From Lenskart's Shame to IndiGo's Silence: How Corporate India Keeps Erasing Its Own Culture
Zeel Soghasia did not ask for much. He wanted to wear his tilak to work. He wanted to keep his shikha . He wanted, in other words, to show up as himself, a young Hindu man employed as a trainee at one of India's most recognisable retail brands. Lenskart said no. When he refused to comply with grooming demands he felt targeted his faith, he says he was removed from the company. He recorded a video. It went viral. And what followed was a reckoning that India's corporate world did not see coming and still has not fully absorbed.
Soghasia's account may yet be tested in detail. But the reason his video struck millions of Indians with the force of recognition is not because his case was unique. It is because it wasn't. Across offices, retail floors, airline cabins and corporate lobbies, a quiet and persistent message has been delivered to Hindu employees for years: your faith is personal, your symbols are unprofessional, your identity is best left at the door. Other religions, other markers, other expressions of faith, accommodated, sometimes even celebrated. A tilak on a forehead? Quietly discouraged. A bindi ? Permitted, in some workplaces, at a maximum diameter of half a centimetre .
One man's refusal to erase himself cracked something open. India is now asking a question that should have been asked a long time ago.
Lenskart: The Apology That Took a Viral Storm to Produce
After Soghasia's video spread, a 23-page internal document dated February 2, 2026 , bearing Lenskart's own branding and company logo, leaked into the public domain. It made for uncomfortable reading. Hindu religious symbols including bindi and tilak were restricted. The hijab was accommodated with instructions, colour specifications and links to tutorial videos. The asymmetry was not subtle.
Founder Peyush Bansal's initial response made things considerably worse. He called the document "inaccurate" and "outdated." A Community Note on X dismantled that defence within hours, pointing out that the document was dated February 2026 and bore Lenskart's branding throughout. Bansal then changed his account: the offending language, he said, had been identified and removed internally as early as February 17 , weeks before the public storm. If that were true, the question answers itself. Why was a corrected version never published? Why was no revised guideline shared with staff or the public? Why did it take days of sustained national outrage to produce one?
The answer is that it would not have been produced at all without the outrage. On April 18 , Lenskart published a new public style guide explicitly permitting bindi , tilak , sindoor , mangalsutra , kada , kalawa , hijab and turban . Every symbol of faith, the company now declares, is welcome. The declaration is welcome. The fact that it required a trainee to be fired, a video to go viral and a week of national fury to arrive at it is not a footnote. It is the story.
IndiGo: A Billion-Dollar Indian Airline That Looks Embarrassed to Be Indian
Lenskart blinked. The same cannot be said for India's airlines and IndiGo , the largest of them all, deserves to be called out by name.
IndiGo carries more passengers than any other airline in India. It dominates domestic aviation. Its aircraft are a fixture of Indian skies. And yet, board an IndiGo flight today and you will struggle to find a single visible marker of Indian identity among its cabin crew. No saree . No churidar . No bindi . Nothing that signals to the Indian passengers filling every row that this is an Indian airline, staffed by Indians, flying over India.
What you will find instead is a uniform cut from the template of any generic European low-cost carrier: slim-fit jackets, narrow trousers, controlled hair, a look engineered to project "international" by excising everything that makes India, India. IndiGo's own grooming guidelines confirm what the eye already suspects. A bindi is technically permitted but only when worn with a saree, and only if it does not exceed half a centimetre in diameter. The same airline that proudly celebrates blue hair streaks, IndiGo-logo nail art and a Girl Power badge as expressions of its evolving brand identity has decided that a bindi , one of the oldest and most widely worn symbols of Indian womanhood, must be rationed to a dot so small it barely exists.
This is not a neutral grooming standard. It is a statement. And the statement is: Indian identity is tolerated here, within limits, invisibly.
IndiGo has not faced the kind of public reckoning Lenskart has. No leaked document has gone viral. No employee video has spread across X and WhatsApp. The scrutiny has not arrived yet. But the absence of a controversy is not the same as the absence of a problem. One is simply less visible than the other. Which, come to think of it, is exactly the point.
The Airline That Grooming Built: Air India's Convenient Memory
Air India walked into the fire the day after Lenskart's apology, almost as if on cue. On April 18 , screenshots purportedly from its cabin crew handbook went viral, showing restrictions on bindi , sindoor , tilak and kalawa . Air India reached for the identical defensive script Lenskart had used the week before: old manual, no longer in use, employees are free to wear bindis.
Except the official record tells a more complicated story. Air India's own post-Tata grooming standards permit a bindi only optionally, only with a saree, and only up to 0.5 centimetres . The same standards ban religious threads on the wrist, neck and ankle. This is not an old manual. This is current policy, from a Tata-owned airline carrying the name and legacy of a brand that was once the global standard-bearer of Indian culture in aviation.
The "outdated manual" defence is fast becoming the corporate equivalent of a fire drill: performed on schedule, meaning nothing, changing nothing. Lenskart deployed it. Air India deployed it within 24 hours. The script is so consistent it has stopped looking like a coincidence and started looking like a template .
What the World's Airlines Understand That Indian Ones Don't
There is no shortage of examples showing that professional and Indian are not in conflict, that an airline can be polished, globally competitive and unmistakably rooted in its own culture.
Etihad's cabin crew are contemporary, polished and visibly, confidently Emirati. Emirates built a globally admired brand around aesthetics rooted in Arab identity. Singapore Airlines created one of the most recognisable images in aviation out of specifically Asian aesthetics, not a pale imitation of a Western template. These airlines did not conclude that looking like their own people was a liability. They concluded, correctly, that it was an asset .
For decades, Air India understood this too. The saree-clad crew of the old Air India, many with bindis , flying into London and New York and Tokyo, represented an India that was modern without being embarrassed about itself. Their uniform said: we are here, we are Indian, and we are proud of it. That confidence has been replaced, across Indian aviation, by a studied blankness: a corporate aesthetic that treats Indianness as something to be managed, minimised, metered out in units of 0.5 centimetres .
The Question the Boardroom Refuses to Answer
No Indian airline CEO has been asked to explain on the record why their cabin crew looks more at home on a European charter than on a flight between Delhi and Bengaluru. No one has had to justify why an airline making its billions from Indian passengers cannot bring itself to let those passengers be served by crew who look unmistakably, unapologetically Indian .
Zeel Soghasia lost his job for refusing to answer that question on someone else's terms. Lenskart has since been forced into a public apology. Air India is answering uncomfortable questions with comfortable lies about outdated manuals. And IndiGo , the biggest, the most powerful, the one with the greatest responsibility to model what a proudly Indian airline looks like, has not even been properly confronted yet.
The scrutiny that reached Lenskart is spreading. It will reach IndiGo. The only question is whether it will take another Zeel Soghasia to make it happen: another person losing their livelihood for the crime of looking like where they come from .
That is a price that should not have to be paid twice.