I'm writing this from a coffee shop in Indore, having just rebooked my flight for the third time. The end of 2025 has been marked by a fairly significant moment. India's largest airline simply couldn't hold its systems together and all hell has broken loose. A few days ago, I was impressed that I could book a direct flight from Indore to Bengaluru. Something unthinkable a few years back. Now I'm impressed by how quickly the illusion of efficiency can shatter and I’m left feeling back on ground zero. 

This moment—sitting between marvel and malfunction feels like the most honest place to observe India right now. 

At year-end, we marketers typically write about year-end trends: the rise of AI, the creator economy, Gen Z behaviours, vernacular commerce. All true, all important. But I think enough of people have written about this already. 

I want to talk about something more fundamental—the ground beneath our feet which is literally changing as a country, and we're probably not paying enough attention to what it means when a nation builds and breaks simultaneously. 

The geography of aspiration is being redrawn

In 2025, infrastructure exploded. New metro lines in cities that were barely on the marketing map. Vande Bharat trains connecting towns that multinationals still call ‘outstation.’ Expressways halving travel times. Airports in Ayodhya and Darbhanga making tier-two and tier-three cities as connected as metros once were.

This isn't just about distribution reach or ‘market penetration.’ It's about what happens to desire when distance collapses.

When a young professional in Aurangabad can reach Mumbai in four hours, when a family in Varanasi can fly to Bangkok as easily as someone from Delhi, when UPI makes a street vendor's business as digitally sophisticated as a mall brand. Something shifts in the collective imagination. The old hierarchy of place begins to dissolve. The ‘small-town person making it big in the city’ narrative starts feeling outdated.

We're witnessing the democratisation of access. But here's what we're missing: access without infrastructure depth creates a very particular kind of consumer. Confident yet cautious, ambitious yet anxious.

The coexistence economy

The India of 2025 doesn't progress linearly. We don't move from one stage to the next. We accumulate. We layer. We hold contradictions as a permanent state.

You book a Vande Bharat ticket on UPI while standing on a waterlogged street. You order groceries on BigBasket while your building's elevator is broken for the third week. You attend a Zoom call with Singapore while the power backup kicks in mid-sentence.

This is the steady state in the India of 2025. 

And it's producing a consumer who has fundamentally different expectations than any marketing textbook would predict. They don't expect consistency. They expect navigation. They don't expect perfection. They expect recovery. They don't trust systems.

They trust their own ability to work around systems.

This is why resilience has become our national consumer trait. Not aspiration. Not value-consciousness. Resilience.

When the heartland doesn't follow the script

Infrastructure is doing something fascinating to India's cultural geography. It's giving mini-metros the confidence to define their own version of modern.

Indore isn't trying to become Bengaluru. Lucknow isn't aspiring to be Delhi. They're accessing the same things. Products, entertainment, services, but on their own cultural terms.

A brand that assumes infrastructure-enabled access means cultural homogenisation will miss the plot entirely. The Vande Bharat passenger from Bhopal has different codes, different references, and different ways of signalling success than the metro commuter. Same infrastructure. Different meaning.

This is the marketer's challenge: distribution has democratised, but culture hasn't homogenised.

The fragility tax

Every infrastructure collapse in 2025, and there were many, taught us something. IndiGo's operational meltdown wasn't just about one airline. Bangalore's water crisis wasn't just about one city. These weren't aberrations; they were revelations.

We're building fast, but we're not building deep. And consumers are beginning to internalise what this means.

There's a growing fatigue with the "India rising" narrative when the rising keeps stalling. Not despair, but fatigue. The difference matters. Despair makes you give up. Fatigue makes you adjust expectations, build buffers, and plan for breakdown.

Watch how consumers are changing behaviour: buying backup power solutions while investing in smart homes. Stocking essentials while ordering everything online. Choosing brands based not on their promises but on their recovery mechanisms when things fail.

The consumer of 2025 has learned to price in fragility. They don't believe the smooth story anymore. They believe the honest one.

What this means for how we market

If infrastructure is both enabling and exposing India's evolution, brands need to stop choosing sides.

Stop pretending everything is world-class. Stop selling aspiration as if it's linear. Stop assuming infrastructure access means cultural convergence.

The brands that will win are the ones that understand the texture of Indian progress. Uneven, simultaneous, contradictory, resilient.

They're the brands that can hold two truths: we're advancing rapidly AND we're fragile. We're increasingly connected AND deeply local. We're globally ambitious AND distinctly Indian.

The infrastructure story of 2025 is about what happens to 1.4 billion people when the ground shifts beneath them. When possibility expands and systems strain, when access increases and reliability wavers, when the future arrives unevenly.

We're not becoming a different country. We're becoming more intensely ourselves—building, breaking, adapting, persisting.
The question for marketers is whether we understand what kind of growth this actually is.

The author is founder, Jigsaw Brand Consultants.