, unbothered, as if this were simply how the world worked and she was mildly surprised it needed saying. "The two-option version is just easier to hold onto at midnight."

"But the comments—"

"The comments don't know you," Amrit said, gently but without softening it. "They know a thirty-second clip and a caption. That's not nothing, and I'm not going to tell you the criticism is baseless in general — there absolutely are tourists out there, the TikTok guy is one of them, and the anger under some of those comments is pointed at real harm real people have actually experienced. But it wasn't written about you specifically. It was written about a pattern, and you got caught in the blast radius of a pattern you don't actually belong to."

Harpreet made a small, sharp sound, somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. "And here is the part nobody online wants to hear. That pattern isn't only outsiders. We have a word for it, in our own community — desi kam. Desi, meaning from home, from the country. Kam, work. Desi kam is what we call it when someone from our own background cuts every corner, does the bare minimum, and gets away with it because everyone assumes family and community are enough of a credential on their own. I have watched more Punjabi men skip the fitness qualification and just stand at the front of a room being charismatic than I have watched outsiders do the same thing. Nobody online is angry at them. They save all that anger for you, because you are the easy target, the visible one. Meanwhile the actual desi kam instructor, cousin of somebody, charging money, no insurance, no idea how to spot an injury before it happens — he gets a pass, every time, because he looks like he belongs there."

"That doesn't feel fair."

"It is not fair. It was never about fairness. It is about who is easy to be angry at online, versus who is actually doing the harm in the room." Harpreet shrugged, unbothered, the shrug of someone who had made peace with this particular unfairness a long time ago. "Ravi built this whole certification because of men exactly like that, you understand. Not because outsiders like you were the problem. Because too many insiders were coasting on charisma and calling it qualification, and somebody finally had to say the credential matters more than the surname."

"There was one more," Sam said, pulling the phone back out. "Longer one. Calmer. A — historian, I think he called himself." She found it and turned the screen around.

Harpreet read two lines and made a sound in her throat that wasn't quite a laugh. "Baldev."

"You know him?"

"Everyone eventually runs into a Baldev," Amrit said, not unkindly. "Plays dhol beautifully, genuinely, no argument there. Also extremely certain that whatever bhangra meant when he was nineteen is the only thing it's allowed to mean forever. He's not wrong that it's a folk art with real roots. He's wrong that folk art and fitness class have to be enemies, and he's especially wrong that he personally gets to decide where the word stops." Amrit tapped the screen. "You know what pop music actually means?"

"You already did this one on me. Popular. Not a genre."

"Right. And Baldev would never in his life argue with a musicologist about that, because he doesn't have any skin in that game. But ask him about bhangra and he'll defend the noun with his whole chest, because somewhere along the way the noun became his. Two hundred thousand followers who agree with him make it feel like consensus instead of one man's very confident opinion about a word that never belonged to him alone in the first place. That's the trap. Not malice. Just a very loud, very certain person standing at one door of a four-door house, telling everyone outside that the house only has one room."

"So what do I do with that."

"Nothing, tonight. You don't owe Baldev a debate in his comment section. But it won't be the last time you run into some version of him — online, at a gym audition, maybe standing in the back of your own class one day with his arms crossed. When it happens, you'll know exactly what you're looking at now, which is more than most people ever get."

Harpreet leaned forward, chai cupped in both hands. "I'll tell you something I don't say to just anyone. My daughter, back in Jalandhar, married a man from Ohio, no relation to Punjab at all before he met her, and I watched that man learn our language, badly, for three years, just so he could talk to his own mother-in-law without an interpreter in the room. Nobody online gave him credit for that. I did. Credit isn't handed out by strangers scrolling at midnight. It's earned in the room, over years, with the people who are actually there. You've been earning it for nine months. Don't let four strangers erase that."

"So I should have just — not posted it?"

"No," Amrit said, firmly. "You should post again. Not despite the comments — because of everything you actually are, which the comments got wrong. Guest, not tourist. Keep being the guest. That's the whole answer. It was always the whole answer."

"There's a second thing, though," Amrit added, after a moment, watching Sam's face carefully. "You went quiet just now, when I asked how you were doing with all this. Same look you get when there's a second thing you haven't said out loud yet. What else happened this weekend?"

Sam hesitated, then admitted it. "I went back and watched some of the performance accounts again. The really polished ones. And I looked at my own clip next to them and just — felt embarrassed. Like mine didn't look as good, objectively, and that meant something was wrong with it."

"Theirs are produced. Different goal entirely, and I want you to actually hear that difference, not just nod at it. There's real psychology behind why a polished video gets treated as more credible, more expert, more worth trusting, regardless of what's actually behind it — psychiatrists call it a halo effect. Beautiful, optimized, camera-ready gets read as good, and anything less than that starts to feel, if you're not careful, like evidence you're doing something wrong. It's the exact same trick as the guy who calls his ab routine bhangra. He's optimizing for how it looks. You were optimizing, that whole class, for what your body actually got out of the hour. Those are different jobs. A thirty-second phone clip of the second one is never going to out-shine a professionally shot version of the first one, and it was never supposed to."

"So the shame I felt about my own footage—"

"—is the same trap, just aimed at yourself instead of at someone else's culture. Comparing your unglamorous, honest thirty seconds to their gorgeous, optimized ninety and concluding you did something wrong. You didn't. You just filmed the truth instead of a highlight reel, and the truth is allowed to look a little clumsy."

"It's bigger than fitness videos too, though, isn't it," Sam said slowly. "I follow this wellness guy — huge account, millions of followers, writes books, gets invited on every podcast. Sells a whole certification program, actually, life-coaching stuff. I always just sort of assumed all those followers meant he knew what he was talking about."

"Does he have an actual qualification behind any of it?"

Sam thought about it and realised she genuinely didn't know. "I've honestly never checked. I don't think I ever thought to."

"That's the whole trick, right there — nobody thinks to. A few years ago there were investigations into a guy exactly like that. Big spiritual origin story, years supposedly spent living some intense, transformed life, and when actual journalists went and checked the timeline against the people who were there, huge chunks of it didn't line up. Some of his writing turned out to be other people's words, uncredited, for years, before anyone caught it. None of that stopped the empire. If anything it barely dented it — the books kept selling, the podcast kept booking guests, the certification program kept charging people thousands of pounds, run mostly by other people while his name sat on the label." Amrit shook her head slightly. "This is the wild-west part of the internet nobody warns you about. It's never been easier for someone with a good camera and a better story to build an audience of millions before a single person checks whether any of it is actually true. Success isn't proof of anything. It's just proof that a lot of people decided not to check."

"So how do you know who to trust."

"You do the checking yourself, same as you'd do for anything else. Is there an actual credential behind the claim, not just a story about one. Does the person's timeline hold up if you look closely. Would the advice survive someone qualified actually examining it. A following is not a qualification. It never was. It just feels like one, because it's very hard to imagine that many people could all be wrong at once — and it turns out that's exactly the imagination gap most of these stories are built to live inside."

"There's a version of this I keep seeing that scares me more than the guru thing, honestly," Sam said. "Dancers — genuinely talented ones — filming the same eight-second clip forty, fifty times in a row. Hours a day. I used to think that was just discipline. Now I watch it and I don't know what I'm looking at anymore."

"You might be looking at two different things wearing the same clothes," Amrit said. "One version is muscle dysmorphia, which is a real, documented clinical picture — someone convinced, against all visible evidence, that they're not muscular enough, not lean enough, not enough, full stop. That one's genuinely a body-image disorder wearing exercise as its symptom. Compulsive training, rigid eating rules, checking the mirror obsessively or not being able to look at it at all, real distress if the routine gets interrupted for any reason. It's closer to obsessive-compulsive disorder than to vanity. Nobody chooses that one."

"And the other version?"

"The other version is a different trap, same shape from the outside. Someone training for hours, not because their body ever convinced them it wasn't enough, but because a number did. Views. Likes. Whatever the app is counting that week. That's not a body-image problem, that's a measurement problem. There's actually a name for it — Goodhart's Law, an economist's line, originally about banking of all things: once a measure becomes the target, it stops being a good measure. Somebody starts out wanting to get better at dancing. The number's just supposed to reflect that. Then, slowly, without anyone deciding it on purpose, the number becomes the actual goal, and getting better at dancing becomes whatever's left over."

"That sounds like it could happen to almost anyone doing almost anything."

"It can. It's not really about dancing at all, underneath — it's what happens to any real goal once a measurable stand-in for it shows up nearby. And here's the uncomfortable part — from the outside, hours logged looks exactly the same whether it's coming from a distorted belief about your own body or a distorted belief about what a number means. The tell isn't the hours. It's what the hours are actually in service of. Getting better at something real, or getting a machine to say a bigger number back at you. One of those is dedication. The other one's just addiction with better lighting."

Sam sat with that for a long moment. "How do you tell the difference, if it's you. If it's your own hours."

"You ask what happens in your chest the day the number doesn't move. If the answer is disappointment, that's normal, that's just being human. If the answer is genuine panic, or you can't stop thinking about it, or you'd keep training through an injury rather than miss a day of posting — that's not dedication being tested anymore. That's the same compulsion the guru's followers have, just aimed inward instead of outward. Worth noticing early. It's a lot easier to walk back at hour one than at hour ten thousand."

Sam felt something in her chest loosen for the first time since Saturday, not entirely — she suspected some version of this fear would resurface every time she posted anything, probably for years — but enough to breathe around it properly. She drank her chai, mostly cold by now, and let Harpreet fuss over whether she'd eaten breakfast, and walked into class twenty minutes later a little raw around the edges but recognizably, stubbornly, still there.