The Weekly Vine Edition 36:  Is your Ghibli portrait destroying the planet?

Hello and welcome to another edition of The Weekly Vine. In this week’s edition, we cast a cold eye over the Ghibli trend, ponder how Trump’s tariff wars could end up helping India, pour over the banality of evil incompetence of the Trump admin, look at the latest Harry-Meghan fracas and finally our meme of the week: the State Bank of India.

Ghibli All You Want—The Servers Are Melting

“Ghibli-this. Ghibli-that. But has anyone asked Lee if he wants to be given anything?”

The bad joke sparked yet another backlash, as purists declared it’s pronounced “Jibli.” Of course it is. Nothing says we’re living in the golden age of digital art like debating Japanese phonetics while our GPUs quietly catch fire. But let’s rewind.

In 2010, Chris Dixon wrote a  (recently resurfaced by David Sacks) on Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory: how revolutionary tech often starts off looking like a toy. The telephone. PCs. Wikipedia. When Sacks shared the post, Altman replied, “Yeah, I just didn’t think it would be this toy.”

We never really see the future coming. Jensen Huang’s NVIDIA was happily building gamer GPUs—until one day, those chips powered a thing called “generative pre-trained transformers.”

When ChatGPT launched, it hit a million users in five days. Ghibli-style portraits? One hour. The toy that changed perception faster than the chatbot that started it all. AI heads used to joke about BC (Before ChatGPT) and AD (After DeepSeek). Turns out, the real dividing line might be Before Ghibli and After Ghibli.

On March 26, OpenAI dropped a cursed gift: the ability to turn ourselves into wistful forest spirits and breezy anime protagonists. Twitter became a Miyazaki fanfic. Then came the crash.

Sam Altman, watching servers buckle in real time, tweeted: “Can y’all please chill on generating images, this is insane.” Apparently, when millions try to see what their ex would look like in Spirited Away, it breaks the internet.

And still, we clicked.

But these aren’t just pretty pictures—they’re existential thirst traps. Sartre said we exist in a state of becoming. Every Ghibli-fied selfie is less a portrait and more a projection of longing: to be softer, braver, loved.

Then came the backlash.

Originality? Dead. “You’re stealing Miyazaki’s soul,” cried the internet—famous for never stealing a meme. But is anything truly original? Is a Kohli cover drive not just Tendulkar in 4K?

Why do we romanticize the illustrator’s agony but not the mathematician’s triumph? Why is a trembling brush noble, but a PhD in applied linear algebra reduced to “soulless code”?

Someone wrote the loss function that powers your AI filter. Someone designed the diffusion model. Someone tuned the weights, so you’d look more Totoro than troll. They worked in silence, under fluorescent lights, with vending machine coffee. No one mourns them when they’re replaced by newer models.

Meanwhile, the planet wheezes.

Each AI image consumes enough electricity to fully charge a smartphone. That’s not much. But nobody makes just one.

You try one with your dog. Then your friend. Then Gandhi. Then “me as a Ghibli witch with a fox companion.” Your group chat joins in. Influencers pile on. Suddenly, 10 million people each generate five images. That’s 50 million images—enough energy to charge 50 million phones. Or power 13,000 homes for a day.

That’s one day of Ghibli thirst.

Not counting the water used to cool the data centres—hundreds of thousands of gallons, often drawn from drought-prone regions. Your aesthetic didn’t just cost electricity. It was irrigated by aquifers.

And still, we persist. Because this isn’t about art. It’s about being seen. Not how you look—but that you looked. With soft shadows. And maybe a cat.

We want soulful art from soulless machines. We want to save the planet—but only after we’ve downloaded the HD version. And somehow, we still value the artist’s suffering more than the coder’s quiet brilliance.

At the center of it all, Altman stands like a monk watching his temple burn, whispering “please chill”.

This is who we are. Post-truth. Post-originality. Just dopamine junkies cosplaying introspection through AI portraits.

Ghibli this. Ghibli that. But has anyone asked Lee if he wants to be given anything?

He probably just wants a nap. Too bad the servers are on fire.

Advantage India

Donald Trump’s new 25% tariffs—projected to rake in $6 trillion over the next decade—might wreck global trade. But they could hand India a rare strategic edge.

As the US, China, and Europe slide into a tariff-driven standoff, global supply chains are set to splinter. In the scramble to reroute trade, India stands out. Not as a superpower, but as a neutral, nimble alternative. Pharmaceuticals, textiles, and electronics—already core to India’s “Make in India” push—could find new buyers from firms desperate to avoid tariff choke points.

American companies looking to decouple from China? India’s factories are ready. EU and Japanese firms seeking tariff-neutral suppliers? India fits the bill. With a young labor force, improving ports, and digital logistics, India’s no longer just the back office of the world—it’s in the game.

But this isn’t a free pass.

India’s manufacturing story depends on imported fuel, machinery, and high-end components—items likely to get pricier in a full-blown trade war. Inflation could spike. Capital could flee. And geopolitical neutrality is a balancing act, not a fixed asset.

Still, in the short term, India isn’t in the line of fire. That alone is leverage.

In a world drifting toward protectionism and fragmentation, agility wins. If India moves fast—expands capacity, diversifies exports, and buffers against price shocks—Trump’s tariff blitz could open a small, valuable window of opportunity.

The question isn’t whether the world’s supply chains will shift. They will. The question is: can India catch what falls through the cracks?

The Banality of Evil Incompetence

The cruelty isn’t even the point anymore. The carelessness is.

In Trump’s second term, immigration enforcement doesn’t just target the undocumented—it stalks students, scholars, and anyone who dares post the wrong thing online. Under Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s “Catch and Revoke” initiative, AI now trawls social media to retroactively flag international students for dissent. One Columbia student lost his visa after liking a meme. Another was told to self-deport via app.

At Tufts, Rumeysa Ozturk—a Turkish doctoral student and Fulbright scholar—was detained while heading to Iftar. Her crime? Writing an op-ed. Days later, her visa was gone. No hearing. No appeal.

The legal fog is the feature, not the bug. Foreign students, admitted under “duration of status,” can fall out of status overnight—without knowing—thanks to a single SEVIS termination. What used to be policy enforcement is now ideological policing.

And yet, incompetence remains the cruellest edge. In Maryland, Kilmar Abrego Garcia—a legally protected Salvadoran father—was deported by mistake.  And the administration’s reaction: Oops.

Despite a judge’s order shielding him from removal, ICE tossed him on a flight. He now sits in a Salvadoran mega-prison, the government admitting, too late, that he should never have been deported.

This isn’t just repression—it’s regression. Universities are caving to federal pressure. Protests are criminalized. Campus speech is under surveillance. And the enforcement is so clumsy, so bureaucratically bored, it almost doesn’t matter if you’ve done anything wrong.

The cruelty is algorithmic. The justice is automated. And the evil? It’s banal, yes—but also deeply, dangerously stupid.

The Harry-Meghan Fracas

There’s a hilarious piece that The Irish Times published in 2021, that goes: “Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.”

Anyway, have you ever wondered why monarchs across Europe – from Russia to France – lost their heads but the British monarchy continues to survive? The Firm has lasted by adapting. From the Glorious Revolution to the Netflix era, its survival has depended on reading the room and quickly changing before the guillotine comes for their neck. But five years after breaking from the Firm, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle appear to be challenging that legacy—not by modernizing the crown, but by testing the patience of those closest to them. Once hailed as disruptors with a cause, the Sussexes now face growing criticism not just from palace insiders but from the very institutions they once claimed to uplift.

Now, the chairwoman of Sentebale—Harry’s own charity—has accused him of “harassment and bullying at scale,” claiming he tried to force her out, briefed against her to sponsors, and left the organization in disarray. Meghan, meanwhile, is accused of derailing a polo fundraiser with an unannounced appearance and awkward on-stage moment that went viral. Donors are fleeing, advisers are walking away, and the brand that once promised a modern, compassionate alternative to monarchy is starting to look like a royal mess. Evolution saved the crown—but the Sussexes may be running in the wrong direction.

Meme of the Week: Lunch Ke Baad Aana

One of India’s oldest memes—long before the term “meme” was even coined—was the SBI employee’s eternally long lunch break. Any visitor to any branch, no matter the task or time of day, would inevitably be told: “Lunch ke baad aana” (come back after lunch).

On April 1st, All Fools’ Day, SBI Digital decided to bring that meme into the digital age. In a post on X, it announced that digital services would be unavailable from 1 to 4 PM. The reason, of course, was routine annual closing activities following the end of the financial year. But that didn’t stop users from dubbing it what it truly felt like: annual lunch time.