I started Berlin's second season on Netflix last week, and somewhere in the first episode I realised I wasn't reading subtitles anymore.
In fact, my husband and I had a full-blown discussion on the logistics and cost implications of recording the show twice - once in Spanish and once in English.
For those confused, this is a Spanish show, with Spanish people, pulling off a Spanish heist.
Everything about it is very Spanish.
I hadn't even chosen English but Netflix just knew that was my default and auto-selected it for me.
I thought it was just me, so I opened Reddit and found a few hundred people who had felt the same strange jolt.
For a second, it felt like a small miracle, and I think it mostly is one.
A kid in a tier-three town can watch Japanese animation, Korean thrillers and Spanish heist dramas in her own language this year, for free, and that is more of the world reaching more of us than at any time I can remember.
But something I found on Duolingo nagged at me.
When Squid Game came out in 2021, subtitles and all, something strange happened away from the screen.
In the two weeks after it launched, Duolingo's own data showed new sign-ups for Korean jumping 40% in the US, and the Guardian reported a 76% jump in the UK.
It wasn't a one-off.
BTS fans were already teaching themselves Hangul so they could understand the lyrics without waiting for a translation, and Korean has since climbed into the 10 most-studied languages on earth, pushed there mostly by young people who fell for a song or a show.
The technology is now built to close exactly that gap, and it's more insane than most people realise.
Old dubbing just swapped the sound and left the mouth wrong.
You felt the seam even when you couldn't name it, and your brain filed the whole thing under foreign.
The newer version leaves the real mouth alone and paints a fresh one over it, frame by frame, matched to the dub, while the rest of the face stays exactly as it was.
The first feature made this way has already played in cinemas, and the same trick is creeping into the apps you already use.
So picture Squid Game arriving today, auto-dubbed into perfect Hindi the second you press play.
You understand everything, the gap is gone, and so is the itch that used to turn a viewer into a learner.
The show that once turned a wave of viewers into Korean learners would now turn almost none.
This is where it stops being about us, because India isn't the cautionary tale here.
By one industry measure, about 86% of what we watch on streaming is still our own.
We mostly watch us.
The places already living inside the smoothed world are elsewhere.
And the youngest viewers, raised on the internet, already treat all of it as ordinary, no longer seeing borders the way we did.
That's the generation I keep thinking about because for them a Korean show and a local one will arrive identically, in the same voice, with nothing to mark that one of them travelled to reach you.
They will never feel the gap, which means they will never feel the pull to close it.
I treated friction as cost, the tax you paid to reach the good stuff.
It was doing work I never credited, turning watching into wanting, and wanting into learning a culture instead of sampling it.
We believed effortless access would spread culture.
It spreads the surface and starves the depth.
You end up with a billion people who have seen Korea and almost no one who has bothered to enter it.
The dub hands you the meal so smoothly you never learn to cook.
In 2009, I watched Coco avant Chanel and decided to learn French. I am still learning but that’s the whole point.
And if you make anything, the same tools point outward too.
I found this out on my own account last week.
I was trying the translation feature on my Instagram reels, and it translated my voice into different languages like Tamil, Kannada and Telugu.
A reel I made about an AI story from India reached around 150,000 people, and a good chunk of them saw me speak in Hindi, a version I never recorded.
So you can either think of consuming global content with this breakthrough, creating global content, or both?
Just one question to think about is that would you want to hear a Karan Aujla or AP Dhillon song in English or would you prefer Punjabi even if you can’t fully understand it?
Reply and let me know!
Nandini