The life of Puja: How a young woman from rural Bengal became an internet star

For much of her college life in West Bengal’s Midnapore city, Pujarini Pradhan felt invisible. “If you ask people in my college, they probably won’t remember me,” she said.

Unlike the girls from “big families” of the city, Pradhan was from a village in East Midnapore. “I used to go wearing a salwar suit, and one look at me they knew that I came from a village,” she said.

But Pradhan was fascinated by the world that her co-ed college opened up. She was “fascinated” by the girls she saw there. “They wore jeans and tops, their hair was so silky, their manner of talking was so confident,” she told Scroll.

She made no friends, barring two other students from nearby villages. “Nobody knew us,” said Pradhan, who studied English literature from 2019 to 2021. “We just came, attended college, studied and left,” Her classmates even forgot to inform them about their farewell party.

But college was not only about being ignored by those who seemed, at the time, better than her. It introduced Pradhan – now a 26-year-old influencer who goes by the name of @lifeofpujaa on Instagram – to the internet.

“I’ve been on social media since I was 18 years old,” she said. “I wouldn’t know the...

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